CONSISTENT GAMING SKILL DEMOGRAPHICS IN ACADEMIC RESEARCH

Abstract

Video games are a popular topic in academia, encompassing many research subtopics. Often researchers investigating video game subjects partition the participants by the participant’s familiarity with video games. Unlike other demographic categories on which research subjects are divided, such as age range or income, sorting participants into gamer skill categories, such as “Expert Gamer”, has no objective consensus on what the labels should be. The inconsistency in terminology makes comparison between research works impossible. Hours per week is often a standard but does not provide statistical significance with many factors and is not as objective as it may seem. This paper highlights this problem, collects demographic questions in existing research, and showcases the data collected from a user study with these questions. The results show that self-chosen categories are a statistically significant metric and is recommended as an easy-to-obtain value.