A research group at the University of Denver recently polled a population of 36 World of Warcraft players (N=36). Of the respondents, 27 were males (n=27) and 9 were females (n=9).The study asked them about their gender, age, hours of play per day of week, their major at the University of Denver, their GPA, their WoW player, and the character that they play most. Taking a looking at this information, we set out to find out whether in this particular set of respondents, females or males played more hours of World of Warcraft, on average, per day.

Question to answer: Who are the players in the starting zone and how do they act?

 In the game, I am a paladin dwarf. As a dwarf, my race was created from the Earth. They used to spend a lot of time mining the treasures of the Earth, but have recently been called upon in the fight against the hoard. It has been said that the dwarves in World of Warcraft closely parallel the characters in Tolkien’s pieces as well as the original race in the Norse mythology. In WoW, my race is kind of a crazy race.

According to The Parent Report, “the excitement of video games makes playing them addictive” (The Parent Report) It suggests that it is not necessarily the video games themselves that are addictive, rather the excitement that they generate within the player that becomes addictive. Other scholars, like George Randall and Joe Ahn from Clemson University, suggest otherwise, claiming that a game like World of Warcraft is “inherently addictive,” since its primary focus is keeping people in the world to play collaboratively (Ahn, Joe and George Randall).