Tag Archives: gaming
Watching Casual Gamers
I’ve noticed something that strikes me as peculiar over the last few days.
I started streaming some games late night – the big ones that have drawn viewers have been Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Secret of Mana, although I still stream other games at times.
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However, I’ve been watching other people play games from time to time when I’m just not in the mood to work on my own files, and what I’m discovering is that there are a lot of people streaming competitive play or top-tier playstyles or speedruns of classic games, but it’s very difficult to just find someone playing an older game of theirs that they haven’t mastered. And you know what? They’re a hell of a lot more entertaining to watch.
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Demarcation of Gifted Gamers
So just what is it that makes a ‘gifted gamer’ different?
Giftedness is a label typically bestowed to students who have demonstrated a superior mental ability. Giftedness arises from a physical difference in person’s brain (Clark, 1988).
It is important to note here that we are not talking about personal strengths. A personal strength is an assessment in comparison to yourself only. A gift, however, is a comparison of yourself to a (large) population. A gifted person’s weakness may still be way above the strength of an average person… Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, not everyone is gifted. (And not all ‘gifted’ people are equally gifted!) A gifted person is one who’s abilities are at least one standard deviation above the ‘norm’ in a large population. There is a significant difference between the the gifted person and the average person. Consider in intelligence one standard deviation below the norm can result in becoming labelled with a mental disability.
Psychologists have broken down the possible fundamental abilities that a person may be gifted in (in one, all or any combination) these are:
- Intellectual (e.g. fluid reasoning – inductive and deductive, crystallised verbal, spatial, memory, judgement and metacognition)
- Creative (e.g. inventiveness, problem-solving, imagination, originality)
- Socioaffective (perceptiveness, communication, empathy, tact, influence, leadership, persuasion)
- Sensorimotor (senses: visual, auditory, olfactive etc and motor: strength, reflex, endurance and coordination)
Ok, so if these are all the areas a person could be gifted in, just what is a gifted gamer…
Obviously they must be gifted in just the right areas that support the development of gaming talents. Lets have a look at how these various gifts, could be useful for gaming.
Prevalence of Gifted Gamers
Hi all, this will be my first post and to introduce myself I wanted to do a quick excursis into the realm of gifted gamers. I’m currently studying gifted education and I thought it might be interesting to apply some of these theories to the gaming world.
The first question I hope to address is, how many gifted gamers are there?
According to wowprogress.com there are currently 54765 guilds that have cleared at least 1/12 ICC 10man and 43647 guilds that have cleared at least 1/12 ICC 25man. Assuming a 25m guild has on average 35 raiders, and a 10man guild 20 raiders and that all 25man guilds also raid 10man occasionally, this represents 1.75 million raiders in the world. Lets add a few casuals who may not have reached that far yet and round it up to a nice 2 million world of warcraft players. (keep in mind this doesn’t include china who are still playing TBC unfortunately!)
Now the question is, how many of these WoW players are actually talented. Stealing from psychology the definition of giftedness refers to the top 10% of the population (Françoys Gagné, 2003). However, current understanding of giftedness indicates that there are various levels of giftedness. Feldhusen (1993) indicates the following statistics for the ranges of giftedness and I have used these to extrapolate the estimated number that currently play wow:
| Level | Prevalence | Estimated # in WoW |
|---|---|---|
| Mildly gifted | 1:6 to 1:44 | ~200,000 |
| Moderately gifted | 1:44 to 1:1,000 | ~20,000 |
| Highly gifted | 1:1,000 to 1:10,000 | ~1,000 |
| Exceptionally gifted | 1:10,000 to 1:1million | ~50 |
| Profoundly gifted | < 1:1 million | ~2 |
Let’s compare this to the current number of players that have defeated the Heroic: Lich-King encounter:
- 25 man – 218 guilds = 7630 people
- 10 man – 792 unique guilds = 15840 people
- total – 23470 people
Hence, it seems this encounter is a good measure of identifying the moderately gifted among us. Well done blizzard in implementing a difficult encounter.
Do you think you belong on this scale? If so where would you place yourself and why?
I intend to run a theme on ‘gifted’ gamers, up next we’ll look at what a gifted gamer ‘looks’ like and whether the image above represents a true image of them.
Zevia: The Golden Age of Gaming
Hey guys, Zevia here. While listening to old video game music, I got to thinking about the topic of how many older gamers think video games just aren’t as good as they used to be, and the counterargument that they only think that because of good ol’ nostalgia.
The first 3 minutes are some thoughts concerning that topic, and the rest of the video is browsing through a small handful of games I used to own and discussing the merits of playing older games.
What do you think? Were games better in the Genesis/SNES days?