Tag Archives: gifted
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.