Gamer demographics

What I'm about to say is completely unscientific, and if there has ever been any published or private research on this topic, I'd love to get it.

I was thinking this morning about demographics, specifically the demographics of people in our hobby, by which I mean pen and paper RPGs.

My general impression, again, merely from my own observations, has been that the majority of gamers are white, male, and typically are 30 or more years old.  This is of course not entirely true - I know and play with many women (who are also typically white and more than 30 years old) and have played with gamers of other races (usually male, but not always, and usually 30+ years old).  Women are a minority, certainly, but are vastly more common than gamers of color, especially male gamers of color.

ACNW is one of my favorite gaming conventions in no small part due to the near parity between male and female gamers, and because there are quite a few gamers of color there.  I have long known that I like gaming with women more than men, typically, and enjoy playing with gamers of all races, so this is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

But, it's rare.  At least that's my impression.

Part of the issue here, I think, is that gaming is a niche hobby.  Not that many people are into it, not that many people are exposed to it, or even necessarily think of it positively.  Certainly, within the broader society, gaming is often vilified as being strange or aberrant, or even evil (among some misguided folks within religious communities).  This has often struck me as odd, because most people like games in general.  Gameshows are a popular thing on TV.  Most people can be convinced to play a card game, or a board game from time to time.  Chess and checkers and dominoes and backgammon are all very popular games in a variety of cultural contexts. 

But for some reason, RPG games have never caught on broadly.  Even at the height of the D&D fad in the 80s, my impression is that it was mostly contained to young white men, of moderate to high income backgrounds. 

This might be changing with the advent of RPG games on computers and consoles.  This is not a group of people I know anything about, other than having met a lot of MMORPG gamers over the years at work, and being somewhat amused to hear them talking about their characters, much the same way I did 25 years ago about mine.  The demographics seem broader with the MMORPGs, but still mostly male.  It does seem to skew younger, though.

I'm not particularly interested in going on a long rant saying that we need to change things to appeal to a broader audience.  While I'd certainly be happy to see more people into our hobby, I am suspicious of any calls for change solely to get more people involved. 

What I am interested in examining is how this demographic profile affects us in the way we play, and in how we relate to each other.  On rpg.net and other forums, I've seen some pretty awful (in my opinion) posts that express very misogynistic, racist and classist thought.  I tend to attribute this less to gaming itself than to the tropes that some players bring to the table.  There's been a fair amount of writing on, for example, race in RPGs, and I'd like to see more of that, and more about gender and class too.  This sort of self examination is useful, if only because by examining our assumptions about games will make them better.

There have been some trends that I applaud.  It's rare these days that you find a game with modifiers based on gender of the character, for example.  Those were common in the old days.  It's rare that I've run into the "chainmail bikini" trope for female characters of late, but there's still plenty of stereotyped depictions of women around.  

Depictions of other races in RPGs (non-human races at least) are still typically completely homogeneous (all elves are like this, all dwarves are like this) and are, more often than not, based on stereotyped understandings of other human cultures (my elves are different because they're all Rastafarians, or are into voudoun).

These sorts of things show a marked lack of understanding on the part of game designers and world-creators.  They express some inherent racism, I think, and are also just pretty lame, oversimplified plugins when the designers don't have the creativity to create something unique.  

On the one hand, it's probably very hard to imagine characters that aren't at least something we're familiar with in real life, or at the very least comply with the ideas we have of others, even if those ideas are not correct.  I generally don't play cross race, or cross gender, because I have a hard time getting into the heads of characters who are really different than my experience as a white male.  I prefer to avoid playing across those lines more out of respect than anything else; it's preferable to me to not play characters who I have a hard time understanding, since if I do, I would likely cause offense or not respect the background I'd be trying to portray. 

But that's just me, and I know a lot of people who enjoy getting out of their gender, or race, to play a character very different from themselves.

I'll just open this up to a bunch of questions.  How do you feel about race and gender and class in RPGs?  Among players of RPGs?  Do you play cross gender or race?  If you're a person of color, or a woman, what's your experience been of playing in RPGs?