Let’s start this little nugget off with a disclaimer: the information regarding race contained within this post in no way reflects the opinions of Kombo or its staff. In fact, it doesn’t reflect the opinions of anyone; this data was collected as scientifically as possible, given its nature, from the profiles of 526,000 members of the online dating website OkCupid, and it’s presented as just that: objective data.
See, the “data scientists” at Gizmodo teamed up with some other “data scientists” at OkCupid to gather the “data” and sort out which terms appeared most frequently in the profiles of members of each race and gender represented on the site. Why should you care? Well, apparently, white people don’t like video games.
Or they at least don’t want to admit that they do. Keep in mind, all of the data was gathered from the users’ own descriptions of their interests, personalities and favorite things, so the information is just as likely to represent what people think the opposite sex wants them to be like as what they’re actually like. In addition, the sample was taken from a population of people who use a free, online dating service, so whether that means they’re young, cheap or weird, I’ll leave to other “data scientists” to determine.
The ethnicities with the highest number of representatives for the entire OkCupid sample are “white,” “black,” “Latino,” and “Asian.” Of the four, white dudes are the only ones who fail to consistently mention video games in their profiles, instead including such brotastic details as “harley davidson,” “brew,” “building things,” and “most sports.”
Black guys list both “xbox 360” and “playstation” in their profiles, while Latinos list only “xbox 360” and Asians toe the line by merely writing “computer games.”
Unfortunately, the Gizmodo article doesn’t list the average age of the OkCupid members from whose profiles the statistics were culled. Do white guys really not like video games? Of course not. Everybody loves video games.
But maybe white guys who use dating services are less likely to play video games, white guys who use dating services tend to be older than most white guys who play video games, or white guys who use dating services simply assume that including video games in their profile will make women less interested in them.
Interestingly, no women of any ethnicity list anything that can be even remotely identified with gaming in their dating profiles, despite the “40% of gamers are women you misogynist!” statistic that gets thrown my way every time I write a story with more quotes from dudes than ladies.
Of course, women who do play video games probably don’t need to resort to dating sites to hook up with guys. What else can be discerned from the information? Hit up the source below for more pointless conjecture.
