I'd say the other way around. SL is like trying to tell others there is a virtual you and come get along with me kind of "game". It's more like a social platform to me, in which you are not "supposed" to disguise yourself in there any more than you do in real life. Then it tells a lot about a person, in a certain way.

WoW, EVE, etc. These are gaming platform purely for entertainment. Especially when it comes to RP, genders don't matter. You are not supposed to expect a male character to be played by male when you are in a RP server, because that's not what it is all about.

Let me give you one real life situation. Two female friends of mine enjoy roleplaying male characters in our D&D games more than female characters. When it comes to porms, they agreed girl+girl is more beautiful, but guy->guy is simply epic, they laugh at all angles while we vormited it out.

Took me three tries to finish it, don't think it's you.

Sounds to me like you've never been on Second Life.

That's not really my point. My point was more regarding the innate stereotypes and norms about men and women. Each culture has its own stereotypes about how you approach and interact with males and females - these bleed into online interactions as well. That is what is interesting - the disconnect between perceived gender and actual gender (I use gender as the social term, not the biological one).

Again, not my point. In online games you do not know the gender of the person you are interacting with - you only have your own perceptions and stereotypes about what is male and what is female to guide you.

I've been trying to think of something to write that hasn't been said...but really, there's not much to say. The whole thing is pointless unless they knew what each player's gender identity is, otherwise you have at least a tenth of the data that's inaccurate(according to the article, which I personally find to be a conservative estimate).

There are no girls on the internet...besides facebook.

I know b/c I've made an advance to every female character in WOW and after my "Hey, bebeh...wanna do it?" the proceed to tell me they are male and laugh at me.

Seriously, how is one suppose to hook up????

I think its the problem is its a generalisation, without any evidence backing up what their saying.

To be fair, the game they performed their study on (Pardus) allows only one character per player. Of course, it doesn't mean the character's gender matches that of the player or that the results of this study will be relevant in any game that lets you create multiple characters.
So you're right, basically pointless.

The thing is, this research doesn't tell us anything new. Take this, for example:
"There s one group for whom this kind of study will be invaluable: advertisers and marketeers. That makes it potentially valuable form a commercial point of view."

Really? So advertisers didn't already know men and women think and react differently? Ground-breaking indeed. It reminds me of that one research when scientist put some hamsters on a diet and discovered that while they still enjoy six, they are less likely to initiate it. If they were on a diet for more than a week, they tended to - surprise, surprise - spend more time hoarding food than looking for six partners!

But yeah, MMOs are a great area for social studies. They just need to be conducted professionally and with good knowledge of how online games work - unlike the research presented here.

You're missing the point of scientific research here. You shouldn't make the subjective judgment that X study is bad because it investigates some common issue or presents evidence that is "common sense" or is "simple logic." If people didn't perform research because the answer to the research question was "common sense" there would be a lot of technology and advances that wouldn't be around.

And "conducted professionally"? Perhaps you should go read the http://www.csee.usf.edu/%7Eanda/CIS6930-S11/papers/mmog-SzellThurner2010.pdf before you make judgments on whether it was conducted professionally or not.

I don't think it was necessarily a bad study. As Reneer said, it was a valid attempt at scientifically investigating a potentially interesting subject. But I think their findings were too unremarkable to make a very interesting or impressive article, and some of their data was undoubtedly flawed to the point of inconclusiveness. As other members here have pointed out, a person's in-game gender and behavior may not accurately reflect out of game behavior. After all, that's sort of what role-playing games are all about: playing someone who doesn't necessarily act like you.