Facebook games appeal to unlikely audience

When Facebook first launched its various game applications—such as the popular FarmVille—the assumption was that it would appeal mainly to men. The image of men enthusiastically playing video games in their home’s basement is one that is deeply ingrained in society. But somewhat unexpectedly, Facebook’s games appeal just as much to an unlikely crowd, namely women over 40 years of age. A major survey conducted by PopCap Games shows that middle-aged women are more likely to be playing Facebook games than men, or any other age cohort. In fact, 40-plus women even beat out teenagers when it came to the amount of time they spent on FarmVille.
The survey’s data was collected in the United Kingdom and the United States and it found that a clear majority of social gamers (55%) are women. Even more curiously, the average age of these Facebook enthusiasts is 43. Not only are middle-aged women more likely to start playing games offered through the world’s largest social networking site, but they also tend to spend much more time logging on to this application then men. While 39% of women played this game more than once each day, only 29% of men admitted to sitting down in front of monitor on more than one occasion to try their luck on FarmVille.
Facebook’s FarmVille now boasts 82 million players and 60% of these enthusiasts are actually women. Even Mafia Wars—another popular Facebook game—appears to be most popular among women. Perhaps what these surprising statistics show is that ever more gender stereotypes are being broken down in the world of social networking