For anyone who is interested in facts, rather than arguing based on their emotions, you can follow the link in this article and find the survey report, which includes the methodology. Just to state it here: the report was done using random phone numbers from samples provided by a survey sampling group, and weighted the results appropriately based on the demographics in the most recent census data. There is no evidence that they hand-picked people to get the results they wanted. The survey contains more detail than I have posted, if you require more.
Yes, they included "mobile games" as "games". This shouldn't be surprising--they are games, even if they aren't "real" games. Note that they did not say "there are as many female gamers as male gamers", only that "there are as many females who play games as there are males who play games". In fact, the survey suggests there are fewer than half as many female "gamers" as there are male "gamers".
The point of the survey was to determine how people viewed games, such as "do games make people more violent", "do games contribute to problem-solving skills", etc. The outcome of the survey is that people who call themselves "gamers" view games the most positively and people who don't play games at all view games the least positively, with people who play games but don't consider themselves "gamers" being somewhere in between. There is an excessive amount of outrage at these unsurprising results.
No, the survey does not tell us how many of these people are "real gamers" by any of the arbitrary definitions any of the commenters have posted. It doesn't tell us that "people who play console games are more/less positive about games than people who only play mobile games" or any other division of what kinds of games people play. However, considering how arbitrary "gamer" is, and the fact that self-identified gamers only made up 10% of the survey overall, it is unlikely that the data is somehow "skewed" because they didn't decide on their own definition. That said, it couldn't be skewed anyway: it states that "people who said they were gamers said [something]", which is completely accurate. Regardless, considering how unsurprising the results were (as I mentioned in the previous paragraph), it doesn't seem like there's anything worth arguing.
tl;dr Take the survey at face-value, rather than imposing your own assumptions on it, and you'll see that it was relatively uninteresting, and any arguments about how misrepresentative the results were are baseless.
@musalala: So now "video games on pc, console, or mobile device" is unclear too? And if they say Christians without any caveats then they mean Christians without any caveats; if you refuse to believe that they have said what they mean, then the fault lies with you. Moreover, they didn't describe anyone as gamers, they described them as people who identified themselves as gamers, which couldn't be more specific.
@musalala: No it doesn't; it represents exactly what it describes. Half of women play games, just like half of men do. 6% of women consider themselves gamers, which is much less than 15% of men. It is exactly as it describes.
@loafofgame: It doesn't even focus on people who play games--half of them don't. It's about how people in the US perceive games, including people who don't play, people who only play casually, and people who play a lot.
@musalala: Because there isn't one and there wasn't a reason to make one. If they said, "A gamer is someone who plays games 30 hours a week. Are you a gamer?", then there would be no reason to say that that makes someone a gamer; they could just ask if someone plays that many hours. They wanted to know who would identify as a gamer, which is what they found out. The survey was about perceptions of gaming, and that is what they got. They didn't try to unilaterally define "gamer", and there was no need to.
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