World of Warcraft Parents Guide

The NY Times published an article on how Americans spend their time. The best part is a cool interactive chart where you can browse the habits of different demographics. While World of Warcraft is not explicitly mentioned computer use is. No matter how you slice and dice the data Americans still spend far more of their time sleeping, working, and watching TV than using a computer.

Computer use doesn’t seem to grow to much more than 4% of Americans at any point during the day. But WoW is such a time sink, with all the questing, leveling, raiding, and PvP going on it’s hard to believe that it doesn’t account for more lost productivity or lost study time.

Once answer is that even though Blizzard sold an estimated 8.6 million copies of WoW so far (as reported by Gamasutra) that’s a small number compared to the 238 million people who are estimated to watch TV everyday.

Another answer may be that WoW and other computer-based social networking activities like Facebook, MySpace, and Instant Messaging are reported as socializing which the study reports people spend about 10% of their time doing.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at 10:29 am and is filed under News & Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.