Since LARP Out of Character started last year, I have been waiting for youtube to have collected enough data on video viewers to compile demographic information on who is watching. As you might have guessed, we just passed that mark. Up until now I have been able to view where view come from (Mostly the US, but other top countries are: UK, Canada, New Zealand, Poland, Germany, Australia, Netherlands), but now as you can see there are age and gender data available as well.
25.5%of viewers are women, 74.5% are men
At non-larp focused gaming conventions I attend the gender demographics are skewed (old statistics put GenCon at 18% in 2006), but I was a little surprised by 25/75 breakdown, since in my LARP community the ratio is about 45% women, 55% men. It had always been my impression that LARPing didn’t have as great a skew as other forms of gaming.
Looking at it a little further, age does play into this, with the skew becoming more pronounced in older viewers. The youngest age bracket (13-17) was close to 50-50 which the oldest age bracket for which there were any viewers (45-54) was exclusively men.
Here is how it broke down:
- 13-17 F: 3.5% M: 3.6%
- 18-24 F: 7.9% M: 18.0%
- 25-34 F: 8.2% M: 30.0%
- 35-44 F: 4.9% M: 17.0%
- 45-54 F: 0.0% M: 6.1%
One other thing to note – US viewers are notably older than the non-US viewers. This shift is even more marked when you consider that the demographics from the US make up about 70% of the global figures.
- 13-17 US: 0.0% Global: 7.1%
- 18-24 US: 23.0% Global: 25.9%
- 25-34 US: 42.0% Global: 38.2%
- 35-44 US: 27.0% Global: 21.9%
- 45-54 US: 8.1% Global: 6.1%
How do these demographics sit with you? Is the ratio right for your LARP group?
LARP Out of Character 
The college campus (RPI) where I run and play theatrical games has about a 3:1 M:F ratio, with the LARP community not as heavily skewed. However, the ratio among current-student authors of games is actually more skewed than the base population (a trend that partly goes away if you count older alums who are still very much a part of the community).
If the trend of male-skewed authorship holds for other communities (I’ve only played at 1 convention outside of RPI so I can’t really assess if that’s the case), that could explain the viewer disparity. The contents of the videos seem generally more relevant to people wanting to write and run games than just play in them.
As to WHY there would be such a gender disparity in people wanting to run games, my only explanation would be the communities LARP sprung from and recruits from being similarly skewed. The community in my area grew out of people interested in board games and tabletop RPGs, which in my experience been even more heavily skewed for the dudes than the LARP community.
As to whether or not this is a trend that would be worthwhile to alter or how to go about doing so, that’s a topic for much deeper discussion than I think I can do justice to in this comment.
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The authorship angle is an interesting one, and could speak to why there is some continued gender imbalance – if men are making games that they themselves would enjoy, then there is an inherent masculine leaning (whatever that means). Also there could just be a lag in players becoming authors such that the authorship gender balance reflects the player balance of some yesteryear.
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