Megagame survey results 2023 - Part 2
Written by Rob Grayston from East Midlands Megagames, these survey results are from his work to canvas the megagame community at the end of 2023. Read on to learn all about what the community thinks about a range of subjects.
This is part 2 with part 1 avilable here. This part of the series details out each country’s results including Rob’s commentary.
Australia - 21 responses
As some general observations, I’ll just note that Australia bucks the global setting/genre trend by having urban fantasy quite so high, nearly 50% of the Australian megagamers appear to be bisexual/pansexual, and the post-game social is by far the most important megagame experience element for them. Cheers to that!
How many megagames would you ideally like to attend in a year?
How many megagames will you have attended during 2023, by the end of the year?
Do you normally play or control/facilitate at a megagame?
What settings/genres do you prefer in the megagames you attend?
What facets of gameplay listed below do you enjoy?
What of the below elements would improve a megagame experience for you?
Which of the following best describes your gender identity?
What is your sexual orientation?
How old are you?
Would you describe yourself as more extroverted, more introverted, or an ambivert (somewhere in between)?
When do you usually read materials sent to you for a game?
Where do you find out information about megagames?
What other "megagame adjacent" hobbies do you do?
Sweden - 13 responses
I will note that Swedes seem to love control roles, exclude fantasy completely from their top 5 most popular settings/genres, and are the only place where boardgame dominance is replaced by another hobby – in this case, roleplaying games.
How many megagames will you have attended during 2023, by the end of the year?
Do you normally play or control/facilitate at a megagame?
What settings/genres do you prefer in the megagames you attend?
What facets of gameplay listed below do you enjoy?
What of the below elements would improve a megagame experience for you?
Which of the following best describes your gender identity?
What is your sexual orientation?
How old are you?
Would you describe yourself as more extroverted, more introverted, or an ambivert (somewhere in between)?
When do you usually read materials sent to you for a game?
Where do you find out information about megagames?
What other "megagame adjacent" hobbies do you do?
United Kingdom - 122 responses
The home of megagames, the United Kingdom has the highest concentration of megagame groups and has submitted the largest number of responses.
Due to the number of respondents, the UK stats look similar to the global ones in many places but there are some UK-specific things to note. We have the fewest extroverts in proportion to anywhere else, and have the highest ratio of wargamers. What does this tell us, apart from that megagames might be a good place to find someone for a game of Warhammer? We’ll have to wait a few years as the data comes in and see.
If nothing else, this data is at least making me rethink whether East Midlands Megagames really needs that Instagram account...
How many megagames would you ideally like to attend in a year?
How many megagames will you have attended during 2023, by the end of the year?
Do you normally play or control/facilitate at a megagame?
What settings/genres do you prefer in the megagames you attend?
What facets of gameplay listed below do you enjoy?
What of the below elements would improve a megagame experience for you?
Which of the following best describes your gender identity?
What is your sexual orientation?
How old are you?
Would you describe yourself as more extroverted, more introverted, or an ambivert (somewhere in between)?
When do you usually read materials sent to you for a game?
Where do you find out information about megagames?
What other "megagame adjacent" hobbies do you do?
United States - 46 responses
The US is the only place where fantasy-themed megagames come close to first place in terms of preferred settings/genres, we can see that roleplaying and immersion are lower down as preferences than for other regions, and Discord is the top dog of the megagame information sources.
How many megagames would you ideally like to attend in a year?
How many megagames will you have attended during 2023, by the end of the year?
Do you normally play or control/facilitate at a megagame?
What settings/genres do you prefer in the megagames you attend?
What facets of gameplay listed below do you enjoy?
What of the below elements would improve a megagame experience for you?
Which of the following best describes your gender identity?
What is your sexual orientation?
How old are you?
Would you describe yourself as more extroverted, more introverted, or an ambivert (somewhere in between)?
When do you usually read materials sent to you for a game?
Where do you find out information about megagames?
What other "megagame adjacent" hobbies do you do?
Comparisons
For comparative purposes we’ll mainly be looking at the bigger data sets which run by nationality (and it is assumed, but cannot be proven, this is the same as the person’s geographic location – something to fix in future surveys).
Another area of interest that was considered for a more in-depth look at megagames and their place in the wider gaming environment was to look at demographic data from adjacent hobbies; this would no doubt be fascinating, but right now it may not be directly useful even if it’s interesting, so we’ll put a pin in this and come back to it at a later date.
Lastly, the 2019 megagame survey used different parameters and took place in a pre-pandemic world. Direct comparisons are not always possible, and at this point we are also several years removed from what might be especially useful. 138 people responded to that survey, so you know what kind of numbers we’re talking about.
However, this data is all we have, so I’ve included a few elements below that you may find interesting:
Total games played
This specifically said played and not attended, so that needs to be considered when looking at these numbers. There’s no way to know what the higher numbers (20+) were, but the comparative on the global 2023 total megagames attended question is at 21%.
The 1-10 game range for 2023 is 62%, but in 2019 it was 55% - a notable gap, but I’m not sure how to interpret it. These numbers seem more like interesting trivia than anything directly useful to us right now – but give the megagame survey another few years and we’ll see.
Games designed and run
Proportions look reasonably close for games being designed – we have 61% saying they haven’t designed a game, and 14% saying they’ve designed but not run a game. When it gets to higher numbers, we seem to have lost a lot of people who’ve designed large numbers of games – only one person in 2023 had designed 10+!
Gender
The proportion of women has stayed roughly the same (13% vs 12%), but there has been a big increase in terms of non-binary representation (1% vs 8%). Was it the pandemic making people self-reflect on how they felt about gender? It’s not for me to speculate here, but it feels like an interesting pub chat.
Sexuality
The number of ‘prefer not to say’ has gone down since 2019 (thank you for sharing!), as has the number of homosexual (6% vs 4%) and heterosexual (65% vs 62%) – and we now have asexual as a new contender at 3% of responders, and bisexuality growing to 20%. See above comment re: pandemic – lockdown introspection may have made people think about themselves a bit more? Or perhaps we’re just reaching out to different people? Who knows, not me, add it to the ‘pub chat’ list.
Megagame adjacent hobbies
What is surprising to me here is that boardgames are over 15 points lower in 2019 than 2023 (ctrl+alt+c my above comments re: lockdown, we had more time to play stuff!), LARP and wargames are roughly the same, but video games are way down the list in 2019 (4% vs 73%)! I know for a fact we had computers and game consoles back in the dim and misty past of 2019, so I’m assuming this is more about identifying video gaming as being a ‘core hobby’ and being a ‘gamer’ than it is that people just... didn’t play games back then.
Now we’ve looked at a select few results from the 2019 survey, let’s chew through some of the delicious results from 2023. Please note that where an entry starts with an ‘=’ indicates more than one answer in that category, due to a tie in response numbers.
Ideal number of megagames in a year
More Swedes want to attend more games, and more Americans would like to attend fewer games. Overall, 3-4 games seems to be the sweet spot of how many games they’d like to attend.
Actual megagames played in 2023
If you’re in the UK, according to this, you’re more likely to have been to more than 1-2 megagames in a year. Is this because we have so many groups in such close proximity? It sounds as good a rough hypothesis as any to me.
Played / controlled megagames
The US seems to have the most people willing to pitch in as control roles – admirable stuff, keep up the good work and let us know your secrets. Sweden is very unbalanced, but we could do with a few more responders next year to see if you’re all as help being control as the Swedish responders were in 2023.
Preferred settings (top 5)
Sci-Fi reigns supreme! Interesting to note that ‘weird’ comes in 4th place for three regions, and historical topics are a top-5 entry in only two regions (discounting the global entry here).
Preferred gameplay elements (top 5)
Teamwork makes the dream work, am I right? (stop booing me, I’m right!)
It warms my chaos raccoon heart that treachery and conspiracy made it into the top 5 in the UK, but it’s great to see that there are definite regional variations here. Do they showcase stereotypical national character, relate to the types of game that are played, or occur because the stars are right?
Preferred megagame settings & genres by assorted metrics
Going by nationality was interesting, but digging in with other metrics can be just as rewarding. Here we have global data using different categories to see what comes up – and it’s fascinating to see that there are some real changes to the trends we’ve seen so far.
Women are big fans of fantasy, people who design megagames prefer historical settings to anybody else, and LARPers... like fantasy far less than I thought they would. Huh. My bad for leaning into stereotype
Note: For Women, Bisexuals / Pansexuals, and LARPers the least favoured setting was Historicals: World War One to World War Two. For Introverts it was superheroes, and for people who have designed/run 3+ games it was Fantasy (Steampunk).
Preferred type of gameplay by assorted metrics
Wargamers were the only group to have Conflict / Warfare in their top 5 (but only just!), whilst non-binary people seemed to like technology trees and research more than anyone else.
Note: More Mechanical Elements was the least-chosen option by all of the above groups; for non-binary people this bottom spot was also shared with Conflict / Warfare.
Conclusions
The idea behind the megagame survey is to gather information so we can do better at making games accessible, finding out what players want, and exploring new areas that people are open to. There are some hopefully some easily-implementable ideas for groups already in this data – and the longer the survey runs, the more numbers we’ll have to prove it.
This data can also be a way to show people we’re an inclusive group within the wider gaming umbrella – there are some things we could do better, but now we also have some hard numbers to help show we can be inclusive too.
Of course, the survey itself could be improved – I have a page of notes which has helpfully been suggested by various people, and some taken from the comments on the survey itself. Some things need clarifying, there are some possible new questions which would be relevant to ask (e.g. a question on neurodiversity was considered but not included; perhaps next year this will change), and we need to find a way to get all that good and useful information whilst also not going too far over 25 questions as people will start to tune out.
Extra questions could include things like ‘how long have you been megagaming?’ and ‘do you think of yourself as a megagamer in terms of what hobbies you identify with?’, which is a bit of a mouthful, but hopefully you get the idea of the intent. Some questions, like the number of megagames people had done in 2023, need amending – as there were quite a few people who had done 0. Bit of an oversight, that.
This data is also useful for a lot of things, but purposefully didn’t include commercial questions – how much would you be happy to pay for a ticket, would you pay less if you knew a megagame was for profit, how far would you be willing to travel for a megagame, etc. All useful information, and there has been a previous ticket survey – it might be time to fire that up again!
Hopefully this is also making some regions and megagame groups also think about their own data. I know that we are all, overwhelmingly, hobby volunteers and things like this take time and effort – but accurate information on your own players, facilitators, and designers can go a long way to giving people the game experiences they want. Does that mean you should all run out and start issuing surveys straight away? No! An inundation of stuff like that turns people off opening emails or paying attention to social media – but perhaps somewhere, where relevant, and not very often, you might want to think about how to incorporate a bit of data capture or comparing some of this survey information with what you know about your own group.
I’d like to thank Megagame Assembly for hosting this survey, as well as the people who looked it over and offered suggestions – thanks to Alan, Charlotte, Chris, Nellie, and Susannah – you were all really helpful and your input was appreciated (even if I ignored some of it, when in hindsight it was Good Stuff).
There’s already a couple of offers by better data-wranglers than I for the next one, so expect that there may be a more expert analysis for 2024’s survey. Something also to think about may be asking for some input or interpretation of results by people from regions which get their own closer analysis (i.e. those with more responders). We all love a bit of content localisation, right?
Overall, it’s been very heartening to see the passion and love for megagames that has come through from a lot of people, and the useful suggestions which can go towards better megagame experiences overall.
Here’s looking forward to the 2024 survey, and let’s see if we can get over 300 responses!
That’s all the results from the 2023 survey. Let us know if anything specific jumps out at you via our Facebook group!
Rob Grayston is one of the people behind East Midlands Megagames. His day job involves emergency planning and resilience, and he is a firm supporter of using games for educational and training purposes. He’s always happy to promote megagames and their serious uses, or just megagames in general, so if you would like to talk to him get in touch.