Historically, any quantitative analysis of trans and non-binary gamers would run into the practical issue of small sample size. For example, in our own data set, we saw a stable 1-2.5% prevalence of trans and non-binary gamers in the Gamer Motivation Profile between 2015 and 2019. So even with a survey sample of 1,000 gamers (not large, but considered adequate for most market research surveys, yielding a margin of error of 3%), a researcher would only see ~20 trans and non-binary gamers.
Then, in any analysis of gender in that hypothetical survey, if a non-binary response option was provided, that category would have to be excluded from analysis due to small sample size. If a non-binary category wasn’t provided in the survey, then those gamers would be included in the gender analysis, but incorrectly categorized. Neither option is good, but paradoxically, it’s the option that explicitly recognizes non-binary gamers that typically ends up excluding them from analysis. [This paragraph has been updated based on feedback from Mimhi. See comments section.]
Because we’ve always included an open-ended gender response option in the Gamer Motivation Profile, and because we’ve collected data from over 1.25 million gamers since 2015, we realized we had a substantial sample of trans and non-binary gamers in our data set, sufficient for analysis.
The Gamer Motivation Profile
The Gamer Motivation Profile is a 5-minute survey that allows gamers to get a personalized report of their gaming motivations, and see how they compare with other gamers. Over 1.25 million gamers worldwide have taken this survey. The 12 motivations that are measured in our model were identified via statistical analysis of how gaming motivations cluster together.
See how you compare with other gamers. Take a 5-minute survey and get your Gamer Motivation Profile along with personalized game recommendations.
Analysis Sample & Filters
For this analysis, to provide a more specific and consistent sample for interpretation, we analyzed only gamers in the US. Altogether, we had a sample of 13,595 trans and non-binary gamers, collected between June 2015 and January 2023. Among these respondents, the vast majority (92%) identified using a term under the non-binary umbrella (e.g., gender fluid, genderqueer, nb, demiboy/girl, androgyne, neutrois) and the remaining identified specifically as transgender (e.g., MTF, transfemale) or a combination of the two (e.g., “non-binary trans feminine”).
1) The Prevalence of Trans and Non-Binary Gamers Has Grown from 1% to 5% in the Past 7 Years
While the prevalence of trans and non-binary gamers was hovering around 1-2% between 2015 and 2018, we saw a jump in 2021 when the prevalence of trans and non-binary gamers hovered around 5%. This broadly aligns with a Pew Research Center survey in 2022 showing a 5% prevalence rate of trans and non-binary young adults (they defined as under 30) in the US.
2) The Prevalence of Trans and Non-Binary Gamers is Higher Among Younger Gamers
Similar to another trend noted in the Pew Research Center survey, we found that in our 2022 data, younger gamers were more likely to identify as trans or non-binary gender (5.6% among < 18 cohort) compared with older gamers (3.7% among 35+ cohort).
3) Trans and Non-Binary Gamers Are Primarily Motivated by Fantasy and Design
Trans and non-binary gamers have a distinct motivation profile. They are most driven by Fantasy (being someone else, somewhere else) and Design (self-expression, customization), and they tend to be much less interested in Power (leveling up, unlocking skill trees), Strategy (thinking/planning ahead), Challenge (high difficulty, practice, mastery), and Competition (PvP, arena, leaderboards).
Overall, trans and non-binary gamers have a profile that clearly leans towards the Immersion and Creativity motivations.
4) Trans and Non-Binary Gamer Motivations Aren’t A Linear Mixture of Male & Female Motivations
Given that male and female gender norms are the dominant social norms, one reasonable hypothesis would have been that trans and non-binary gaming motivations could be modeled as some linear mathematical mixture of known male and female gaming motivations—not necessarily the average, but lying somewhere between the two profiles. It turns out this is not the case.
Male gamers tend to be most motivated by Competition, Excitement, and Challenge. Female gamers tend to be most motivated by Completion, Fantasy, and Design. Trans and non-binary gamers have a motivation profile more similar to that of female gamers, but trans and non-binary gamers don’t over-index on Completion and they are more interested in Discovery. In short, the motivation profile of trans and non-binary gamers isn’t a linear mixture of male and female motivations, but is a distinct profile.
5) Popular Games Among Trans and Non-Binary Gamers
By dividing the mention rate of popular game titles among trans and non-binary gamers by the baseline popularity of game titles in our full data set, we can identify the games that are disproportionately popular among these gamers.
In the resulting top 10 list, we see many games that focus on non-human characters and/or non-binary characters. For example, Flight Rising is a dragon-raising game, and some characters in Deltarune and Cookie Run identify as non-binary.
6) Unpopular Games Among Trans and Non-Binary Gamers
Conversely, we can also identify games that are disproportionately under-mentioned among trans and non-binary gamers—i.e., games that they tend to stay away from.
Consistent with their profile of scoring low on Competition, Excitement, and Challenge, we see many games in this list center on fast-paced, skill-based, PvP mechanics. CS:GO and Rocket League are good examples of this.
What Do You Think About Non-Binary Gender Options in Video Games?
Have you played games with non-binary characters and what was your experience? Do you wish more games offered non-binary/non-traditional gender roles and identities?
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I find it really interesting that the lack of interest in competitive multiplayer games is attributed to the game itself rather than to the game’s playerbase. CSGO, Rocket League, League of Legends, and GTAV have a really bigoted playerbase and you interact with so many players that you’ll often run into at least one loud enough to ruin the mood in a day’s worth of playing unless you take steps to avoid interacting with random players. I think this is a much larger contributer to their unpopularity in this audience than anything intrinsic to the game in a vacuum.
My community and I had the same thoughts about this. I would want to see some additional looking into these patterns as controlled for the presence of certain features, like team PVP or voice/text chat in these games, just to assuage some concerns I have about being in a very misrepresented segment. It just doesn’t match my anecdotal experience of being surrounded by trans gamers who have not played a single game in the popular games list, whilst having played a disproportionate amount of the multiplayer games in the unpopular games list.
There’s a base rates issue to keep in mind. For example, if we go just with the numbers on Steamcharts, then CS:GO is the top-played game, with 1.4m peak concurrent players in the past 30 days. Dream Daddy, on the other hand, has a peak concurrent of 59 in the past 30 days.
So even though CS:GO is only 27% as popular among trans/NB gamers than in the general gamer population, there’s still a lot more trans/NB CS:GO players than there are (likely) currently Dream Daddy players in total.
That’s why these findings on the popular/unpopular games as well as your observations can all be true at the same time: Trans/NB players are disproportionately more likely to play Flight Rising and disproportionately less likely to play CS:GO, but you’re much more likely to meet a trans/NB gamer who plays CS:GO (simply because of how large the CS:GO player base is).
Thaaaaanks Nick, you’re right. It does make it a very odd list to read though. There’s this cultural truism or meme of trans people being extremely invested in certain games like the Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Elden Ring series, or Celeste, and I think I was hoping to find whether there’s any truth to the humorous idea that there’s some odd spikes of homogeneity.
I looked up the QF scores for the games you mentioned:
– Dark Souls III (0.69)
– Elden Ring (1.01)
– Bloodborne (1.10)
– Celeste (1.98)
So Elden Ring and Bloodborne are right around general baseline, Dark Souls III is moderately under baseline, and Celeste is about double the baseline.
Neat, data! Thank you!!
I would really love to see the uncertainty estimates on the QF values there. A QF value of 10 makes sense even on a smaller dataset, especially if we can attribute the game popularity among the cohort to its topics. But how meaningful is a QF value of 0.5? If another cohort member would mention The Witcher 3, would it drive the QF value to 0.51 or to 0.90?
If we look at Witcher 3 specifically, then adding +/-1 mention wouldn’t change the QF score (rounding to 2 digits). To shift the QF score by +/- 0.01, it would take +/- 10 mentions–so if the Witcher 3 got 10 more mentions, then its QF score would be 0.47.
In the unpopular games calculation, we also pre-filter for moderately popular (or higher) game titles. This is to avoid scenarios with little-known, niche games with extremely low mention rates where, indeed, +/- 1 mention could swing the QF score if only 10 people in the 1.25 million gamers mentioned that game.
Hello. I wish there was a “full list” report (with some threshold at least, like “games with >50 votes”) so we won’t ask you in every another comment.
Because I would like to ask about Q3 (Quake 3 = Quake Live, or maybe even compare Q3/QL to QC). So we could have more full comparison of games within a genre for example.
WE DID IT! Remember to keep linking this site but only in safe spaces! We can change gaming together!
Thanks for this report!
“Do you wish more games offered non-binary/non-traditional gender roles and identities?”
I do! I like eg. the Nonbinary Haven Steam curator for this reason, it helps me discover new games with NB protagonists :) https://store.steampowered.com/curator/39486419-Nonbinary-Haven/
This is really interesting! I definitely wish there were more trans and nonbinary characters or options in games – I often choose them if they’re available. Dragon Age Inquisition had the best representation of a trans masculine character I had ever seen at the point where it came out, and it was really nice to see a trans character whose story was not solely about transition. I just want to see trans and nonbinary people represented as part of the world in games, just like they are in real life.
As a transgender woman on the survey list, I must say I am a little confused by the first part of this article. Please do include transgender women with other women, and transgender men with other men! Plenty of us have binary identities that are properly displayed in the traditional survey results.
“If a trans or non-binary category wasn’t provided in the survey, then those gamers would be included in the gender analysis, but incorrectly categorized. ”
I am a female, so it is not in any way inaccurate to include my data in that set. That is not incorrectly categorized, it is correctly categorized.
Even on a biological level transgender woman are female, because someone’s identity stems from recognizable variation in brain structure that varies by gender, with trans people’s brains physically matching their own identities, not their assigned identity at birth. IE a transgender woman and a cisgender woman will have the same brain structure.
For anyone curious to learn more about the science, I recommend this great short documentary program, it’s all heavily sourced but distilled in an accessible and entertaining way. https://youtu.be/szf4hzQ5ztg
Apologies for the lack of precision on this and the inadvertent problematic framing! I’ve updated that paragraph to frame that particular point only around non-binary response options (referencing your comment). And thank you for sharing the YouTube video link.
When we were drafting this article, we struggled with whether the transgender and non-binary cohorts should be combined or not. They are not the same thing, of course, but they are often discussed together conceptually (e.g., https://www.hrc.org/resources/transgender-and-non-binary-faq or the Pew article), and non-binary is technically a sub-variant of transgender. Focusing on non-binary only would have been cleaner in a way, but it also felt like a potentially larger problem to exclude transgender gamers from the analysis.
Question: Is there value/interest in exploring transgender gamer preferences (to surface under-studied groups of gamers), or is doing so always problematic since many transgender male/female gamers have binary identities and they should always be analyzed as part of those binary identity cohorts?
I think that’s the underlying conundrum we were struggling with.
Hi Nick, as someone who is both transgender and nonbinary I want to direct you to the most recent data that I am aware of about nonbinary people, and provide an answer to your last question.
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/nonbinary-lgbtq-adults-us/
What that data indicates is that most nonbinary people do not in fact identify themselves as being transgender. I think the most appropriate way to approach trans and nonbinary people in analyses like this one is to treat them as distinct but overlapping groups, not as a “sub category.” I think it’s fine to lump them both together as long as it’s clear that the results are aggregate and don’t necessarily reflect nonbinary people or transgender people separately. I think maybe the aggregate results are slightly less interesting but it’s understandable if there are limitations with the data.
As for the point regarding including trans people who are also women/men. It would be completely appropriate to include their data with non-transgender (cisgender) people of the same gender as Mimhi said. In this case you might consider transgender people as simply a subgroup of their gender category. As an example it would be appropriate to include my data in an analysis of women, transgender people, and nonbinary people as I am a transfeminine nonbinary person as well as a woman.
As you might see, as in my case, gender is more complicated than is usually presented.
For you last question, I think the analysis you described absolutely has value. I think it is interesting to explore how transgender or nonbinary people might differ from the rest of the population. We have unique life experiences that could absolutely influence our media preferences in significant ways.
No worry, I understood your intention based on the surveys I’ve filled out and appreciate the added clarification! The included explanation was in case of curious commenters and I hope I didn’t come across as condescending or overly defensive.
There is value in studying the preferences of transgender people broadly, but be aware that if you include binary transgender people from both men and women that you aren’t going to get something displaying equivalent results to a gender profile, it would be more equivalent to doing a profile of another broad minority group such as race or cultural identity. Which of course do inherently have useful and relevant data.
Though it could still be very interesting to compare transgender people specifically to other subsets of gender based profiles. For example comparing cisgender women and transgender women to see whether going through young childhood (or generally earlier parts of ones life) as the opposite gender would tend to make someone lean further from the typical results due to more exposure to differently gendered cultural elements. I imagine it would be a bigger difference for older people as video games used to be far more gendered and exposure to young girls was limited.
To further clarify on the transgender =/= non-binary element, non-binary people are most often transgender due to pronouns, but not always also “medically transgender*” as the two are separate things (*a term I use at great discretion due to problematic exclusionary usages of similar terms in the past). Transgender is not a medical term but a political one, it refers to anyone whose gender identity does not match their assigned identity at birth.
Someone can be transgender because of physical medical conditions such as “brain in the wrong body” (due to hormones in early development causing traits of the opposite gender) or intersex people being born with elements of both genders (in which case the doctors need to guess for the birth certificate, and if they guess wrong that person is trans), gender experience (most non-binary people), or because of gender presentation (using non-traditional pronouns which inherently won’t match a birth certificate). It’s a somewhat arbitrary term, as an intersex person can end up being cisgender if their doctor guesses right, a non-binary person can be cisgender if they prefer to keep their birth pronouns, or an otherwise cisgender identifying person can be considered transgender if they want to have alternative pronouns legally recognized.
Someone can be multiple or all of these different things as well, since medical conditions, gender experience, and gender presentation are all distinct elements. I am certainly no expert here as I’ve only lived through this from one of these perspectives (binary “brain in wrong body” medical condition).
I would be very interested to see where transgender women end up relative to cisgender women! Lived experiences can have huge impacts on media consumption and the data for that is always interesting.
@Decima & @Mimhi: Thanks so much for your thoughtful, informative replies. This helps us a lot in terms of thinking about and framing future surveys.
Hi there. I just wanted to give some feedback as a trans woman, that might be helpful. I took the survey, and was asked if I identified as male, female, non-binary or if I preferred to specify. I selected female since that’s how I identify. That seems to just put my input in as female, (which is perfectly fine!), but if you wanted to specifically pull data for trans folk who identify inside the binary, you’re out of luck. You might consider a followup question, if you want to be able to identify which data is from non-cis but binary trans folk? Like if you select male or female, a followup might ask if you identify with being trans (for example. I acknowledge that there’s no easy clean way to categorize human beings.) As it is, my particular experience as trans but female identifying is somewhat lost.
I also think more questions might be helpful to identify the reasons beyond certain preferences. For instance, I’m much less likely to play a game where toxicity and/or bigotry is prevalent, in game chats or among the community outside the game. My preference for community in games would normally be much much higher if not for fear for example.
Keep up the good work!
This sounds like a great way to filter for that!
An easy followup question I would recommend is “Does your selection match the one assigned at birth? Yes or No.”. While there are lots of varying ways people can express or register their gender, following it with a detailed selection is going to again run into issues of drastically diminishing the available sample size.
Following a choice of female/male with transfem/transmasc is not always going to give desired results, as most binary transgender people are still going to stick to just using female or male, as while those terms can broadly include binary transgender people it can feel appropriative to use them sometimes. Also avoid using terms like “biological female/male” as these can often be interpreted as dog whistles, and are no longer accurately reflective of the current medical science.
As for reasons to avoid certain games, I don’t think the current structure of the surveys is really in a position to measure that. That would require a questionnaire for why a certain game is liked or disliked. A good option for future surveys though! A selection of popular games and rating reasons for liking, disliking, or avoiding them.
This comment might be a touch late to the party, but I’m rather curious about the fact that Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was in the proportionally least popular games for non-binary gamers, given that it should appeal to the motivations of Story, Fantasy and Discovery (not certain whether Design would apply though); what do you make of this apparent anomaly?
Another set of points that have occurred to me having re-read this blog post since my last comment:
– I note that the ’15/’16 years’ percentages are close together, ’17 to ’20 are similarly clustered, then there is a jump up in 2021; this looks less like a slow incline so much as sudden jumps in interest during specific years; are there particular games released during ’17 and ’21 or events in those years that might cause higher interest in gaming – or is this a result of a jump in people identifying as transgender or non-binary during those years, with proportional interest in gaming being an increasing function of underlying population trends?
– I’m actually not surprised that the gaming motivation clusters of transgender and non-binary gamers wasn’t a ‘middle’ position between the typical male and female motivation clusters as, perhaps more-so for non-binary gamers than transgender ones, non-binary people explicitly reject being either male or female but identify themselves to be something different enough to exist outside a binary spectrum; so it shouldn’t be a surprise that their motivations clusters are not both male and female but with less intensity but a different set of clusters altogether
Anyway, I hope this provides someone out there with some food for thought and/or analysis
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