To put a long story short, there is no reliable, objective source of information on gamers in general, for many reasons.
 One, it’s difficult to define gamers. A person enjoying a Freecell game every other week, a console RPG geek and a Korean Starcraft gosu have little in common. Drawing statistics on such a diverse population does not imply much in terms of reliability.
 Two, because this is a political subject, numbers that come from either the inside of the industry or from anti-game lobbies are built to advocate a point of view and may be very subjective.
 Three, numbers that are self-reported (i.e. from the gamers themselves) are equally subjective, as the way many gamers see themselves is heavily idealized.

But, for all of these reasons (especially for the last 2), it’s worth digging through the numbers we can find on gamers. Even if they are not accurate, they tell us a story: how do people want to present gamers? The viewpoint of the industry and how gamers see themselves is of particular interest. Let’s see.

Gamers are great citizens

This seems to be the mantra of the American ESA (Entertainment Software Associations). In its key facts for 2005, the ESA has included surprising figures on the demographics of gamers. We learn that "Gamers devote more than triple the amount of time spent playing games each week to exercising or playing sports, volunteering in the community, religious activities, creative endeavors, cultural activities, and reading.". 79% of gamers do more than 20 hours of sport per month! What’s more, 92% of the time, parents are present when games are bought or rented. 32% of parents play games with their children weekly, and 63% of parents believe that games are a positive part of their children’s lives.

The ESA has to fight the idea that gamers are extreme couch potatoes and that game ratings are useless because parents do not monitor their children’s game activities. I don’t know how this survey has been conducted, or how they define gamers... The last number seems especially surprising. While I am deeply convinced that gaming can be a positive experience, under certain circumstances, of course, I can only see how little parents seem to agree with that statement. Were the surveyed all working in the entertainment industry?

From the opposite viewpoint, there are less numbers. That videogames cause violence, for instance, is harder to express in statistics, especially as violent crime rates in the United States have been regressing. Arguments tend to be more qualitative and harder to counter directly.

How gamers see themselves

When it comes to asking gamers how they feel about their hobby, there’s hardly anyone better than GameFAQs. Since January 1999, they ask a question each day to their many viewers, and get usually from 50 to 100,000 responses, mostly from hard-core gamers who both spend a lot of time playing, and play a lot of games.

People visit GameFAQs for, well, FAQs, so its audience is principally interested in RPGs, adventure games and fighting games, and less so by more immediate games such as driving or sport. While we know that GameFAQs gamers do take gaming seriously, we also know that there’s no small amount of self-glorification in the answers that the visitors, often juvenile, feed the system.

This is precisely what’s interesting: the numbers themselves do not matter much. But the direction in which these gamers influence results tell us much about their values, how they think they should behave. Games are a world of freedom, answers to fantasies. They should take this dimension into account, and send back to the players the image they like.

The gamer spends considerable amounts of money on videogames

They’re likely to own all the current consoles: 80% of them have at least 2 machines plugged in and ready to play, and 40% have at least 4. 40% plan to buy at least 2 of the next-generation consoles (30% are going to do it within the next year), and around 10% will buy all three of them. Most surprisingly, 50% have more than 50 "legit" games, while 10% have more than 200 [1] and 3%, more than 1000! (to put things in perspective, more than 80% of the people who answer are 21 and younger.

The player is a dedicated fan

In March 2004, 8% (more than 7000 people) answered that they owned every main Final Fantasy title. Likewise, in 2000, 5% also said they owned every Squaresoft title, even obscure imports (which amounted, back then, to some 67 titles). This is highly unlikely that more than a handful of people own either collection, spanning over so many years and so many systems, (especially considering the young age of many of the respondents).

This has a deep impact on their social life

Fact: true gamers do not sleep. While few of us would survive with less than 30 hours of sleep per night, this doesn’t seem to be a problem for 10% of our gamers, and 40% are seriously sleep-deprived. This is not surprising considering that 65% play more than 11 hours per week, of which 10% play more than 8 hours a day! To the question "How many hours out of the last 24 have you spent playing video games?", 70% answer more than 2, and 30%, more than 8! No wonder than 75% of the respondants are single.

The player is a winner

10% of GameFAQs visitors report that they have beaten Final Fantasy VII more than ten times. In another poll, more than 95% of the respondents feel that the games they play are not too hard. They are skilled indeed: 25% say that they rarely or never (3%) use walkthrough or FAQs. 80% only use them "sometimes".

The player is a connoisseur

True gamers do not just play a lot, they also have played since the invention of gaming. 85% of the respondents have started playing before the SNES/Genesis era (1989), even if most of them weren’t born back then. When asked what is the most important feature of a game, they massively answered gameplay, then replayability (to be honest, the question was quite directive). Why are we not all playing Tetris? After all, 80% of them still play their old consoles at least occasionally.

Conclusions

Since the 1990s, the industry has endeavoured to rid games of frustration. This means that games should be spaces of freedom.

There is a discrepancy between who the players really are and who they want to be perceived as. Rather than reestablishing the truth, game makers should utilize that and send them back an image that they like.

Among other things:
 the game should recognize the players’ efforts, send them positive feedback at every "real" occasion and provide them with metrics that they can boast about.
 how the game measures success ("score") should reflect what the player want to hear. Some games measure time: they should not include time spent restarting sections because the player lost. In fine, they should be able to say, "bah, I beat this game in twelve hours", even if it took them hundreds of tries. When the game is over, some games give appreciations or grades. No matter what, beating a game is an accomplishment and should be rewarded as such. "Bad endings" should definitely be avoided.
 there is an obvious gap between the type of game players like, and the one they say they like. Players like to see themselves as strategists, thinkers, experts. But the games they do play do not reflect those orientations. Games, therefore, should exhibit some of these features, not so much to lure players ("buy this game, it has RPG elements") but to make them like it more ("I really love what I’m doing in this game, I never thought it would be that deep").