Bump. Since it’s past midnight UTC on December 31, the survey results are now out. Happy 2026. There are some interesting patterns in the results, which I’ll probably make another post about later. For example, the survey results indicate that only around 18% of the forum userbase is female.
I’d like to create graphs for this data. I particularly want to show the distributions while including how many people didn’t answer a particular question, since some demographic questions got less responses than others.
If the mods want to send me a .csv of the results via DM, I’d appreciate that, since it would help with analysis. It’s completely up to them, however. If they don’t want to, or if they want to remove sensitive questions from the .csv before they send it out or make other changes, they can do so.
I also didn’t realize the number rating questions for parser vs. choice, asking you to rate your preferences on a scale of 1 to 5, would only show averages and not how many people picked each number. This was my mistake, and I’ll make an actual distribution chart for those two questions if the .csv allows me to. If I do this again, I’ll make those two questions ordinary multiple response polls, like the other survey questions.
I’m particularly struck by the high percentages for no religion and no children.
Also by half of respondents having entered a game into IFComp or SpringThing - higher than I expected.
Plus the dominance of laptop or desktop computer users over mobile, at least for primary device. I rather wish that you’d asked about Windows vs Linux vs Mac balance, but maybe that can be explored another time.
Not surprised by the 40-59 year old age profile though, or just how many really old timers are here. Glad you were able to add a second question to explore more the “Over 10 years ago” contingent.
I’ll see about putting together a CSV in the next week or so. Given the number of respondents, I don’t foresee any real anonymity issues, but I want to double-check and make sure, just in case.
Much of this will probably make it into my writeup, but here goes:
I’m interested in the lack of certain answers. Nobody answered “American Indian or Alaskan Native”, “Black”, or “Middle Eastern” on the fourth question, and for the continent question, we had no respondents living in Africa or South America and only 2 respondents living in Asia. For religion, there were no Hindu or Muslim respondents, only 2 Buddhist respondents, and only 2 Jewish respondents. I grew up in a diverse area, so this was surprising to me. It also makes me wonder about IF made by authors who belong to those demographics. I know those games exist, and have played some, but their authors aren’t active members of this forum.
The low proportion of female respondents was also surprising, though not as much, since I’ve seen it before. A 2016 demographic survey of Reddit users, indicated that around 67% of Reddit users are male, just as this survey indicated that around 67% of Intfiction users are male. The Reddit survey didn’t have options for nonbinary gender, however. The Reddit survey also indicated that around 64% of Reddit users are under 30, compared to the 22% we have here, which might have been why I expected more younger survey respondents.
Tying into that, I was surprised by the number of people in the 40+ age brackets. In the age question, I naively combined 40-49 and 50-59 into one category, thinking it would be relatively small. But it’s actually people who are under the age of 30 who are the minority, which is the reverse of nearly every other online space I’ve been in. I’m hard-pressed to think of digital spaces with a lot of older people in them. There were also only 3 people who said they were 13-19, so at most there were 3 minors who answered the survey. Many other surprising results are downstream of the age results, like the part where 47% of the respondents said they were married, and 36% of respondents had children. There’s also an astonishingly high proportion with a degree from higher education, at 79%. Compare the 2016 Reddit survey, where only 42% said they had a college degree, and a 2018 survey of the US population, which indicated only 35% had a bachelor’s degree. The difference between college degree, bachelor’s degree, and “any degree from higher education” could be responsible for this, but I still think it’s notable.
The Reddit demographic survey didn’t have a question about religion, so I can’t look at the numbers. But 70% irreligious is surprising when compared to, for example, the mere 17% of the US population that doesn’t believe in any God. Of course, not everybody here is from the US, and I believe techy spaces are generally more irreligious, so that could influence things. Sweden is a more comparable country, with about half of Swedes self-reporting as non-religious in 2016. [Edit: Though, as people below have pointed out, there are differences between “irreligious”, “atheist”, and “doesn’t believe in any God” that have relevance here.]
I’ll definitely ask about operating systems if I do this again. While I agree with most of your post, I was actually surprised that there was such a high proportion of the forum who had children, compared to many other online spaces I’m in that are dominated by people under 25 or 30 and therefore have very few parents in them. To be honest, one of my main impressions of parenthood is that the time it takes to raise children and maintain a family cuts heavily into time that could be used to browse the Internet or participate in other non-child-raising hobbies, so most parents don’t have time for that stuff anymore. Their social circle shrinks to other parents, and between work and kids, they no longer have the energy or bandwidth to do other things like reading books, working on creative projects, or talking to people online. This is surely a biased opinion, but it’s based on my perceptions of my own parents and not this forum’s users.
For comparison, Facebook generally has a reputation among younger people as a site for old people; and 38% of Facebook users are 45+, drop to 35+ and it’s 57%.
That doesn’t really surprise me, since adventure games tend to be about solving (often fairly complex) puzzles, and this forum tends to focus a lot on developing them. We’re a niche within a niche within a niche.
The result that bothers me most is that there were no Black respondents.
I was about to say the same thing before scrolling down.
This section of this Wikipedia article illustrates a different way of looking at the topic, with a 2023 Wall Street Journal poll showing 29% of Americans as “not religious at all” and a further 23% as only “slightly religious.” The section also outlines some reasons why it’s difficult to get good, comprehensive information about religious belief through polling.
One big factor worth taking into account is how people choose to market themselves in a given context.
My anecdote on the subject...
I’m an active user of dating apps, where people can list a religion on their profiles.
In Massachusetts, where I lived until recently, I almost never saw anyone describe themselves as “Christian.” Instead there was a lot of “spiritual,” “agnostic,” and people just leaving the field blank.
In Indiana, where I now live, the vast majority of people I see describe themselves as “Christian.”
In my experience talking to people I met on these apps across both states, there is no discernible difference between what Mass’ “spiritual/agnostic”/unspecified people believe and what Indiana’s “Christian” people believe. The people I’ve talked to from both groups are generally folks who have some belief or hope in some kind of divine power, don’t take the Bible very seriously, pick and choose moral precepts and theological ideas to suit their fancy, and go to church only for funerals and weddings.
Obviously there’s a selection bias here, since I can only speak to those people I see in the first place (i.e. women approximately 30 years of age) and then get along with well enough to get into deepish conversations with.
I was thinking of works inspired by queerness, transness, etc.
Also the question “do you believe in God?” could also be answered by in the negative by people who aren’t atheists, although that’s probably even less than the number of atheists answering it.
Facebook completely slipped my mind, since I never use it. It’s odd to think that this place is technically more “boomer” than Facebook.
It’s true about adventure games, though I think there are significant IF cultures that aren’t focused on puzzles and don’t have much to do with them. The “personal” genre of IF, which is associated with Twine games, is an example.
I spend a fair amount of time in more diverse online communities, so the demographic results here caught me by surprise. Part of it, though not all of it, is that this community is small and there weren’t many respondents. Even the Pokemon battle sim website I spend a lot of time on has more hourly users. I wonder if there are good ways to draw in more people to the forum. Maybe if people linked to it more when posting on itch.io and other sites? Especially for a lot of the newer IFDB games that are hosted on itch.io, I feel like linking to a positive review on IFDB from Itch could get people interested.
On a related note: For a while, I’ve had the idea of looking at the games on IFDB that take place on Earth, and which country or global region they take place in, maybe even mapping out the results or tagging them as such on IFDB. I imagine that out of the top IFDB games that take place on Earth, most are set in North America, Europe, or perhaps Australia. I can’t think of any well-known IFDB game that takes place mostly in South America or Africa. One difficulty is that IFDB’s tagging system doesn’t automatically include tags like “New York City” inside “United States”, and doesn’t automatically include “United States” inside “North America” and so on, so I’d have to go through everything manually.
These are very good points, and thank you for the fascinating personal anecdote. I’m biased because a significant portion of my childhood friends, and therefore a significant portion of the people I spent time with growing up, were devout Christians and regular churchgoers who believed in Hell and didn’t swear. One of them stopped reading a webcomic I recommended because there was a lesbian couple in it. I wasn’t religious, but it influenced my view of the world and the proportion of devout Christians within it. The religious landscape of any country will look vastly different depending on where you are and what your social bubble is like.
I think the demographics of this forum don’t translate to the demographics of IF readers and writers as a whole, and in particular the demographics of this forum’s most active users aren’t the same as the demographics of the survey as a whole, which aren’t the same as the most celebrated IF authors, active or otherwise.
That said, I think the members of the “2010s queer Twine scene” as it was described at the time, such as Porpentine, have largely moved on from IF. Additionally, the Tumblr and itch.io IF communities are for the most part completely separate from this forum. Most of the games that do really well in IFComp or Spring Thing get little to no attention on Itch.io, and there are highly popular IF games from Tumblr or Itch that have received next to no attention here.
40% non-heterosexual and 11% trans (+9% trans-ish?) are both well above the population average, especially for what is apparently an older-skewed population.
That’s definitely true, but it ties in with the age results; when parents are 40+ (depending on how young they were when they became parents, obviously) they suddenly have a lot more free time than they have had for the past decade or two.
one must understand what “agnostic” means, and what “atheist” mean. and is my perception that US framing discends from the Deism of not few of the major founding fathers.
JAcrimonious’s report from Indiana is exactly the norm here in Italy, where RC church is basically the cultural substrate on which people build their moral precepts, and the churchgoing is basically limited to the major rites of passage (RC has also the baptism) and I disclose that I’m one of the two which ID as “Hebrew”, but in the Indianan/Italian sense.
This forum isn’t the place for discussing this, but I feel that the majority religion in the West (which for me encompass the entire sphere of the Abramitic religions, hence is from Anchorage to Vladivostok thru Jerusalem and Mecca) is shifting toward a form of Deism (“belief in some kind of Divine power” in JAcrimonious’s terms) and this IMO explain the western (in my sense above) mess since the start of the century, but is a huge OT, so I think suffice the core, the people is increasingly shifting their spiritual view into the personal/interior sphere, becoming a cultural part of oneself.
This particular result didn’t surprise me at all. There might have been one or two, of course, but it seemed highly likely the number would be close to zero. I’ve often felt that while there was occasionally some discussion about American racial or socio-economic minorities on this message board, there is little discussion by them.
That feels overly generalizing to me. People on the internet generally don’t make a habit of announcing their race or socioeconomic status every time they post, so it’s hard to know someone’s demographics when you’re talking to them online. Someone who is a minority may be additionally motivated to hide it, or at least to avoid announcing the fact loud and clear, for fear that they’ll come under the receiving end of previously hidden prejudice or be reduced online to the “token X person who represents all members of group X”.
As someone who is American but not white, I can assure you that there is in fact discussion by American racial minorities on this forum. But I will keep my exact demographics out of the discussion because I prefer to maintain my privacy.
That makes sense, thanks. I honestly hadn’t thought about it. I guess life as a parent looks very different once you get an “empty nest”, so to speak. Though there are some parents who will live with their children, or children who will live with their parents, depending on the country and the specific situation of the parents and children.
You did say “American racial or socio-economic minorities” in your original post, though, which is what I was responding to. There are members of such minority groups who answered the survey and are on the forums, and using a term that broad encompasses a wide range of people, more than just the demographics that weren’t in the survey results. But maybe we’re splitting hairs at this point.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. You’re right of course. There are certain groups that are massively overrepresented here, others woefully underrepresented and still others somewhere in between.
And yes, I can only guess at the demographic makeup of users, too. I still believe that my intuition that some groups are mostly (though not entirely) talked about rather than with is correct.