Top Games by Player Gender per IFDB

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Some more interesting statistics from IFDB: How the list of top games varies by player gender.

This data should be taken with as big a grain a salt as you feel is appropriate. Some relevant facts:

  • Gender data is voluntarily self-reported.
  • Only about 21% of user accounts specify gender.
  • The number of people specifying ‘M’ is about 2.5x that of those specifying ‘F’.

Rankings are by adjusted rating as determined using the Top 100 algorithm, i.e. actual rating data is padded with fourteen all-average rating values. Unlike the Top 100 list, no minimum number of ratings has been imposed here. The games with the smallest number of actual ratings have 8 ratings for the men’s list and 6 ratings for the women’s list.

Titles marked with an asterisk are exclusive to that list, i.e. do not appear on the list for the other gender. There is slightly more disagreement than agreeement between the lists, with 25 titles overlapping out of 54.

#	 MEN (N=2901)												 WOMEN (N=1238)
--	 ---------------------------------------------------------	 --------------------------------------
1	 Counterfeit Monkey                                       	 Anchorhead                             
2	 Anchorhead                                               	 Counterfeit Monkey                     
3	 Lost Pig                                                 	 Lost Pig                               
4	 Spider and Web                                           	 Bronze                                 
5	 The Wizard Sniffer*                                       	 Violet                                 
6	 Violet                                                   	 Blue Lacuna                            
7	 Photopia                                                 	 Savoir-Faire                           
8	 Savoir-Faire                                             	 Suveh Nux                              
9	 Superluminal Vagrant Twin                                	 Worlds Apart                           
10	 The Impossible Bottle*                                    	 Superluminal Vagrant Twin              
11	 Blue Lacuna                                              	 Birdland*                               
12	 Toby's Nose                                              	 Eat Me                                 
13	 Alias 'The Magpie'*                                       	 Toby's Nose                            
14	 City of Secrets                                          	 Spider and Web                         
15	 Coloratura                                               	 Photopia                               
16	 Worlds Apart                                             	 Known Unknowns*                         
17	 Eat Me                                                   	 Horse Master*                           
18	 Junior Arithmancer*                                       	 Midnight. Swordfight.                  
19	 Cragne Manor*                                             	 Bee*                                    
20	 Slouching Towards Bedlam                                 	 Type Help                              
21	 Bronze                                                   	 City of Secrets                        
22	 The King of Shreds and Patches*                           	 Bogeyman*                               
23	 According to Cain*                                        	 Vespers*                                
24	 Suveh Nux                                                	 Alabaster*                              
25	 The Bat*                                                  	 Slouching Towards Bedlam               
26	 Metamorphoses                                            	 Will Not Let Me Go*                     
27	 The Mulldoon Legacy                                      	 Chlorophyll*                            
28	 And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One* 	 Stay?*                                  
29	 Harmonia                                                 	 Make It Good                           
30	 Babel                                                    	 SPY INTRIGUE*                           
31	 Repeat the Ending*                                        	 Gun Mute*                               
32	 Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom*                          	 To Hell in a Hamper*                    
33	 Foo Foo*                                                  	 Dual Transform*                         
34	 A Beauty Cold and Austere*                                	 ♥Magical Makeover♥*                     
35	 Never Gives Up Her Dead*                                  	 Coloratura                             
36	 Type Help                                                	 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds 
37	 The Den*                                                  	 With Those We Love Alive*               
38	 The Gostak*                                               	 The Master of the Land*                 
39	 Social Democracy: An Alternate History*                   	 Coming Out Simulator 2014*              
40	 Make It Good                                             	 Our Life: Beginnings & Always*          
41	 All Things Devours*                                       	 Tavern Crawler*                         
42	 So Far*                                                   	 Superstition S1*                        
43	 Sub Rosa*                                                 	 Ataraxia*                               
44	 Midnight. Swordfight.                                    	 Metamorphoses                          
45	 Brain Guzzlers from Beyond!*                              	 Cactus Blue Motel*                      
46	 How Prince Quisborne the Feckless Shook His Title*        	 All Roads*                              
47	 Endless, Nameless*                                        	 Galatea*                                
48	 Inside the Facility*                                      	 the uncle who works for nintendo*       
49	 Turandot*                                                 	 Shade*                                  
50	 The Wand*                                                 	 You Will Select a Decision*             
51	 Creatures Such As We*                                     	 De Baron*                               
52	 Varicella*                                                	 Babel                                  
53	 Christminster*                                            	 Harmonia                               
54	 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds                   	 The Mulldoon Legacy
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I’m focusing on the Victor Gijsber piece of this, because “Turandot is for boys, De Baron is for girls” is blowing my mind lol.

(I’m assuming this is mostly just that self-reported gender on IFDB is a crapshoot, but still, interesting data to look at!)

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Well, of course Turandot appeals mostly to men. Do you find that Puccini’s characterization of either Turandot or Liu rings true at all?

There are a lot of things on both list that I’m surprised got an asterisk at all, never mind which side they show up on.

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This thread reminds me that this has been an open issue on the IFDB Github since 2021: Pronouns field on profile · Issue #718 · iftechfoundation/ifdb · GitHub

Currently, IFDB profiles have a “gender” profile, offering “male,” “female,” and “decline to state.”

As well (instead?) it should offer a “pronouns” field: “he/him,” “she/her,” “they/them,” and fill-in-the-blank.

It would be nice to see IFDB get rid of the binary gender classification.

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@DeusIrae, @sue: I found many aspects of these charts to be surprising!

Some of the differences in ranking are quite large. For example:

  • The Wizard Sniffer is #5 for ‘M’ but would not appear until #105 (tied at that place with 3 other titles) for ‘F’.
  • Birdland is #11 for ‘F’ but would not appear until #102 for ‘M’.

It’s also interesting to note the titles that appear at approximately the same ranking (i.e. a difference of one place or less) on both lists: Counterfeit Monkey, Anchorhead, Lost Pig, Violet, Savoir-Faire, Superluminal Vagrant Twin, and Toby’s Nose.

On the topic of ties, I’ll note that for the ‘M’ list The Wand and Turandot are tied in their adjusted rating scores, so really both should be #49.

Likewise, looking over the data behind the ‘F’ list more closely shows that there are several ties:

  • Superluminal Vagrant Twin and Worlds Apart are tied at #9.
  • Bogeyman and City of Secrets are tied at #21.
  • Magical Makeover and Dual Transform are tied at #33.
  • 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds and Coloratura are tied at #35.
  • Coming Out Simulator 2014, Our Life: Beginning & Always, Superstition S1 and Tavern Crawler are all tied for #39.
  • The Mulldoon Legacy is tied at #54 with The Gostak, so arguably the latter should not be marked with an asterisk on the ‘M’ list.
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If the manosphere had any intellectual capital, this could be their new chant :wink:

-Wade

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Just to keep things in perspective, this is a chart of the self-assigned gender data as broken out by year of account registration:

ifdb-registrations-data
ifdb-registrations-data939×532 19.9 KB

Note that I’m pretty sure that this reflects current assignment, i.e. the most recent user preference setting, so if someone who registered in 2010 were to have changed to ‘decline to state’ in 2012, then they would count under ‘X’ in year 2010 on this chart, regardless of prior setting. Also note that 2026 data reflects only registrations through May 31st and is not projected for the rest of the year.

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The three genders: male, female, and privacy.

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Agreed!

Some more data that’s relevant to the thread, if we assume that there’s a decent overlap (or similarity) between IFDB users and Intfiction.org users: in the demographic survey of this forum from last December, 15% of respondents described their gender as neither male nor female (selecting either “nonbinary” or “other”). That number was not far behind respondents who selected female (18%).

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