Are you the strong silent type that ganks?

What do you see when you look at demographic data that shows you are not who you think you are? Or do you always see a little bit of yourself in those personality tests? Come on, we've all read the "What makes you tick" articles in the checkout lines at the grocery store haven't we? At least I hope you have or I have just outed myself as an even bigger wingnut. Anyway, I always enjoy a good personality discussion when it comes to the composition of gamers and their online personas. By now, I think we've all read about and probably taken the Bartle Test. Essentially, it classifies gamers from a standpoint of being an achiever, killer, socializer or explorer. I typically score high as a socializer (duh?) and killer(eek!), which I believe makes me a sociopath, but I'm still looking for more back up or some medication. Why am I rambling on about all of this? GamerDNA has taken it upon themselves to divvy up a relatively small sample and look at various Bartle and gender categories in regards to World of Warcraft.

I love a good set of charts and graphs and the results are stunning in full color with pie charts, bar graphs and even some percentages. The class breakdown showed no surprises in that hunters rule the roost (16%) in overall numbers, and we lowly shaman bring up the rear (6%). That shouldn't surprise anyone, but which class do you think is predominately played by women? No, not backstabbing rogues like I assumed, it's priests. Maybe there is something to the "mommy wants to make you feel better" (unless of course they are all melting faces). The classes offered no real surprises and the races also played to the crowd in that the pretty races (human, night elf, and blood elf) are all top choices for women while orcs barely get a spot on the chart for female players.

If the gender discussion didn't really offer any surprises, the Bartle categories didn't either. Rogues are high in the Killer category, and priests are low. Hunters tend to be explorers while shaman and mages are almost even across the board. Check out the rest of the results at GamerDNA and then report back in our forum what you find.

I predominately play a shaman and my second main (I can't call a character decked in purples an alt, it hurts too much) is a priest. Both of those have socializer as high on their Bartle scale, and the higher killer score on my shaman plays the "yang" to my priests' explorer "yin." The funny part is that I see my friends in the graph and the Bartle categories really fit with their personalities and playstyle. Who would have thought there is some truth to those psychographs?