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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark CMG" data-source="post: 5720117" data-attributes="member: 10479">To the contrary, I both understand and disagree.  My point being that, collectively, the confluence and compilation of our knowledge from the "personal tables" as well as of our extended-circle knowledge and knowledge gained from gaming and observing games at larger gaming events is quite representative of the whole, online experience included.  So, too, drawing from both our own personal knowledge and that knowledge others provide which seems counter to our own, we can get a fairly good idea of the whole.  I, for one, am not bashing anecdotes but rather arguing against being dismissive of them and holding to the belief that they are more informative than you (and some others) credit them. To whit -I've always felt that old saw was inaccurate, in that (particularly to the extreme) once you collect the objective information gleaned from all possible anecdotes, you do indeed have very accurate data compiled.  Truth of the matter is that "data" in an of itself is no more reliable than anecdotes and anecdotes are merely data points with some individual analysis attached.The defining characteristics I see put forth in this thread as those exclusively exhbited by either online gamers or their offline counterparts are not ones I find to be truly exclusive to either group.  The only one that seems to be the sticking point is that some claim they know gamers who do not go online (or do not do so in a gaming context).  However, to hold that online gamers are not representative of gamers as a whole simply because some gamers do not go online for gaming purposes seems to be an irrelevant distinction.  Just because some of the tens of thousands of gamers who frequent these boards (if Morrus's "data" regarding traffic is anything by which to judge) are more vocal (or vocal in differing ways) than one's personal experience with gamers offline, is no reason to suppose that online gamers are not representative of gamers as a whole.  To refer back to the OP -My own experience online and off is that there will always be a vocal minority in both fields but that taken as a whole, the online gamer community, indeed even EN World's community, is quite representative of the gaming community as a whole.  I think some folks simply allow their own personal experience offline, contrasted by their experience with the vocal minority online, to overly influence their opinon of the differences rather than the show the commonalities.  And don't get me wrong.  I'm fine with someone saying their personal experience offline is different than their experience online but to then extrapolate that the online community is not representative of gamers as a whole?  Well, that might be a place where you could more aptly apply the old saw in disputation (if I might wax Gygaxian for a moment <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ).</blockquote>

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