Pete_LeGrant May 3, 2009 PWNage 139 views Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

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In a thorough scientific study which we started approximately 27 minutes ago, we displayed news headlines about video games to 4,238 adult gamers. Various prominent sources were used, including n4g.com, kotaku.com, pwnordie.com and majornelson.com.

We broke down the headlines into 10 major groupings. Adult gamers were asked to click on only one headline–the one that they found most interesting. However, 8 of these groups were irrelevant as gamers showed absolutely no propensity to deviate from 2 of the groups: “porn” and hot cosplayer.

An interesting phenomenon occurred in our study. Consider these sentences:

• The mailman has 3 letters.
• “The mailman” has 10 letters.

The first uses the phrase and the second mentions the phrase–it is talking about the phrase itself.

Our study is, in the end, inconclusive. Consider:

98% of 97% of the gamers still clicked on this headline. To be charitable to our subjects, they must not have been confusing the use/mention distinction in this case. (One explanation is that they thought the headline was false and that the story might have actually contained pornography.) Another explanation is that these gamers have been so conditioned to the letters in the word “porn” they will click on any link containing it.

Our sample size is, admittedly, too small to warrant any conclusions about gamers in general. A further study is planned.

We conclude that gaming sites seeking to boost their readership might look into using or mentioning the the word “porn” in their headlines, even when they conduct fake scientific experiments to cook up blog posts.