Today TNS, a market research specialist, in conjunction with gamesindustry.com has released the findings of the 2009 National Gamer's Survey for the United Kingdom, which I personally didn't even know existed. 36,000 people took part the survey in six different European countries, the ey topics posed to include: general media consumption, reasons (not to) game, general interests, demographics, money spent, (digital) distribution of games, feature and genre preferences, and what drives their purchase decisions. The results of the survey are actually somewhat surprising.

On average, across all age groups, it is estimated that 73% of all citizens of the United Kingdom 'game' in some form or another, of those with access to the internet. Of people who do game, across all age groups, an average of 5.1 hours of each person's week is spent gaming. People say that women don't game, but the findings find little difference in gender, until it comes down to choice of gaming platform and time spent playing.

As well as gaming, other forms of media were investigated in this survey: it is estimated that gaming for men, at 5.1 hours a week, takes up more than double the time people spent reading newspapers and over four times more than is given to magazines. For men, the amount of time spent gaming per week is only 20 minutes less than listening to radio. With women, it's only 2.6 hours a week gaming, but still double magazines and newspapers. If we compare this to television and the internet, both estimated, for men, to take up 10.4 and 10.8 hours respectively. That means nationally, for people that do game, only twice as much of it is spent on the internet or watching television.

When it comes to platform comparison, of the people that play games a staggering 78% of men and 73% of women play on consoles. So that translates as over 30,000,000 of the UK's population being console gamers. 52% of male and 43% of women gamers play on the PC and 18% of men and the surprisingly high number 0f 9% of female gamers are MMO players.

I must say, these are definitely very interesting findings. It'd be even more interesting to compare them to those of the Americans, but it seems that gaming is much more of an accepted gaming medium than I'd thought, even if perhaps regarded as taboo.