When we asked readers about their interest level in the adventure genre in October, 89% rated it a 4 or 5 (where 5 is the highest possible). This is one of the facts we learned from the visitor survey, which received a total of 604 full responses.

While the survey is inherently biased (since this site naturally attracts adventure game enthusiasts) and while I am not exactly a statistician, the survey does give some rough insights into the opinions and demographic makeup of Adventure Gamers readers.

Particularly telling are your answers to the question, "Are you more or are you less interested in adventure games than you were five years ago?". This question was only given to those who had indicated more than five years of experience with adventure games. 48% said "about the same", while 37% said they were more excited about the genre than they were five years ago.

Although we don't have a previous survey to compare against, it does seem that adventure gamers are particularly upbeat about the genre. Such excitement makes sense. I remember five years ago the Adventure Gamers staff was struggling just to find enough good games to feature in the Hype-O-Meter, which is our regular top 10 ranking of games that people are excited about. The "death"of adventure games was one of the most-discussed topics at the time. But the quantity and quality of adventure game releases has clearly gone up dramatically in the past several years. Now the staff struggles just to narrow the list of Hype-O-Meter candidates down to 10.

The survey also asked about some basic demographics. Adventure games are known to be popular amongst women and it's not surprising to see that reflected in the survey: 27% of the respondents were female. For reference, only 3% of GameSpot visitors is female, and 5% at 1UP.com (this is according to their corporate pages).

The average age of Adventure Gamers visitors also skews higher than usual. 7% of the respondents is below 20. The ages 20 to 34 together account for 68% of the Adventure Gamers audience. Check out the graph for more details:



We're honored to have received five survey responses from gamers over the age of 70. Computer games haven't exactly been around for very long, and I envy anyone who at an old age can enjoy a still relatively new form of entertainment. (I hope when I'm over 70 I'll be able to figure out whatever we'll use to play games then... some kind of full-body digitization retinal projection thingamagig? I have no idea what I just wrote.)

More results from the survey will be included in another blog post. For now, I'm curious how interested you are in the genre compared to years past, but more importantly why. Which specific games most affect how you feel about adventure games right now? As per usual, sound off in the comment section!