Nearly everyone who plays video games has had to fight off the perception that gamers are just loser loners who set up in their parents' basements.
But while armchair debaters have long pointed out that just isn't the case - citing the rise of social gaming, mobile gaming, the fact that Americans spent US$13.5 billion on gaming last year - there has not been a lot of hard data on hand.
Until now.
The results of a new study commissioned by the video-game-streaming network Twitch and conducted by noted social researcher Neil Howe (the man credited with coining the term "millennial") offer an entirely new picture of the gaming community. The study suggests that gamers actually tend to be more social, more successful and more educated than the non-gaming population.
They're a particularly valuable group of people but ... difficult to reach
The study, released by Howe's LifeCourse Associates consulting firm, surveyed more than 1,000 people via the internet about their gaming habits and then pulled some basic demographic information.