I have to confess that after years of working professionally with elves and the people who love them, I have a serious thing for zombies, lasers, and rocket ships. Sometimes your mind just needs a palate cleanser, you know? And furthermore, every time I see a multiplayer title with a sci-fi or post-apocalyptic setting, I shake my metaphorical pom poms for it. See, the massively multiplayer industry won’t stop making WoW clones until something besides fantasy hits a home run. Could be Star Wars, could be Starcraft, could be one of the billion things in development, but until it happens, I will turn an encouraging word to any multiplayer title with either robots or the undead.

In the past, that has meant I’ve been cheering for things that did not deserve my love. It’s like high school all over again. But the latest zombie title is getting lots of love, and critical accolades to boot. And even though it is technically a shooter, it’s taking advantage of gameplay elements familiar to any fan of MMOs (new content releases, dynamic enemy spawn, cooperative gameplay with healing).

Left 4 Dead, aside from the egregious title spelling, has made a lot of good choices, and players are responding. http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/56173 Here at GamerDNA, we strive to tell you a little more besides “omg, lots of people bought it.” We also strive to introduce new features that will tell you more about the games you love, the games you might love, and the people who are similar to you.

So, today’s column seeks to kill two birds with one stone – we’re going to take a closer look at the kind of player who picked up L4D, and get more of you to use the trait system.

See, the trait system is relatively new to GamerDNA, and not all of you have tried it yet. (This is your chance! Log in. Click your name, and choose “My Home” from the drop down menu. Choose the third tab, “Games.” Add games if you need to do so. If you select “liked it” when you add a title, it’ll appear in a chart on that page, with an option to add traits. Click on “add traits.” The system will offer you the most popular options, but if they don’t work for you, click the plus sign and add your own – it could be that what you’re about to add only needed your vote to become one of the most popular options!) The trait system is going to provide some awesome columns in the future, but only if you make it happen.

Onwards! Let’s take a look at what OTHER games our L4D contingent is enjoying – if they are Xbox players:

We looked at the top twenty games enjoyed by the GamerDNA members who grabbed Left 4 Dead on the Xbox. The early adopters of the zombie game are pretty dedicated Xbox players across the board. Compare those same games with the general population:

As you can see, the early adopter guys are more likely than the average player to have picked up… oh, everything. The only title that I would have expected that is not on the list is Fallout 3 – a bizarre omission given the setting and the graphic nature of the title. It’s even stranger given the presence of Oblivion and Fable on the list. But this is a list of the top games played by all Left 4 Dead players, and somehow there just wasn’t enough crossover to crack the top twenty. (It was close, at 53%, but you know what they say, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.)

Let’s see how PC players of Left 4 Dead compare to Xbox users, in terms of the other titles that they’ve played. This chart is looking at Left 4 Dead users, and the top PC games they’ve played throughout their tracked history.

Obviously, Halo 3 players don’t have a PC option, and PC players have more options in terms of massively multiplayer games. And Fallout 3 does appear in this top twenty… along with Minesweeper. Oh, you crazy grid game, how we all secretly adore you, calling you for 3 AM booty calls but never, ever putting you into our DNA. But I digress. I think it’s interesting that Fallout 3 makes the PC list for the L4D players but not the Xbox list, and BioShock makes the Xbox list but not the PC list. I would have expected all three titles to be on both lists, myself.

Just for the sake of balance, here’s the chart to see how those PC games compare to the regular Xfire population:

Now we get to the GamerDNA goodness – the traits. This sample pool is a bit small, but has over a thousand different system entries to draw from. It could be interesting to see if this data changes after this article runs, just to see if you column readers changed the shape of the results.

About 45% of the traits were assigned by PC players, and 55% came from people who played the game on the Xbox. In each of the following charts, the percentages reflect the percent of their own pool. Or, put another way, 19% of PC players say that the game is a cooperative multiplayer game, and 14% of Xbox players say the same thing.
 

You can see that everyone can agree that it’s a cooperative multiplayer game. Interestingly, so far only PC players described the game as fast paced.

PC players, huddling in their dens, describe the game as intense more than twice as often as their couch dwelling brethren do. But Xbox players are twice as likely to use the genre as synonymous with tone than PC players. And they’re the only ones to use the word aggressive to describe the feeling they get when they play.

From this one, I conclude that Xbox players are slightly more likely to take the option to play as a zombie than the PC players are. We can double check with the next trait:

Yep. More than twice as likely, as a matter of fact. By the way, with MMOs, players tend to put in their specific class/race for the Playing As trait. Shooters, not so much. But with this hybrid style of game, we had a decent number put in which of the different characters they chose – just not often enough to show on the chart, the way the female and the one zombie did. Taken collectively, though, it was a decent number.

And here we see that PC users are quick to describe the type of urban environment, whereas the console players (who seem to me to ALWAYS play in some kind of nasty decayed environment) were more likely to simply describe it as urban. But, lest we make too many assumptions, Xbox players were more likely to describe the setting in a creative way, whereas the PC players said “post ap” and called it a day.

In other words, it’s safe to say that your medium will dictate to a large degree your emotional response to the product – even if the product is exactly the same.

Now that’s an interesting thing. So, what other titles do you think benefit (or suffer) from that phenomenon?