A report by Reviews.org on the popularity of various game titles state by state showed two clear front-runners for most popular game in America: League of Legends, and World of Warcraft. But the particular distribution of which state prefers which game is where things get interesting: states that voted Democratic in the 2016 election mostly lean towards League of Legends, while states which voted Republican prefer World of Warcraft.
Data in the report was collected from five years of Google search trends. That doesn’t track how many people actually play the game, of course, but it’s a good indicator of what people have on their minds; in states that lean to the left, apparently, internet users are hungry for the latest League of Legends builds, while in traditionally red states, it’s World of Warcraft tips that tend to enthrall.
While Reviews.org was careful to warn people that correlation does not necessarily imply causation, it does make you wonder why the map turned out so clearly delineated. There are exceptions, of course; Wisconsin, Iowa, Georgia, Texas, Utah, Arizona and Pennsylvania all went Republican in 2016, while they prefer League of Legends, according to the report. Colorado, Vermont, New Hampshire and New Mexico, on the other hand, voted Democrat but World of Warcraft was their game of choice.
Other titles were also represented in the report; Dota 2 was most popular in California, while Overwatch was biggest in Alaska for some reason. Perhaps predictably, there was another game whose search terms utterly eclipsed both World of Warcraft and League of Legends; Reviews.org actually had to exclude Minecraft altogether to get results that were diverse across states.