By Joel Smart (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: April 4, 2012
The age of the average gamer has been getting older and older for the last couple decades. Though the ‘80s saw gaming directed towards primarily children, the average gamer these days is in their late 30s. For older gamers, it seems positive – more games aimed at them. But it has serious implications for the gaming industry as a whole that the younger generation seems less interested in gaming.
There is nothing to say that the current gaming generation—mostly born in the ‘80s—will ever stop playing games. But, the crowd will only thin out as time goes on. For an industry to be sustainable, it needs to convince subsequent generations to join in. That, it seems, may not be as likely as initially suspected.
Even though children are consuming more media than ever before, they’re playing games less. A 2010 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation that has tracked children’s media use for a decade found that 8–18 year olds spend far more time watching TV, listening to music, and using a computer than they do playing video games. The study found that children use media over 53 hours in an average week – that’s seven hours and 38 minutes a day! That is over an hour more than kids consumed five years before. Though 2012 figures are not available, it’s likely that the situation is either the same, or worse. Despite these high numbers—which reach double-digits when multitasking is considered—the average child spends just about an hour a day gaming. Perhaps those numbers still seem high, but compared to the older generation, it’s small stuff.
The gaming industry, it seems, grew up with its initial generation of gamers. That means fewer games, especially high-quality titles, are designed for children. Considering the pull other media forms direct at kids, perhaps it isn’t too surprising.
Kotaku editor-in-chief, and former MTV gaming correspondent, Stephen Totilo recently spoke with Montreal-native Jade Raymond, managing director of Ubisoft Toronto, about the situation.
“What if the next generation of our culture thinks games are so out of touch that they dismiss them as the wasteful rich pastimes of a more self-indugent generation?” Totilo asked of both Raymond and his readership.
Raymond explained that money seems to be the core of the problem. There is little room for error, with the amount of money on the line – so rather than experiment, the big companies tend to create the same thing over and over again.
“All the stuff that happened with the Arab Spring, internet freedom and just generally what’s going on with people’s privacy and all of those kinds of things as tech moves along,” she told Totilo. “That’s the kind of thing that’s been brewing for a while. These are really big stories. They are being dealt with in other media. You can see films that are already out addressing these things. Books. Documentaries. But for some reason games don’t touch those things.”
In short, younger gamers are looking for meaning, not a mindless escape. For that to happen, game makers will have to take risks.
It may be that the time for video games is reaching a critical moment. A moment where a generation will either leave them behind, or perhaps out of the mindlessness a new, deeper, more meaningful industry will arise; an industry that represents a plurality of voices. It is a promising suggestion – and one that the indie gaming community may just have the answer for.
