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TV's Missing Men Still Flocking To Games?
Thanks to Ad Age for its article discussing the young male demographic's move away from television and towards videogames. The article notes: "Some 32 million 18- to 34-year-old males constitute the mother lode for a vast array of marketers. That's about one-quarter of the total U.S. male population", and goes on to quote an advertising executive as suggesting: "Games have bigger viewership numbers than The Sopranos." Also of note is a referenced Codemasters survey, which "...found that 32% of gamers were over 30 and 47% were in their 20s. It was the latest data to confirm that video gaming, once almost exclusively associated with teenagers, has become a mainstream interest that is dramatically altering the pattern of media consumption by men."
journalists will understand "violent" video games a bit more. They are dealing with a mature demographic. Or, at least we know that companies trying to make a buck will continue to do so even with the protests.
The / in
It seems to me that the generation that is now in its 30s and late 20s is the generation that the phrase "video gaming, once almost exclusively associated with teenagers" used to describe. All that happened is that while the media wasn't paying any attention, the home console video game generation grew up. Or, at least, grew older. Does this really surprise anyone?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
hard-core players who prefer first-person-player games like Nintendo's "Final Fantasy" series which takes 100 hours to complete
Now, I can understand someone not understanding what a 'first-person' game is.
But thinking Nintendo makes Final Fantasy? That's either a testament to the strength of the Nintendo brand, the weakness of Square-Enix (in North America, anyways), the inability of the writer to look up a simple detail, or some combination of the three.
Nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of programmes that are on the telly during primetime then.
I've noticed a shift towards programming to attract female audiences over the past ~10 years. There always has been some, just as there is some directed programming for males. But the shift is not just in female oriented networks (Lifetime), but also in mainstream broadcast programming. Some of this gets extreme. - pardon the commercial reference.
Of course, if all the reporters of The New York Post suddenly find themselves playing CounterStrike during their working hours, well...no big loss ^_^.
"By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth." - George Carlin
One is to do with the tv schedule. The computer has changed the way I do my entertaining/time wasting. I want it when I want it. It is not really even a want. It is more like I see a program I might like to watch and then totally forget to turn the tv on in time. Of course it doesn't help that were once I had the tv on as background noise I now have to turn it off in disgust when their is some reality show before what I want to watch and even hearing it in the background irritates me. There is at the moment only 1 program that I watch and that is "have I got news for you" on the bbc. Nothing else. Not that I don't wanna watch but I simply forget.
I have been hearing since I was a little kid about on demand tv. First machines I seen used tapes to give you an idea how old it is. Yet it never happened. No demand the networks said. Nope people didn't demand it. I don't demand it. I simply don't watch your product anymore.
There is a group to whom I belong that tv just can't seem to reach anymore. I never liked programs like gameshows but when they where half-shows I could at least tolerate them. If in a group I would watch it with half an eye. Shows like Idols I can't stand. Wich means I have the tv off and won't watch the program I might be intrestted in afterwards since I am now doing something else.
So tv networks can do three things. Whine and die, aim at other groups, win us back. 1 is what they will do, 2 is what they should do, 3 is what they haven't got a chance in hell of doing.
Oh and cutting back on the number of ads wouldn't hurt either. Don't have 10x$1000 ads. Have 1x$100.000 ads. Same money less channel hopping.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Trailer Park Boys
Yeah, and all Adult male TV viewser are a bigger group than Metal Gear Solid players... they make grand statements, and it sounds like a revolutionary advertisers shift, but the Sopranos is ONE show, and all gamers are users of many different products.... let's see the adman who reads that statement and then buys an ad for Big Rigs 2, claiming to his boss they will get more viewers than the Sopranos!
"...found that 32% of gamers were over 30 and 47% were in their 20s. It was the latest data to confirm that video gaming, once almost exclusively associated with teenagers, has become a mainstream interest.."
It couldn't possibly be that the teenagers grew up since the last big survey and are now in their 20's and 30's?
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
"Games have bigger viewership numbers than The Sopranos."
Let me correct this statement: games have a larger number of players than "The Sopranos" has viewers.
In case you're an ad-man, or have an MBA, let me clearly state: gamers are not viewers.
Anyone remember the whole premise of cable-tv channels? That you'd pay for the channel upfront, and so avoid commercials?
Now this is only true for the so-called "premium" channels, so called because to view them you must pay an additional premium over and above what you pay for the basic cable service. Indeed it seems like most cable channels not only feature ads, but sell their entire late night time to infomercials. (Of course, I may be wrong; I only watch cable on vacation, because I won't buy lots of channels with lots of ads.)
So beware this discovery of games by Madison Avenue: prepare to find the games you've paid for to interrupt your play for commercials, or to sacrifice playability to product placements.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Adult Swim
^^^ That's where they(we) are!
Besides the Daily Show, what else is there besides Adult Swim?
Wake up and smell the Meatwad. (Do what now?)
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
With the release of Savage 2.0 yesterday, I plan on wasting all my "TV time" playing.
This one is almost as time consuming as previous addictions, and shares many of the same traits of both!
If you get slaughtered by a rabbit or a penguin, you've probably 'seen' me!
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Reality shows just don't cut it for a lot of men. I am sick of hearing about them, and I would rather see higher quality fiction on television. Instead, shows like Firefly, John Doe, Mr. Sterling, and The Lyon's Den get canned. All for 'lack of ratings'... sometimes a show takes awhile to get a following, but this short-sighted nature will kill a lot of good tv.
I have Tivo, so the time a show is on doesn't really matter much to me. I get to watch the shows I'm interested in, when I want to. Unfortunatly, television schedules still work on the prime-time model, and that needs to change. If there are three shows on at the same time that I want to watch, I'll usually only pick one. If they show one in another time slot, then I can get that one as well. Fortunatly this isn't much of a problem now, as the networks are hell-bent on cramming every form of reality show into as many spots as they can.
Until then, the computer is a better use of my time anyway. Maybe the execs will get it, maybe they won't.
"If you fight, fight without fear. If you love, love without reservation." -- J. Michael Straczynski, Babylon 5
Since TV is becoming more and more "Reality" oriented. I believe that video games are "Reality TV" at its best. Since just like TV it is a different reality than the "yours" with the added benifit of actively controling it. As opposed to the TV one where you're just a passive viewer.
I can't believe they haven't tried it yet.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
...that we can get rid of the worst anti-social devices by playing.
I welcome the death of TV and all those shitloads of crap, CRAP and !%&%$"&$ that comes with it.
Some of this gets extreme. - pardon the commercial reference.
Compare:
While you're at it, you might also throw in a healthy dose of Barbara Dafoe Whitehead & Laura Schlessinger.This past summer, I damn near got in a fist fight with one of these Stalinist university professors; we were at a dinner party, and I remarked that our society is becoming more tyrannical as it becomes more feminine, and then quickly corrected myself to say that, no, that's not entirely fair to women - it's becoming more tyrannical as it becomes more feminist. Apparently this offended his little lady friend so much that we almost came to blows over it. [As an aside, is there anything more oppressive than trying to coexist with people who spend their entire lives in a perpetual state of offendedness?]
There's some dude here at Slashdot who's sig is a Ennio Flaiano quote - "Fascists divide in two categories: the fascists and the anti-fascists." It's impossible to describe these people more accurately than that.
Freshman year I paid for cable. That was a mistake. I barely used any of it, my roomate used it all the time. I had to pay half. Oh well. I never paid for cable again. It's my 4th year of college now, and TV is dead to me. I only watch it in two ways. Way 1, when I go home for a break or something I'll watch some sports and some cartoons to kill the time. Way 2, download shows like family guy, or get DVDs of tv shows and watch them. Tivo isn't even worth it. Heck a home brewed linux tivo isn't worth it.
TV is dead to me. I get all my information from the internet and I get all my video entertainment from DVDs and the internet. It's not just video games. It's push vs. pull technology. I just wont use anything that is push anymore.
Fuck you TV networks you lose.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
In my mind there is an ever growing gap in TV. TV Shows like CSI, Without a trace, Law and Order, or all sorts of stuf fon the informational channels engages my brain. It's not so much mindless garbage, but usually has somehting to get my brain moving a tad.
Video games and general computer usage for geeks like us always moves our brains to action. programming, games, web design, or screaming and ranting on /. always is more entertaining than some stupid sitcom with the same plot we've seen a thousand times.
Pretty Pictures!
You too are a tomato
True story.
Are responsible. I like Survivor and the apprentice but the rest of the gooey gah girly crap should be flushed down the toilet where it came from. Average Joe, Joe millionaire, the bachlor/batchlorette etc are ALL garbage girl shows and I'd rather play video games than watch them. I get over 100 channels of digital cable and during primetime the selection is FOR CHIX ONLY. When tv becomes more gender neutral and less metrosexual/feminine then I might start watching again. kthxby
I realize nowadays that I watch only the follow...
1.) sports
2.) news
3.) discovery channel
I can't watch anything else because I don't have HBOs and skinemax. I can't watch any regular citcoms and shows cause they are all so lame. Not to mention all shows are off the air in 3 days anyways. You know there's a problem when reruns of "married with children" is funnier than 95% of the shows on TV.
The only reason I, as a gamer in his 20's, don't watch much TV these days is because the majority of the tv and especially its primetime (I assume that's the time tv execs want us watching the most) lineup are geared toward mindless comedy, trite drama, and the much over-played shock-value.
It seems to me that all of the tv that I find interesting has some aspect of it that hasn't been ran through the politically-correct/marketing machine. Things like reality tv are only intriguing (and sometimes funny) because they hint at showing everyday life, filled with obsceneties, moodiness, and everyone's unique perspective/opinions on life. Sitcoms and drama's just don't have that, even a fictional state. They try so desparately to keep their hands clean that its no wonder people tuned in everywhere when Southpark uttered "Shit" almost 200 times in 30 minutes.
Its not that people want filthy tv filled with sex, violence, and cursing... rather, perhaps they want something that doesn't make them feel like they're children and have to cover their eyes all of the time.
Besides the movie channels, I really only watch Cartoon Network (honestly, only Adult Swim/Toonami and a few others like Samurai Jack, occasionally Justice League, etc), Discovery/TLC, and SciFi. I'm sure I'm not alone, either. And if you think about the programming you watch on those channels, I would bet that they all just don't pay much attention to what the other channels are doing, and instead just focus on what they do best: anime, documentaries, and science fiction with lots of cheesy effects.
If you want me to watch your station, don't hold my hand like I'm a freakin' 2 year old. Just spit out the real truth behind what you're trying to tell (if there is some), and for God's sake quit trying to market to every demographic possible!
Oh, and it might help to come up with something original instead of just repackaging the leading channel's ideas. Just a hint.
Sorry for the rant.
A few months back my roommate bought a TiVo. Before that, I watched very little TV anymore. It was too hard to keep up with all the schedule changes, new shows, cancelling of old/new shows, etc. My primary interest was SPEED and FoodNetwork. Now, I get to watch more of the good stuff (Monster Garage or Stargate SG-1 or Alias or whatnot) without missing an episode here or there. TiVo has put me back in control. That is something the networks can't do.
A. On the cartoon network. (Or kids WB, etc.)
B. Short lived.
I get tired of watching science fiction series X to have it cancelled, just as I am getting into the characters. (Besides the fact that there is a lot of bad, dumb or both science fiction on TV.)
Video games, on the other hand help me to use up hours and hours of my life without boring me to tears. I can't say that about reality show Y or Friends.
If they want the people who play video games to watch TV they should pay attention to what kinds of video games sell.
Hey, it worked for Peter Jackson.
Oh, and another thing, what is with the ads? How much show versus AD content is there these days? It seems like the AD content is steadily increasing, to the point where all shows are will be like the occaisionally entertaining "60 second radio hour" that they play on community radio around here, except with lots of ads interrupting every ten seconds.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=93452&ci d=8021756
-insert a witty something-
One of the main reasons that young males move away from TV to videogames is...
1. They are tired of being assaulted by your mindnumbingly irritating advertising every five minutes.
2. Violent video games are a great release for the pent up frustration of having to watch commercials every five minutes.
My wife isn't as thrilled about it - she's an avid HGTV and TLC fan, mostly for the home improvement shows - but we just couldn't justify paying so much for channels we never actually watched. If we could get selected channels a la carte, we'd probably pay for them, but cable companies don't seem to be going down that route anytime soon.
Instead of TV, I'll just be content to play Morrowind GotY this month, which I picked recently for cheap. It's not for everybody, but lots of fun for me, and best of all - no frickin advertisements!
TV has become too racy for alot of folks, and not racy enough for the others. I made the the mistake of watching a prime time comedy with my children in the room, they learned all kinds of great words that I deem unacceptable. So the TV goes off.
About the only things that get watched are history, tlc and espn.
And about once a month Law & Order.
I think his mistake is he is thinking of narrative instead of visual.
In books, a 'first-person' narrative is inside the head of one of characters, seeing things as they see. This is what most writers (even article writers) know, and probably what he was thinking of. Most modern Final Fantasies have some kind of thoughts of the male hero displayed to the player. In that sense, he is correct.
However, many games with a narrative do this, putting the player in the role of the principle character. This is necessary to give the player the control over the character's actions they require. This is not entirely obvious to an 'outsider' who may be more used to traditional forms of narrative. A third-person narrative in a written story is much more common then it is in video games.
In gaming, 'first-person' usually refers to perspective, as in the screen shows what the character in the game would be seeing. This is compared to third-person perspectives, such as FF, where you can see the main character you are controlling. This jargon has no analogue in writing or acting and has different uses in film, so I can understand why a writer would use it in the narrative sense even though in gaming circles is typically refers to the perspective.
Some 32 million 18- to 34-year-old males constitute the mother lode for a vast array of marketers
wouldn't that be the *father* lode???
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
Because I'm tired of men being portrayed as idiots. I also can't stand "reality TV" shows, and since there appears to be hours of it on every single channel every night of the week, I'm not tuning in. Rather, I'm watching The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, Cartoon Network, Spike TV, and yes, a lot of ESPN and ESPN2. As this article indicates though, I also play the GameCube a lot during prime time. Oh, and I'm 33 with two kids, and I probably play the Cube almost as much as my 11 and 8 year olds do.
Aych tea tea pea colon slash slash slash dot dot org slash
in australia, if you dont pay for your tv, you have the choice of 5 free to air stations. out the main three commercial stations, about 90% of their programming is a mix of game shows, current affairs shows*, fucking awful reality tv, and endless shitty drama shows, with everything from cop drama to law drama to hospital drama. and then half a dozen rapmovies each week.
i watch maybe 2-3 hours of tv a week, mainly whatever sport is currently in season. if my tv is on, then 99% of the time its because im playing on a console. although, at the ripe old age of 26, youd think i would be over such childish pursuits by now.
im suprised that tv stations get any ratings at all. then i remember i live in australia. dont let anything youve heard fool you folks, australia is full of sheep-like morons that embrace censorship, and need to be told what to think because they cant do it for themselves. anyone who told you it is a smart or lucky country was having you on.
australia is probably different because we dont have a million channels, but surely another point to make is that computer/gaming nerds probably have a much different appetite when it comes to television shows, maybe taking a more sci-fi, documentary preference when it comes to watching stuff. the 90% fluff that gets put on tv, which is just stuff to mindlessly watch, not actually get involved in (except for talking about the latest fucking crap reality tv show the next day at work) isnt worth wasting time on.
* by which i mean 'see tonight how bob got ripped off by his car dealer OMG NO!, not world news or anything, just sensationalised local shit
Oh, and advertising companies, give up -- DVDs can make more than enough money to pay for themselves without needing ads, while ads will reduce demand. If I was an advertising comapny I'd specialise on releasing demos, previews, trailers, shareware, "lite" versions on P2P networks. Or possibly coupons -- "Ads" need to contain some sort of value to the person exposed to them or they will be considered to devalue whatever they're attached to.
In my mind there is an ever growing gap in TV. TV Shows like CSI, Without a trace, Law and Order, or all sorts of stuf fon the informational channels engages my brain. It's not so much mindless garbage, but usually has somehting to get my brain moving a tad.
I agree with you completely here. CSI is probably the only reason I still subscribe to cable (reception is crappy here... but I'll be moving soon anyway). The problem is, despite the popularity of these shows, they are damn expensive to make. CSI requires a significantly larger writing budget for fact-checkers and script consultants. Without a Trace, Law and Order, and Cold Case, a little less so, but to get a story that has enough basis behind it to really engage and hook viewers, you have to spend a little more.
Now imagine you're a TV exec. (I'm just Mr. Hypothetical of late, aren't I?) You have fifteen slots available to you for next season, and thirty shows that are in the running. Fifteen of them are really good but expensive, ten of them are sort-of OK with average costs, and the other five are total crap, but cheap. (This is unusually optimistic, of course, but it's for demonstrative purposes only. In a more cynical mood I'd probably reverse the numbers.) You could just put all fifteen of the good shows in the slots and be guaranteed total dominance of the airwaves, but it would be a tremendous up-front cost-- a cost that would have to be absorbed by advertisers; advertisers who are probably not going to have as much faith in these shows as you do. So, you cut it down to ten great shows and five so-so ones. You still have high costs, and advertisers are still leery, but you lose some of the ratings share. It works out OK, but there will still be some undeserving shows that get the axe next season due to artificially "poor ratings" (ie the advertisers didn't want to front the cash for season 2 because the great show they sponsored didn't pick up in popularity until January). So, to ensure that everybody's happy, you pick five great shows, five OK shows, and the five cheap garbage shows. This way you balance out the costs of the expensive shows with the throwaways, which probably won't last until November anyway. Advertising costs stay level, people buy ads, they get watched by the masses; everybody's happy. Well, except for the 15 people whose shows got canned before they were even aired.
It's not because the "public" still likes mass-produced junkvision. It's because crap TV is cheap to produce and the networks have to put SOMETHING new in those timeslots each fall. I'd love to see more CSI-like shows on TV, but until good writing becomes cheaper it's just not going to happen.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
So the number of people watching is more or less fixed (less, probably, since sporting events and stuff like that will have an impact), but in effect it's about who gets the biggest slice of the demographic. And as a TV exec, you'll run what you think is most effective... same effect, different reason.
Doesn't really detract from your argument, though
sig is my sith nature.
which has been rarely of late, since I don't have one at home, I start itching for the forward button.
:(
Zapping just doesn't cut it
sig is my sith nature.
They should show more violence like this video of our tax dollars at work.
www.iateyourcat.com/224Helicopter_Kills.mpeg
True, true. That didn't really occur to me.
Maybe if theyd stop giving ppl all those reality shows men would watch tv
It was the latest data to confirm that video gaming, once almost exclusively associated with teenagers, has become a mainstream interest that is dramatically altering the pattern of media consumption by men.
DUH! We grew up!
It was people of my generation that popularized the atari2600, NES, Sega Master System, Genesis, SNES and the rest. Did they think we'd stay the same age forever?
We aged into our 20s and 30s. That was going to happen. DUH!
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Bunch of people already saying the same thing, but I might as well raise the decibel level a notch.
I don't even watch TV shows I want to see anymore. I love Iron Chef, Adult Swim, a lot of what's on public television, and as much as I'd like to see them, I frankly can't be bothered with it. Too many ads. Even on PBS, the first and last 5 minutes of any particular show are merely thinly veiled advertising, it seems. Not to mention the month long pledge drives and TV auctions.
I used to be glued to the TV, and now it's a worthless adfest. I go over to friends' houses and they turn the TV off because the constant ad barrage puts me visibly in a bad mood. Nothing I asked them to do, they just do it themselves, most of them inveterate TV watchers. Every so often I'll have PBS on when I'm sick of whatever video game I'm playing, or can't think of a DVD I'd like to watch, but my network television watching is strictly limited to important sports events (Go Pats!) but even then, I mute the commercials, and sometimes miss large sections of the game because I didn't realize the TV was still on.
My father is paying for the cable TV subscription coming into my apartment against my fervent protestation that I'd never use it, and I haven't. The odd Iron Chef episode when I remember to turn it on. Adult Swim when I remember it exists, which isn't often. PBS, because in the Greater boston area, PBS just doesn't come in over rabbit ears unless it's the one from New Hampshire, but it can't be worth the approx $45/month my father is paying for it. However he stubbornly believes that he's doing me a favor. *shrugs* Whatever.
I got Halo and Final Fantasy XI a couple of weeks ago and have since stopped watching TV entirely.
I so agree with you!
:-)
As a kid, I was a TV addict. My parents were concerned that I'd waste my life being a couch potato. Now I'm 34, and recently talked with my wife about shutting off the cable TV, as we couldn't recall watching cable at all in about 2 months.
The last program I made a point of watching was the Battlestar Galactica miniseries on Sci-Fi. The last series I watched regularly was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which ended some time ago. There are a lot of programs which look like they'd be fun, but my life is too busy for a regular committment of time to something non-interactive.
We have an extensive DVD collection that we like to watch, and we go to the movies pretty regularly, but both of these are usually done with groups of friends as social events. If I'm alone I'll opt for a computer game over passive TV/DVD viewing every time.
TV just bugs me. Most programs are mindless and boring, the news infuriates me with how shallow the coverage of real news is (Michael Jackson coming home from the courthouse was carried live in its entirety, while the President's address on the future of NASA was reduced to a 10 second sound byte? C'mon, guys!), and even good programs are generally ruined by the oversaturation of advertising (ironic, since I majored in advertising).
The net is, across the board, superior. I can research topics to far greater depth than most TV programs would dream of (the odd TLC or Discovery program notwithstanding), news can be obtained from all sides, and having a chat client running in the background lets me interact with friends, family, etc at the same time.
Oh, and the pR0n on the net blows away anything you can get on pay channels!
-Cybrex
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!