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We Are All Gamers
One of the BBC's 'At-A-Glance' features talks about the realities of gaming in Britain, and it has some encouraging statistics for the industry's continued health. "The detailed project, called State of Play, profiled UK gamers and non-gamers from 6 to 65 and found that almost 60% played games. Of those, 48% are women and 100% of 6 to 10-year-olds play games ... The average age of the UK gamer is 28, perhaps much higher that one might expect. Unsurprisingly, those born in the 90s do not know life without games. Perhaps more unexpectedly, 51% of the 36 to 50s play games, and the figures are still rising. "
A conclusion that says 100% of anyone does anything (aside from eat, sleep, and taxes) seems pretty low-resolution, even if it's restricted to a single country... I suppose "play games" is a low hurdle to clear, "play games once every few months at my cousin's" probably qualifies. If that's true, it seems like a bad idea to market based on this data...
Sendou Wave Kick!!
Clearly, I need to move to the UK.
I was surprised to see that, of the 100% of 6-10 year olds, only 48% were female when normally slightly over 50% of children are female. Suspecting bad stats, I checked out the last census:
p ages/UK.asp
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/pyramids/
The figures are by no means unreasonable.
The page talking about "Heavy Use" is really a bit lame. Once a week, more than one device? That's quite subjective. I mean, if I took heroin once a week, you wouldn't exactly call me a "heavy drug user", would you?
The quiz/puzzle games coming top makes me a little suspicious. Maybe I'm too way hardcore or something, but these games never seem very popular. I once loitered in a games shop for about a year and they hardly sold. It seems unusual to me that this genre would crush the others.
It makes me think that, considering one of the game types is "PC/INTERNET", a lot of people have noted down great quizzes like "What harry potter pairing are you?" and "What did you do during the great livejournal outage of 2004?" and "Are you a tree?" and "Are you 53% gay?" as serious hardcore gaming.
I don't know why I wrote any of this.
Trust me, I'm a doctor.
For the purposes of the study, this merely means "have played a game in the last 6 months". So bear in mind that means everyone who has launched Solitaire since May, everyone who has loaded Snake on their phone to see what it was, and so on.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Much of what people consider to be 'games', are really Murder Simulators and Sex Simulators! How can training to become a sniper, one-man-army, pagan shaman, or dirty pervert be a meer game? These people should not be labled as gamers(one who games), but as psychopaths! And they should be treated as such!
Perhaps more unexpectedly, 51% of the 36 to 50s play games,
I'm in my early 40's and I've been gaming since I was twelve - that was when the first real electronic arcade games came out. I used to spend many an hour playing Space Invaders, Lunar Lander, etc etc and have know many people in my age group who did the same and have remained game players ever since.
Why would we stop doing what's fun just because of the calendar?
Personally I tend to think it's more of a bias in the age range of people doing games journalism that makes them find it surprising that we're gamers.