What About the Grey Gamers?

Chris Morris at CNN's Game Over column wonders out loud about the legions of older gamers, and their snubbing by most of the gaming industry. From the article: "The Entertainment Software Association reports that 19 percent of the people playing video games are 50 or older. That's a huge jump from 1999, when players of that age group made up just 9 percent of the gaming world. Game publishers, though, seemingly couldn't care less - mainly leaving senior gamers to Web-based games, such as PopCap Games' 'Bookworm'. And while it certainly makes loads of sense for publishers to focus primarily on the core market, especially in transitional times like they're experiencing now, that focus is at risk of becoming myopic."

Comments

It's inevitable

[deadhammer]

Eventually the game industry is going to have to figure out how to market to the older demographic. The majority of gamers currently are 25 and over. If we're talking about an industry that's planning on sticking around for the next few decades, it's going to come up eventually.

Naturally, of course, there's still plenty of clout among the "video games are just for kids" crowd to delay this eventuality.

Not all "gamers" play FPS games...

[FlyByPC]

I'm not yet "old and grey," but I've never liked FPS games. DOOM was unique when it came out, but if you've seen one, you've seen them all. (Yes, I've tried more modern versions; the graphics are much more realistic, but there's still really no plot.)

Why aren't there more games like Syberia, Myst, The 7th Guest? Even Zork, with *no* graphics, was more interesting than the shoot-anything-that-moves games that the industry seems to concentrate on these days.

Why not, for example, a space exploration game -- concentrating on the science, economics, and logistics involved, instead of the usual shoot-the-evil-green-aliens theme?

Re:Not all "gamers" play FPS games...

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Yeah, I remember Wolf 3D -- and the original Wolfenstein, too. Hell, I remember buying the Atari and getting bored of Combat the first weekend. Dad, can we go get another one? Hey, here's "Adventure", that looks good!

An hour later, leave the yellow castle, go down the big corridor to the right, down into the room below, a dragon came at me, hair stood on end! Holy crap! Never looked back. Yeah, maybe we should've gotten an Oddysee II, or even the Intellivision (they did have an actual Dungeons and Dragons game, OMG!) but damn was that expensive! Yeah, we didn't have any damned thumb-sticks, multiple buttons. We had an 8-way with simple direction switches, no rheostats, and one, count 'em, one fire button, and we liked it!

We didn't need no steenkeeng CD player -- we didn't even know what one was. A laser was that damned Shiva thing in the Guiness Book of World Records. You bought a fat disk to put in the middle of your 45 and put it on your eight million dollar record player with tinny speakers left over from Grandma's house when she moved to Florida, and you liked it! And that was assuming you didn't get a spanking for touching it in the first place. Because spankings was what real people did to train kids right, none of this touchey-feely stuff where the kids who came in last place at the Express-Your-Emotions-Taco-Bell T-ball tournament are praised as highly as those who busted ass and came in first, and get a trophy only one or two nanometers smaller with blue ribbons and holygrams on it. Nooo, if we lost, we didn't need people teasing us making a finger and a thumb in the shape of an L at us, no, we knew we were losers and we liked it! The coach would spank us and we'd go home crying from the T-ball and we'd get a another spanking for losing and we liked it!

No, and then there was the day we found gramma's old portable cassette tape player with its one tinny speaker and it had a cartridge you could put into the cassette spot that made it play AM radio. Holy god, that must have cost almost as much as the six million dollar man. That thing played electronic transcriptions, or "tape recordings", even though it couldn't record. That was the ten million dollar version and it weighted seven hundred pounds.

That thing was unbelievable. You can hear the music on the AM radio. The VCR and the DVD, there wasn't none of that crap back in 1970. We didn't know about a World Wide Web -- it was a whole different game being played back when I was a kid. Wanna get down in a cool way? Picture yourself on a beautiful day. Big bell bottoms and groovy long hair, just walkin' in style with a portable cd player? No, you would listen to the music on the AM radio. Yeah, you could hear the music on an AM radio.

Flashback, '72, another summer in the neighborhood, hangin' out with nothing to do. Sometmes we'd go drivin' around in my sister's Pinto, cruisin' with the windows rolled down. We'd listen to the radio station. We were too damn poor to buy the eight track tapes. There wasn't any good time to wanna be inside, my mama wanna watch that TV all Goddamn night.

I'd be in bed with the radio on -- I would listen to it all night long just to hear my favorite song. You'd have to wait but you could hear it on the AM radio. Yeah, you could hear the music on a AM radio -- I can still hear mama say, "Boy, turn that radio down!" "Aw, Mom. not that show again! I don't wanna watch that show! Can't we watch Six Million Dollar Man or Space 1999, something cool? Turn it off!

Things changed back in '75. We were all growing up on the in and the outside, if ya know what I mean, and there wasn't no pr0n to download either, no, you found an old playboy out behind the factories, or, Heaven forbid, an 8mm film reel some kid couldn't hide in his home and you looked at the frames through the light. Damn, it looks like that woman has a forearm coming out of her mouth.

We got in trouble with the police man. We got busted gettin' high in the back o

Difficulty Settings

[Detritus]

I'd like to see more games with a wider range of difficulty settings. I get frustrated with games that expect everyone to have lightning-fast reflexes and excellent hand-eye coordination. There's a reason I became a computer programmer and not a baseball player.