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40% of Adults Play Games
Gamasutra reports on an AP Poll stating that some 40% of American adults play games. From the article: "The poll also yielded plenty of other results worth ruminating on - 45 percent of gamers play over the Internet, and those who do are notably more 'hardcore' than those who do not. Forty-two percent of online gamers spent four hours or more per week playing games, but only 26% of offline gamers did similarly. The AP/AOL survey also revealed that, of those who play online games, almost one in five said they had formed real-life friendships or relationships with those they play with online, showing the use of gaming as a social activity, even when playing remotely against others."
Does it really matter the percentage of people that play games? I believe many of us do it as a way to have fun and pass time. Is it really such a surprise that people play games? I'm really getting tired of all these studies.
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This doesn't surprise me in the least. Gaming is mainstream, though some people don't realize that. That's why Halo 2's opening day of sales was better than any opening day of sales for any movie in history.
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How many of these games are Solitaire and Minesweeper, or on Flash portals like PopCap? These are very clearly games, but to what extent can they be compared to what the average Slashdot user thinks of as games (Halo, Metroid, Final Fantasy, GTA, &c.)?
...but is it art?
... or are other people bothered by the assumption that when somebody says "games" they mean "computer games"?
What percentage of gamers are adults? I think that would be much more interesting than the other way.
"These are very clearly games, but to what extent can they be compared to what the average Slashdot user thinks of as games (Halo, Metroid, Final Fantasy, GTA, &c.)?"
As you've said, they're very clearly games anyway, so why is such a distinction important? Yes, we can jolly well go into "only those playing my favourite genres are _really_ gamers, and those playing that other crap aren't really". (After all, all the "yeah, but those writing the same project without EJBs aren't _really_ programmers" or "yeah, but their data centre runs on Windows, so they aren't _really_ admins" holy wars in the other sections are sooo productive. Let's do the same here.)
E.g., let's exclude FPS and RTS for a start, because _I_ don't like those. And, hey, to what extent can you compare a simplistic FPS (it's barely more than a graphics engine, sometimes with some network code) to a complex game like Oblivion? Or how's an online one, _maybe_ supporting 16 players on a small map, even remotely comparable to a complex game like World Of Warcraft?
See how silly can it get? How about we settle for "if you play games, you're a gamer" instead?
The _only_ point I can see in your distinction is if you're trying to determine how much money is in that market. Then it makes sense to elliminate the free ones. But I don't see the article aiming for any kind of dollars per year estimate.
And even then it gets funnier than that. E.g., Anarchy Online is a full-fledged MMO, but you can play it for free, as long as it's without the expansion packs. (Mind you, dunno if they fixed it lately, but based on my experience at launch... well, let's just say: playing it for free, you get exactly your money's worth.)
Then there are games that were bundled with other stuff, e.g., with graphics cards, magazines or in some "Top Games #15" pack. E.g., I have a copy of a Tomb Raider game that came with a graphics card, and a copy of HL2 that came with all ATI cards at that time. I haven't played either and wasn't planning to buy either. Heck, I still have a second version of Daikatana which came with some 15 game pack, and I certainly didn't buy that pack for it. Yet somewhere they're counted in some "number of copies sold" and some marketroids are patting themselves on the back for having such a great selling game.
A funny case of it is Sony's Station Access subscription. If you play more than one of their games, or want some of the extras even for one game, you can get a Station Access subscription. In the process you basically get any other online game of theirs for free. So you could be interested just in, say, Planetside and EQ2, or just want the EQ2 extras, and get SWG and Matrix Online and a few others for free.
I know I have such a subscription and can't even unsubscribe SWG from it, once it's been activated once under that plan, even if I wanted to. So much as I consider it a steaming pile of feces and mostly a textbook example of how _not_ to design a game (and believe me, both are actually understatements: the game is even worse), I'm counted too in some "look how many hundreds of thousands of subscribers we have" statistics.
So basically it can get very hairy once you try to separate free games from commercial ones, because a lot of the commercial copies "sold" were actually in one of the above categories.
So again, let's just leave it as "If you play a game, you're a gamer." Avoids a lot of such complications.
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