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PC The #1 Choice For Kids Gaming
An NPD study entitled 'Kids and Gaming' has revealed that for the latest generation of gamers, games on the PC is their first taste of the hobby. Interestingly, kids seem to go through a sort of 'gaming life cycle', starting with kid-oriented systems (Leapster), with PC games picking up around six and console gaming beginning around ten. The study also confirmed something you probably already knew: more kids are gaming than ever before. "The study, which surveyed kids aged two to 17, said that more than one-third of children in the US are spending more time playing games than a year ago. Half of these kid gamers are 'light' users at five hours a week or less and the other half are 'medium, heavy or super users' who game six to 16 hours-plus per week. With the kids surveyed who play games online, an average of 39 percent of their time is spent playing games online versus offline. The majority of the kids (91 percent) play free online games."
I think there are two factors at play here. The first, and most obvious, is that edutainment games are overwhelmingly based on the PS (although the PSP and DS both have a growing library). Most parents like to feel that their children are at least getting some educational value out of the games they play and edutainment games are often how they decide to introduce their children to the world of IT.
The other, more complicated argument, probably revolves around pester-power. Almost all middle-class house-holds in the US/UK today contain a PC. These are generally low-end machines bought off-the-peg from a high-street store for a mix of home-office use and recreational web-browsing/e-mail. Consoles, despite having firmly entered the mainstream, remain less common, mainly because they are single-purpose machines and not everybody likes games.
When children are still in the single-digit age-range, they're generally more likely to be satisfied with the fairly basic games you can play on a low-end PC. However, as they age, they and their peers become increasingly aware of what else is available in gaming terms and more aware of what they don't have. At this point, they also get better at pestering their parents and more likely to be able to make the case for big-ticket items such as games consoles finding their way onto Christmas lists and the like.
Mind you, when I was 10-12ish, I was playing Gunship 2000, Eye of the Beholder, Microsoft Flight Simulator and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe on the PC. Frankly, I'm not sure I'd have the time or patience for the learning curve that games such as this involved today. Maybe some kids just develop... ah... sophisticated tastes early.
This story is not surprising for those of us still "growing up" (I'm a recent college grad) I started out with console gaming (NES) and moved to PC for some time while waiting to get enough money to buy the next console. And with parents buying things like LeapFrog, the next gen is starting even younger. I can't imagine how to get much more gaming time in than I already do (~4 hrs a night after work and countless on weekends)
Idea for follow up story: "5yr old develops youngest case of carpal tunnel...."
For ages 5 to 7, the PC is the only place you're going to get games. At that age, you're primarily looking for educational slower-paced games. While most games of that type on the PC are insufferably lame, that category of game is basically non-existent on consoles. Add to that the fact that parents of kids that age tend to have less money than they do when the kids are older (since people tend to both make more and get better at managing money as they age), and the fact that most people already own a computer even before they have kids, and it's easy to see why kids would be gaming on the family PC prior to any console.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
It does annoy me greatly when these two are written interchangeably. My daughter is in the 2-6 age group and has a Leapster that is gathering dust. She plays plenty of games but not video games. She loves soccer, Candy Land, and Sorry. All kids play games of some sort. The kids in the survey are playing video games more. I'd be interested to see what they stopped doing to spend more time on the PC playing video games. I'd wager it most of them gave up time from some sort of non-video game.