Slashdot Mirror
Among Gamers, Adult Women Vastly Outnumber Teenage Boys
MojoKid writes: The Entertainment Software Association has just released its 2014 report on the state of the video game industry (PDF), and as the title of this post suggests, there have been some significant shifts since the last report. Let's tackle the most interesting one first: Females have become the dominant gamer, claiming 52% of the pie. That's impressive, but perhaps more so is the fact that women over the age of 18 represent 36% of the game-playing population, whereas boys aged 18 and under claim a mere 17%. Statistics like these challenge the definition of "gamer." Some might say that it's a stretch to call someone who only plays mobile games a "gamer" (Candy Crush anyone?). Mental hurdle aside, the reality is that anyone who plays games, regardless of the platform, is a gamer.
There are, of course, roughly ten times as many women over 18 as there are males in the range15-18.
For me, "gamer" has always carried the same connotation that "film buff" does: just as I wouldn't consider somebody who occasionally goes to the movies a "film buff", I wouldn't necessarily consider a person who occasionally plays games on their phone to be a "gamer".
At the end of the day, though, my litmus comes down to whether the person considers video games to be an important part of their life and their identity. For me, video games were my entire childhood, and are my primary hobby today. And even though my girlfriend never played the hardcore CRPG's and FPS's of my youth, playing Sonic, Kirby, and Nintendo GameCube with her little sister is an incredibly important part of her childhood and remains important to her in adulthood.
To me, that makes her a "gamer", regardless of whether she's played Baldur's Gate, Half-Life, and Ocarina of Time, or not.
This suggests that we have passed a point where gaming has become dominantly a women's hobby.
I disagree. As usual, they miss the measurement of "quality" and instead dumb it down to "quantity". Playing Candy Crush 5 minutes a day is not the same as playing the Xbox until 4am.