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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.
What is said at the end of the summary,
is obviously not true.
"Gamer" is associated with people who spend most of their time playing games inside their mancave.
People who play a bit of casual gaming on the go from time to time are not gamers.
The article summary is incoherent and wrong. The article clearly states that Male games make up 52% of the pie, not Females. Secondly, the given the total population of women over the age of 18 is vastly greater than the population of boys aged 18 and under, I have no idea what the point of comparing those two particular statistics is.
This summary is THE example of starting from a conclusion. It is clear that the submitter cares more about the narrative of "female gamers are dominating" then the actual facts of the situation.
Mental hurdle aside, the reality is that anyone who plays games, regardless of the platform, is a gamer.
Or, people who play video games are called "video game players", and the subgroup of people who make it a huge part of their lives are "gamers". Or some other definition. I don't know, I don't really care. If you want to generate page hits by making boys feel uncomfortable by playing mind games with a definition of an adjective they use to describe themselves, whatever. If "gamer" is going to be hijacked to mean something else now, then the community will use a different word.
TFA has some interesting stats, but not much narrative to go with them. I would say that there are two big over-arching themes that are driving changes behind "who plays games".
1) The first generation to grow up playing games is now moving into its 30s and even early 40s. Moreover, while this reflects my personal prejudices only (hey, at least I'm upfront about it), I suspect that with many of the first generation of gamers being academic and nerdy types, they are disproportionately well-paid now compared to their wider generation. So the people who grew up with games in the 1980s and early 1990s now have a lot of spending power. For some years now, the 30-40 year old age group has been the most lucrative in gaming.
This is partly why Japan's importance as a market for (as opposed to a producer of) games has plummeted. Aside from "quick blast on the train" mobile games, gaming in Japan is in a very unhealthy state. Domestic production in Japan, when it targets domestic audiences, increasingly plays for children (eg. Nintendo), teenagers (Capcom) or the unemployed/under-employed "otaku" demographic living off its parents' income (Gust, Nippon Ichi, Cave etc).
This is largely because Japan doesn't have the market of relatively well-paid adult gamers that the West has. Some of that is down to social stigma (games being a "kids' thing"), but much more of it is down to working cultures. Maintaining a middle-class lifestyle in Japan requires the kind of office-hours that would make even a Western games-development house in crunch-time blush.
So yeah... in the Western gaming market, oldies increasingly hold the purse-strings, while Japan is increasingly falling out of the mainstream.
2) There is no longer one single "games industry" any more. If... indeed... there ever was. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the games industry split neatly into two halves marked "console" and "computer", with very little cross-over. These days, that distinction has almost vanished (most console games bar first-party exclusives come to PC, Valve increasingly act as the platform-curator for the PC). But at the same time, there is a growing divide between "core" and "casual" gaming, with the latter not looking much like traditional gaming at all.
Facebook games and mobile titles like Candy Crush Saga draw nothing but contempt from "core" gamers (including many of those affluent 30-40 year-olds mentioned above). But they have drawn in a vast market which would never touch a "core" game - and that market is heavily female. So the demographic of the gaming population in general is skewing to reflect that.
There's also what almost constitutes a third tier somewhere in the middle - the "dudebro" gamer (which is overwhelmingly, though not entirely, male). These are the guys who spend a lot of time gaming, but almost all of it goes into Madden/FIFA (delete as appropriate depending on whether in the US or not) and Call of Duty/Battlefield (delete as appropriate depending on favoured brand of spunkgargleweewee). This is a big demographic, but as MS learned when it pitched the Xbox One at them heavily, it isn't a big-spending demographic or one that's particularly sensitive to technological advances.
Just clarify your fucking terms.
A "gamer" is someone who plays games.
However, if you are only referring to "serious" gamers who invest hours of training to play a particular game, then specify that. Of course, most of the Candy Crush generation aren't doing that (they have a life for a start).
If you want gamer to distinguish between those who buy hardware for their PC to game properly, even that definition won't help you - I've had two people ask me about desktop PC's capable of playing The Sims 3 for their teenage daughters, and you need a decent graphics card for that.
What you want is to use "gamer" as some undefined term that meets your particular clique of game geek. It doesn't. It never has. To me a gamer is someone who was around in the 80's and will happily fight through 10-minute loading screens, unsuitable hardware, pump money into an arcade machine, for proper 8-bit graphics (not the fake-8-bit-retro OpenGL shite you get now) on a game that's almost, if not actually, fucking impossible to complete.
Sorry, guys, but most of you just aren't "gamers". I enjoy a TF2 jaunt as much as any of the other 800 games on my Steam account, that I've had before some of the gamer kids around now were even born. I've run CS servers from 1.6 to the current day. But I still sit and play Altitude like a demon.
Gamer is not a definition beyond "one who games". If you mean FPS player, say it If you mean professional-level twitch shooter, say it. If you mean someone who plays new titles on new hardware, say it. If you mean someone who plays lots of games, or for a long time, or spends lots of money, say it. If you mean someone the industry can sell games to, say it.
But "gamer" means nothing. My mother has completed every Mario game in existence (up to and including Wii U), used to play Horace Goes Skiing back in the 80's, broke four Palm Pilots playing Bookworm Deluxe so much, played Gin Rummy on our first DOS machine, and has caused more money to be spent on the gaming industry than the rest of her family combined. So the industry will target her. And get money from her. And she will buy stuff. To "ignore" her because she's not the stereotypical gamer playing whatever game is considered "real" at that moment would be insanity for the industry.
Maybe she won't join you in a 32-player CS:GO competitive tournament (though she did used to win at Turok quite a lot). But you can't say she's not a gamer any more than anyone else.
Do you really want to call anyone who plays Candy Crush on their smartphone a "gamer"?
I mean, if so, then OK. But then you're going to have to find another name for those of us who do speed-runs through Metal Gear Solid whilst blasting death metal and swigging energy drinks.
I mean, besides, "unemployable jackoffs".
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
And as far as advertisers are concerned the candy crush, farmville, and word with friends group is more valuable as they are exposed to alot more ads than the person playing mario on an xbox.
Especially because people who mod their Xbox consoles to run Nintendo emulators are the same kind of people who run ad blockers.