Game of Gamer Perceptions
The stereotype of the teen boy in their parents’ basement as the prototypical gamer is not what it used to be.
Amanda Vanhiel is one of the thousands of gamers checking out the latest and greatest in video games at the E3 expo in Los Angeles.
“It was a dream of mine when I was like 12,” Vanhiel said. “I remember telling my mom there’s this place called E3 and I really want to go there!”
And more women are making that happen. According to the Entertainment Software Association, the face of gaming is changing.“Today 46% of gamers are women,” said Stanley Pierre-Louis, with the ESA. “In fact more women play than teenage boys.”
As players become more diverse, so do the games’ creators… and the characters featured in them
“That will keep encouraging women to pick up controllers going on their PCs and exploring all the games,” said online video game personality Emily Rose Jacobson.
The average gamer in the US now is 33-years-old. For the first time this year, more millennials have a subscription video game service than pay for traditional TV.
I am of the age where I started gaming with black-and-white computers and Atari 2600s (also black and white but that was my frugal father resisting color TV) to modern-day. Besides the technological innovations, by far the biggest change to gaming from then till now is the social aspect. If you wanted to have a social experience playing Mario Brothers 3, your friends had to physically congregate. Online gaming coupled with social media has exploded not just the popularity of gaming, but the community of gamers. Add in the hardcore gamers who broadcast their play on Twitch, rising popularity of E-Sports, and the fact anybody with a YouTube channel can monetize their gaming, and you have a revolution on your hands.
More social means wider demographics, and the diversity that is showing in the numbers will only continue to evolve since gaming is now, quite literally, available to anyone with the technology to access it. And you don’t even have to blow into the cartridge to get it to work right. What an amazing modern age we live in.
I’ve noticed this too. I don’t play a LOT of video games, but the ones I do play tend to have communities of just … people. All ages, mostly adults, many with families and jobs. Mobile gaming especially is that way because you can slip it into little five minute breaks. I haven’t done a binge-gaming session since I was in grad school.Report
I do a ton of binge gaming. Single, no kids, live in the suburbs. So you know what else am I gonna do.
Honestly I’m a totally stereotypical nerdass NEET except for the part where I live alone and am gainfully employed.Report
That 46% statistic seems to have its origin in a study done by NewZoo. But they also find that women are much more casual gamers than men. Among hardcore gamers, the ones most likely to spend big money on games and gaming hardware, men outnumber women 65% to 35%. The largest category of female gamers is what they call “time fillers”, who play on their phones.Report
Remember when Farmville was a thing?
We might easily dismiss Farmville as being a “time filler” game. “Casual”.
I also heard rumors of people who set their alarms for the middle of the night so they could get up, tend their crops, and go back to bed.
If that’s not “hardcore”, I don’t know what is.
(That said, I do think that there is a difference between the people who play Candy Crush on their phone while waiting in line at the bank and the people we probably refer to when we say “gamers”.)Report
I don’t have the specifics on how the study constructed the categories, but it seems like time playing and money spent are part of the formula.Report
Dude, I have caught my wife Crushing Candy at 2am on a Saturday night and she is so competitive on Words With Friends that family members have stopped playing with her. I tell her she is a gamer all the time. As far as I am concerned she fits the definition.Report
There are the people who buy one game a year.
There are the people who buy multiple games a year, but they’re the blockbusters. The Grand Theft Autos, the Maddens, the Spider-men.
There are the people who buy a game because they’re at Wal-Mart anyway and the box art is interesting.
Then there are the *CRAZY* people. The equivalent of the football fans who know the resume of the Defensive Coordinator of the opposition team. “Kowalski better not try the run against this team”, he says to no one in the room. “Just because the run worked last week means nothing this week. He was playing against Brennan who got burned badly by passing in the playoffs last year so he puts just a little too much pass coverage out there. Spencer knows better!”
“Did you say something, honey?”
“No, I was just watching my game!”
These are the guys who know the names of the developers, the names of the publishers, and know the names of the genres, the sub-genres, and the sub-sub-genres.
You know the guy who can tell you the difference between acid hip-hop and funk electronica? And then tell you “here, listen to this”?
That’s what this group of gamers is like.
And this last group is the one that does the gatekeeping. “You’re not a *REAL* gamer if you can’t tell me what FFIII for the SNES was called in Japan!”, that sort of thing. They don’t all agree with each other on everything… there are the turn-based ones and the real time ones. The PVP ones and the PVE ones.
But they see themselves as the real ones. They’re the ones who are *INVESTED*. Consumption as Identity.
And, of course, the business model of gaming has to now navigate between the New Batch of New Fans and the old grizzled crazy people who gatekeep.
There’s a lot of money to be made, after all. If you’re a publisher, what’s the best way to make it?Report
Dunno, what are you publishing?Report
Not I.
But, like, EA or Nintendo or Capcom is.Report
Hmmm. I think the answer involves a lot of crunch time and loot boxes.Report
Crunch time, yes. Loot boxes seem to have inspired a backlash, though… (and I think that companies now know that they’re risking being legislated similarly to slot machines which would be *BAD* for them).Report