| Smashing Stereotypes |
1 September 2003
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Plurality of Gamers are Girls
Proof positive that conventional wisdom is wrong came again this week thanks to a study of video gamers. It turns out that 26 percent of gamers are female and over the age of 18 while boys 6 to 17 years of age accounted for only 21 percent. Moreover, the average age of gamers is 29. One must reassess one's attitudes -- again.
In the days when zapping aliens in "Space Invaders" was all there was to video games (back when Mr. Carter was president, Mr. Callaghan prime minister, and when the Pope was an Italian), a pimply boy with a retainer was the gamer's image -- one that did not keep up with the times.
The games have changed. There is still plenty of blood to splatter, both alien and human alike, but with greater graphics and more computer processing power, games have evolved towards greater and greater role playing, which in the pre-PlayStation era meant Dungeons and Dragons, GURPs and Traveller. Now, all the cumbersome statistical tracking that kept these sorts of games out of the hands of many are done by machine and the roleplaying is the be-all and end-all.
Roleplaying is, or course, what actors do, and therefore, those who create the game have taken on the task of storyteller as surely as any writer of literature. There are a great many who will argue that the art forms are too far apart, but in the end, creating a reality of one's own and telling a story about it is what fiction means.
As the games have become more like literature, their appeal has broadened, hence the change in the mix of the sexes and the aging of the gamer population, and yet another preconceived notion succumbs to empirical analysis. Entertainment Software Association commissioned the study which was conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates.
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