I'm A Gamer?
I was in a discussion with my daughter's sixth-grade teacher a couple of weeks ago. It was parent-teacher conference, but we were shooting the breeze a little bit before getting down to details, which we are fortunately pretty familiar with. My wife is a former elementary school teacher herself, and tries her best to keep informed about how our kids are doing.

For some reason we got to talking about my job - making videogames, and the teacher made a few comments about not understanding these kids and their games.

I told her that actually, the fastest growing segment of the market was casual games, which tend to be geared more for adults.

She was astonished. "Really? I just don't see that," she said.

I nodded. "Yep. The growing market right now are women 40 and over." She looked at me in complete disbelief. I kept going. "They aren't playing bloody shooters for hours on end, though. They are playing little games like Solitaire or Minesweeper or gem-matching games for fifteen minutes at a shot - just to take a break and get some relaxation in between things they have to do."

I saw the light of realization appear in her eyes, but she quickly bowed her haid and shielded her eyes with her hands. "Oh, that's ME!" she admitted. "And thank you SO much for announcing my age to everyone!"

I considered mentioning that SHE was the one who fessed up to belonging to that demographic, but held my peace as we all chuckled before moving on to the business at hand.

Apparently, we've got a ways to go to fix the stereotypes of videogames and "gamers." I think we've got a lot of gamers out there who don't know that they are gamers.

Labels: casual games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:56 AM (Permalink)