Almost Half of All Americans Over 50 Play Video Games

The NPD Group recently conducted a survey on the behalf of the ESA, which is the industry trade group that represents the game publishers and is responsible for the organization of E3 every year. Their study looked to see what percentage of people over the age of 50 played games and how often they played those games. The NPD Group conducted the survey among 1,800 participants age 50 and older and counted games played on smartphones, video game consoles, portable game consoles, computers or any other game systems.

Out of those respondents, 48% of those adults over 50 reported that they play games. In addition to that, 80% of these gamers reported that they played on a weekly basis and about 45% of the gamers reported that they played daily. In addition to these statistics, the NPD Group study found that they prefer games that mimic traditional forms of game play. The most popular games were card or tile games, puzzle or logic games. The least popular were trivia, word and board games, however first person shooters, real time simulators or role playing games were not taken into account.

The majority of the gamers played at home and most gamed play was done during the later hours of the day. Also, among those that have children in the household, they stated that 63% said that their children influence which games they buy and 62% said their children help them learn about the latest games and game technology.

The NPD Group conducted the survey for ESA among a U.S. representative sample of approximately 1,800 gamers age 50 and older. Survey respondents said they play video games on at least one system or device, such as a smartphone, video game console, portable game console, computer, or other game system.

These findings merely confirm that gaming is not just for kids or young adults, but rather all ages and the games that people prefer will change with time. We can most likely expect that the 50 yearolds in 10 or 20 years will be playing a lot more RTS, FPS and MMORPGs than their parents did at that age.

 

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Call of Duty franchise is “review-proof”

Low critic scores won’t harm sales, but Titanfall and Destiny may pose threat.

Media reviews of the Call of Duty franchise have no impact on sales of the games, as critics become bored of analysing the latest in Activision’s yearly first-person shooter release.

That’s according to Doug Creutz of Cowen & Company, who notes that while Metacritic scores for Call of Duty: Ghosts are hovering around the 74 per cent mark they come too late to influence pre-orders and pre-sales figures.

“We think CoD has become such an embedded franchise that it is somewhat review-proof,” he said. “We think of CoD as being like EA’s Madden NFL, which continues to sell similar unit numbers year in and year out, regardless of reviews; Madden’s Metacritic has ranged as low as 78 in recent years.

“Given that CoD changes only incrementally from year to year, we think reviewers have become increasingly less likely to give very high review scores due to a certain degree of ennui with the franchise.”

He also suggested that Call of Duty’s main competitor – EA’s Battlefield 4 – “didn’t exactly cover itself in glory” with an average Metacritic score of 80 per cent on Xbox 360, but again, reviews are unlikely to impact sales.

The biggest threat to Call of Duty and Battlefield’s dominance is likely to come from new IP next year, with Titanfall and Destiny pretenders to the throne.

“Our concern lies more with next year, when Call of Duty will face competition from several new next-gen shooters, including EA’s Titanfall and Activision’s own Destiny,” said the analyst.

“To the degree that Call of Duty may become a bit of a ‘been there done that’ experience for gamers, we think it is vulnerable to losing share as new product enters the market; even if a lot of that share goes to Destiny, as a third party title it will carry a lower margin for ATVI, and we think bullish 2014 EPS estimates assume Destiny will be more incremental than cannibalistic.”

 

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Killzone: Mercenary…Digital or Physical?

Depending on your memory card size, you may want to seriously consider how you are going to buy Killzone: Mercenary for your Vita next week. 

According to the Sixth Axis, the size of the upcoming Vita title is roughly under 5 GB (which includes a mandatory patch of 1.2GB).

Should be pretty stable now.

This is a pretty big size…lucky for those of you with a larger memory card, but if you only have a 4 GB card it is time to upgrade if you’re picking this one up digitally. Is this why the Vita Mercenary Bundle in Europe has an 8 GB card with the package? And what about DLC? If KZ Mercs is as successful as people think it will be, do you think there will be an additional map pack to download someday?

 

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Titanfall, Battlefront replacing Medal of Honor in EA shooter cycle

Publisher planning to rely on Respawn and Star Wars efforts to help out between Battlefield releases

Earlier this year, Electronic Arts confirmed it was putting Medal of Honor on the shelf, leaving a question as to how it would capitalize on demand for shooters in years when it didn’t have a Battlefield release. Speaking with CVG at Gamescom, EA Labels head Frank Gibeau said the company is now working on a new rotation of shooter franchises.

“The shooter rotation we think about now is Battlefield, Titanfall and Battlefront, and so we like those three brands going forward,” Gibeau said. “We’re working out how we’re going to line that up because that’s what you’ll see from us.”

Battlefield 4 is set for release this October, with Titanfall to follow in the spring of 2014. Star Wars: Battlefront is tentatively set for a 2015 summer launch alongside the next Star Wars movie. As for Medal of Honor, Gibeau gave no reason to hope for a quick return to the series, saying, “you try things in entertainment and if they don’t work you try something else.”

 

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When Gaming Is Good for You

Hours of Intense Play Change the Adult Brain; Better Multitasking, Decision-Making and Even Creativity.

Videogames can change a person’s brain and, as researchers are finding, often that change is for the better.

Love them or hate them, online videogames are a treasure trove for researchers who are studying how all those keyboard taps, mouse clicks and joystick moves may affect behavior, perception and even cognitive skills. WSJ’s Robert Lee Hotz reports.

A growing body of university research suggests that gaming improves creativity, decision-making and perception. The specific benefits are wide ranging, from improved hand-eye coordination in surgeons to vision changes that boost night driving ability.

People who played action-based video and computer games made decisions 25% faster than others without sacrificing accuracy, according to a study. Indeed, the most adept gamers can make choices and act on them up to six times a second—four times faster than most people, other researchers found. Moreover, practiced game players can pay attention to more than six things at once without getting confused, compared with the four that someone can normally keep in mind, said University of Rochester researchers. The studies were conducted independently of the companies that sell video and computer games.

(clockwise from top left) Rockstar Games; Take -Two; Blizzard Entertainment; Activision; Electronic Arts; Blizzard Entertainment; Eli Meir Kaplan for the Wall Street Journal (cyclist)

Scientists also found that women—who make up about 42% of computer and videogame players—were better able to mentally manipulate 3D objects, a skill at which men are generally more adept. Most studies looked at adults rather than children.

Electronic gameplay has its downside. Brain scans show that violent videogames can alter brain function in healthy young men after just a week of play, depressing activity among regions associated with emotional control, researchers at Indiana University recently reported. Other studies have found an association between compulsive gaming and being overweight, introverted and prone to depression. The studies didn’t compare the benefits of gaming with such downsides.

The violent action games that often worry parents most had the strongest beneficial effect on the brain. “These are not the games you would think are mind-enhancing,” said cognitive neuroscientist Daphne Bavelier, who studies the effect of action games at Switzerland’s University of Geneva and the University of Rochester in New York.

Different Games’ Effects on Your Brain

Blizzard Entertainment

Learn how different games do different things to your brain

Computer gaming has become a $25 billion-a year entertainment business behemoth since the first coin-operated commercial videogames hit the market 41 years ago. In 2010, gaming companies sold 257 million video and computer games, according to figures compiled by the industry’s trade group, the Entertainment Software Association.

For scientists, the industry unintentionally launched a mass experiment in the neurobiology of learning. Millions of people have immersed themselves in the interactive reward conditioning of electronic game play, from Tetris, Angry Birds, and Farmville, to shooter games and multiplayer, role-playing fantasies such as League of Legend, which has been played 1 billion times or so in the two years since it was introduced.

“Videogames change your brain,” said University of Wisconsin psychologist C. Shawn Green, who studies how electronic games affect abilities. So does learning to read, playing the piano, or navigating the streets of London, which have all been shown to change the brain’s physical structure. The powerful combination of concentration and rewarding surges of neurotransmitters like dopamine strengthen neural circuits in much the same the way that exercise builds muscles. But “games definitely hit the reward system in a way that not all activities do,” he said.

Cognitive scientist Mark Blair and Robert Lee Hotz answer readers’ questions

“There has been a lot of attention wasted in figuring out whether these things turn us into killing machines,” said computational analyst Joshua Lewis at the University of California in San Diego, who studied 2,000 computer game players. “Not enough attention has been paid to the unique and interesting features that videogames have outside of the violence.”

Broadly speaking, today’s average gamer is 34 years old and has been playing electronic games for 12 years, often up to 18 hours a week. By one analyst’s calculation, the 11 million or so registered users of the online role-playing fantasy World of Warcraft collectively have spent as much time playing the game since its introduction in 2004 as humanity spent evolving as a species—about 50 billion hours of game time, which adds up to about 5.9 million years.

Games People Play

Top five video games in 2010 (by units sold)

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops

2. Madden NFL 11

3. Halo: Reach

4. New Super Mario Bros.

5. Red Dead Redemption

Top five computer games in 2010 (by units sold)

1. Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty

2. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Expansion Pack

3. The Sims 3

4. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Expansion Pack

5. Civilization V

Source: Entertainment Software Association, NPD Group

With people playing so many hundreds, if not thousands, of different games, though, university researchers have been hard-pressed to pinpoint the lasting effects on cognition and behavior.

Blizzard Entertainment Inc. in Irvine, Calif., which sells World of Warcraft, StarCraft II and other popular games, did not respond to queries about whether the company supports gaming research or conducts its own studies. Neither did RiotGames Inc. in Santa Monica, which markets League of Legends.

The vast majority of the research did not directly compare gaming with hours of other intense, mental activities such as solving math equations. Almost any computer game appears to boost a child’s creativity, researchers at Michigan State University’s Children and Technology Project reported in November.

A three-year study of 491 middle school students found that the more children played computer games the higher their scores on a standardized test of creativity—regardless of race, gender, or the kind of game played. The researchers ranked students on a widely used measure called the Torrance Test of Creativity, which involves such tasks as drawing an “interesting and exciting” picture from a curved shape on a sheet of paper, giving the picture a title, and then writing a story about it. The results were ranked by seven researchers for originality, length, and complexity on a standardized three-point scale for each factor, along with detailed questionnaires.

In contrast, using cellphones, the Internet, or computers for other purposes had no effect on creativity, they said.

Several new studies shed new light on how videogames affect the brain and behavior — and it’s not necessarily for the worse. A new study suggests videogames boost creativity in children and offer other neural benefits. Lee Hotz has details on Lunch Break.

“Much to my surprise, it didn’t matter whether you were playing aggressive games or sport games, not a bit,” said psychologist Linda Jackson, who led the federally funded study of 491 boys and girls at 20 Michigan schools.

Even so, researchers have yet to create educational software as engaging as most action games. Without such intense involvement, neural circuits won’t change, they believe. “It happens that all the games that have the good learning effect happen to be violent. We don’t know whether the violence is important or not,” said Dr. Bavelier. “We hope not.”

Until recently, most researchers studied the effects of gaming on small groups of volunteers, who learned to play under laboratory conditions. Some scientists now are turning the commercial games themselves into laboratories of learning.

In the largest public study of electronic gaming so far, Mark Blair at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, is analyzing the behavior of 150,000 people who play the popular online game called StarCraft II, pulling together more than 1.5 billion data points of perception, attention, movement and second-by-second decision-making.

By analyzing so much game play, he hopes to learn how people become experts in an online world. That may shed light on how new knowledge and experience can become second nature, integrated into the way we react to the world around us.

 

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