Steven Johnson
At some point — probably in the late '70s — the average rock-and-roll listener hit the thirty-year-old threshold as well. Do we think that was the result of some kind of tipping point or some influential thirtysomething-friendly artist? Of course not. It was just the kids who were fifteen when Elvis arrived hitting middle age, and dragging the whole average up. That's what's happening with games. I'm thirty-seven, and started playing games seriously when I was ten, when they first appeared in the arcades (and shortly after, the home consoles.) So my generation is now tugging the mean gaming age towards thirty and beyond. (An easy trick when there are plenty of 40 or 50-year-olds who came to gaming late in life helping out as well.) ...read more

Steven Johnson
At some point — probably in the late '70s — the average rock-and-roll listener hit the thirty-year-old threshold as well. Do we think that was the result of some kind of tipping point or some influential thirtysomething-friendly artist? Of course not. It was just the kids who were fifteen when Elvis arrived hitting middle age, and dragging the whole average up. That's what's happening with games. I'm thirty-seven, and started playing games seriously when I was ten, when they first appeared in the arcades (and shortly after, the home consoles.) So my generation is now tugging the mean gaming age towards thirty and beyond. (An easy trick when there are plenty of 40 or 50-year-olds who came to gaming late in life helping out as well.)

Even the cultural attention to games has been relatively constant through the years: Space Invaders and Pac-Man, Mario and Sonic, Mystand SimCity, Doom and Quake, Grand Theft Auto and The Sims. They've grown up in a relatively linear progression. Not surprisingly, their player demographics have followed the same line. click to close

Henry Jenkins
It is certainly the case that the kids who grew up playing Super Mario Brothershave continued to play games into their adulthood, allowing the games market to expand upward in age with each passing year. But that trend in and of itself explains little if we don't see it as part of a larger pattern in which adults in the early twenty-first century continue to play and fantasize actively well past the age when previous generations of adults would have put aside the pleasures of their childhood. There has been a shift in the ways our culture thinks about what it means to be an adult — one which allows more space for creativity, imagination, and pleasure as valuable on their own terms. We can see this change take place over several generations. The postwar generation of men were taught that play was valuable because it allowed them to be a better father, a pal to their sons and daughters, and because it refreshed them after the dullness of their work days. The next generation was taught that it was not selfish to seek pleasure for themselves, whether this involved recreational sex or simply fun and games. After a while, people started bragging that whoever dies with the most toys wins. ...read more

Henry Jenkins
It is certainly the case that the kids who grew up playing Super Mario Brothershave continued to play games into their adulthood, allowing the games market to expand upward in age with each passing year. But that trend in and of itself explains little if we don't see it as part of a larger pattern in which adults in the early twenty-first century continue to play and fantasize actively well past the age when previous generations of adults would have put aside the pleasures of their childhood. There has been a shift in the ways our culture thinks about what it means to be an adult — one which allows more space for creativity, imagination, and pleasure as valuable on their own terms. We can see this change take place over several generations. The postwar generation of men were taught that play was valuable because it allowed them to be a better father, a pal to their sons and daughters, and because it refreshed them after the dullness of their work days. The next generation was taught that it was not selfish to seek pleasure for themselves, whether this involved recreational sex or simply fun and games. After a while, people started bragging that whoever dies with the most toys wins. And indeed, there is a growing recognition that the future economy needs to be a creative economy — one where imaginative play actively increases the value of what we produce as a culture. We can see this push towards adult play across all sectors of popular culture most comics readers are adults and the superheroes have grown up with their readers, you can now buy really expensive action figures tied to properties which at no point were aimed at kids, we are seeing more and more animated series and films targeting more mature viewers; a large chunk of the trade on eBay centers around reclaiming toys and collectables that our moms threw out when we went off to college, and it continues all the way down the line.

The emergence of the adult games market, then, is part of this larger pattern and impacts not simply those who grew up playing computer games. There is growing evidence of senior citizen interest in games as a form of armchair tourism. I don't simply mean card games or chess but massively multiplayer fantasy games — at least those which don't require twitch speed — spaces where seniors can be bards and innkeepers, can travel vast virtual landscapes and interact with many people, enjoy a rich community life within the guilds, even if they are no longer able to leave their own homes. A previous generation would have found parading around as an elf to be beneath their dignity but for the current generation, it can be almost as normal as getting together with the bridge club or playing bingo in the church basement.

Now, this shift of the game market towards adult consumers has repercussions for the censorship discussion we had yesterday. The games industry is more and more producing content targeting this older demographic, less and less creating content targeting children. And this is creating confusion in the marketplace as many parents still assume that games are for kids and do not pay attention to the ratings systems that are in place. You would know that an R-rated movie was not appropriate for all ages; many seem not to be able to imagine that an M-rated game might not be the best thing for the younger members of their families. And so there is a sense of moral confusion, even outrage, about the idea of mature-content games — not because our culture looks down on adults for playing but rather because they still assume that this particular medium is for kids only. We?ve seen this pattern before.

The same thing happened to comics coming out of World War II. Lots of G.I.s read comics on the frontlines because they were cheap and light weight. Coming out of the war, they continued to read them but demanded more mature content. Thus, we saw the emergence of crime and horror comics titles, which quickly became the focus of moral backlash from reform groups who felt this material was totally inappropriate to children. And it was in that context that the Comics Code was born, essentially restricting the content to only that material which could be regarded as appropriate for every member of the family. This was devastating to comics at a time when they needed all the help they could get to compete with television and comics has never fully recovered from the marginalization which occurred in the wake of that backlash.

Many of us fear this is what could also happen to games. Games seem poised to become a mass media consumed by all sectors of our society but they also seem in danger of becoming a niche medium, like comics, increasingly cut off from the mainstream, either because their content is so restricted that it becomes only a children's medium again or because they go for mature content at the expense of the family market. The challenge is to teach consumers how to distinguish which titles are family appropriate and which are for mature audiences only. click to close

Eric Zimmerman
The simple answer to this question — and I assume that some of the other panelists are going to agree — is that gamers have simply grown up. I am thirty-six years old now. But I played Pong on TV in second grade, Atari and TRS-80 games in fifth grade, spent the early 80s in junior high school devouring Apple 2+ titles and basking in the golden years of arcade games, and so on. I still play games, and me and my X-Generation cohorts are helping to pull the average age of the gamer older and older. As with other forms of culture and media, depending on the sort of game, audiences differ widely. Handheld game systems like the Nintendo DS (the latest version of their GameBoy series) are played primarily by preteens and teens. Online downloadable games, like my own company's title Diner Dash, have women in their 30s and 40s as the majority demographic group. In fact, more women than men are playing so-called "casual games" online. Who exactly is playing games may surprise you. ...read more

Eric Zimmerman
The simple answer to this question — and I assume that some of the other panelists are going to agree — is that gamers have simply grown up. I am thirty-six years old now. But I played Pong on TV in second grade, Atari and TRS-80 games in fifth grade, spent the early 80s in junior high school devouring Apple 2+ titles and basking in the golden years of arcade games, and so on. I still play games, and me and my X-Generation cohorts are helping to pull the average age of the gamer older and older. As with other forms of culture and media, depending on the sort of game, audiences differ widely. Handheld game systems like the Nintendo DS (the latest version of their GameBoy series) are played primarily by preteens and teens. Online downloadable games, like my own company's title Diner Dash, have women in their 30s and 40s as the majority demographic group. In fact, more women than men are playing so-called "casual games" online. Who exactly is playing games may surprise you. But why does this surprise us? What's so unexpected about 40something women playing games? In "Western" culture, there is a deep sense that games and play are the domain of childhood. Brian Sutton-Smith, in his seminal book The Ambiguity of Play, identifies several rhetorics that inform how it is that we think about play in our culture. The dominant rhetoric in our society, according to Sutton-Smith, is the idea of "play as progress" — that the purpose of play is to help children evolve into adults, and that "good" play assists with physical, intellectual, or social development. The notion that play might also be for adults chafes with this deeply-rooted set of beliefs. Even the question that Hooksexup posed for today, which ends by asking if adult gaming is the result of "regression or early midlife crisis" seems to assume that play can't simply happen as play, but as a symptom of something bad. Even hooksexup.com, a bastion for playful adult pleasure, has a tendency to pathologize adult videogaming.

As I mentioned in my last post, pleasure is central to games, and perhaps it is this element that makes it difficult for us on some level to reconcile them with adult leisure pursuits. Like sex, play is transgressive, but it is a pre-sexual form of indulgence, only giving way to more mature forms of enjoyment later in life. With all of this in mind, I like the idea that gamers are growing up, that game players are getting older. What will happen when things come full circle, when adults are making games for themselves, guilt-free, when games are no longer stigmatized as a "regressive" way to spend one's time? Perhaps at that moment we'll see a new kind of game, one more akin to film, literature, and theater, one that fulfills on the exciting promises of the digital game medium. But it's also possible, by the time that happens, the kids will have moved on to better things. click to close

Rob Levine
Certainly an increasing number of adults — a category in which I only reluctantly include myself — play video games. But before everyone gets too excited, that average age of thirty comes from the Entertainment Software Association, an industry lobbyist group which also says that 75 percent of American heads of household play video games. They arrive at these numbers by using a very loose definition of video games that encompasses everything from online card games to the solitaire programs that come with some computers. (Gaming executives are also fond of saying that the video game business is bigger than Hollywood, which is true only if you compare sales of game hardware and software to the theatrical side of the film industry; comparing apples to apples, or rather silver discs to silver discs, DVD sales in 2004 were worth $15 billion and video game software was about half that. But I digress.) Let's be honest: The vast majority of video games are made for kids. And, let's be honest: That's cool. ...read more

Rob Levine
Certainly an increasing number of adults — a category in which I only reluctantly include myself — play video games. But before everyone gets too excited, that average age of thirty comes from the Entertainment Software Association, an industry lobbyist group which also says that 75 percent of American heads of household play video games. They arrive at these numbers by using a very loose definition of video games that encompasses everything from online card games to the solitaire programs that come with some computers. (Gaming executives are also fond of saying that the video game business is bigger than Hollywood, which is true only if you compare sales of game hardware and software to the theatrical side of the film industry; comparing apples to apples, or rather silver discs to silver discs, DVD sales in 2004 were worth $15 billion and video game software was about half that. But I digress.) Let's be honest: The vast majority of video games are made for kids. And, let's be honest: That's cool. Many of the most creative and sophisticated games made in recent years — Pikmin, Nintendogs, Mister Mosquito — are aimed at kids. Many of the games ostensibly aimed at adults are simply attempt to replicate a cinematic experience — and just as television went beyond its origins as radio with pictures, games will move beyond movies with joysticks. And many of them are full of what's thought of as adult content — violence, swearing or what have you — but think that just means they're aimed at teenage boys. (I'm talking mostly about console games here — there are lots of online games and simulation games for PCs that are very sophisticated and intended for adults.) Think about the movie version of Doom and the animated movie Spirited Away. The first features what might be thought of as adult content, but the second — ostensibly aimed at children — is far more sophisticated. I'm not saying video games are just for kids — I just want to let some of the air out of the hype balloon. Plenty of twenty- and thirty-somethings play games, simply because they enjoyed them as teenagers and never found a reason to stop. I think that's a matter of demographics: People who were raised on games kept playing them and became adults who preferred Grand Theft Auto to golf. As with Baby Boomers listening to rock in their retirement, a form of entertainment is now considered suitable for adults partly because the generation that grew up with it didn't grow out of it.click to close

Brenda Brathwaite
I think we early gamers just got older, but we didn't stop playing. Unlike so many things, people don't really outgrow games any more than they outgrow books or movies or television shows or other forms of entertainment. The entertainment itself matures and the audience's capacity to understand it grows. So, while my daughter (she's four) might be enjoying Katamari Damacy and Petz now, I can see her getting into The Sims in ten years. I grew up making and playing games. I got into the industry when I was fifteen, so it's always been a form of entertainment for me. I know plenty of people just five years my senior for whom games are completely alien. They just have no interest. Now, we're even seeing generational gamers — my daughter and I are looking for games to play together.

Henry Jenkins III
First, lets put the question in some historical perspective. As we look across the history of popular culture and new media in the twentieth century, we see the same pattern recurring: each new medium is embraced by young people who are seeking out experiences which they can call uniquely their own and are often drawn towards material which shocks and titilates; parents and adults express a growing dismay because this medium was not part of their own childhood experience and they do not know how to protect their young; some kind of incident occurs which can be loosely tied to the emerging medium and we enter an era of moral panic during which people seek to "do something even if it is wrong" and end up doing the wrong things; the medium withstands a storm of controversy and attempts at regulation which go counter this country's stated support for free expression. At the end of the cycle, the generation which grew up with this medium ends up looking back nostalgically at their misbegotted youths and take as given the place of that form of popular culture as the standard against which new media experiences will be judged and this cycle starts all over again. We see this playing out around everything from joke books ("We've got trouble right here in River City!"— The Music Man) to radio, television, comic books, rock music, the internet and now computer games.

Further complicating the case for games is the fact that the center of their marketplace has shifted from children to adults and that they have as a result started to experiment with mature content even as many people still assume that if it is a game then it must be okay for children. Many of us have seen the result at our local retailer as a mom or dad plops down fifty or sixty bucks to buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto for their nine year old. You would think that the title would give them a clue of its content. Can you imagine them buying First Degree Murder or Solicitation and Prostitution without batting an eye? Is there any other fifty-dollar purchase that the average American parent would make with so little reflection or research? Yet, it is precisely this impulse to insure that all content is appropriate to children which we must combat if we want to see games become a more diverse and mature medium of expression.

The stakes for what we jokingly call our political leaders in all of this are pretty clear. Going after video games has been the way that Democratic politicians with national ambitions try to win over popularity with the Red States. Violent video games is a safe target without strong special interests groups, lobbies, or PACs to antagonize. They can simultaneously signal that they are doing something to help American parents and show that they are concerned about the moral decline of western civilization. They can blur the boundaries of the culture wars without compromising on anything they care about. And they can do so safe in the knowledge that they are probably never really going to be asked to pass national legislation which is unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny in any case.

What sickens me about the stance, though, is that it comes at the expense of doing anything about the actual causes of violence in the lives of young people. For example, when Hillary came out against video game violence, it was in response to a shooting on an Indian reservation involving a kid with a long history of adult neglect and abuse and exposure to all of the social preconditions of violent crime. What kind of liberal targets video games when the same incident could have been used to call attention to the problems confronting Rez kids? Answer: one that cares more about seeming "centrist" (some would say reactionary) than dealing with the real problems in this country.

None of this is to suggest that there isn't a legitimate conversation to be had about the content of video games. For me, the problem with most video game violence isn't that it will turn kids into psycho killers (which I don't believe for a minute) but that it remains formulaic and thus doesn't take full advantage of the potentials of games as a medium. Every storytelling medium created by humankind has dealt with themes of aggression, trauma and loss, because these are fundamental aspects of our experience and because we want art to help us make sense of what seems senseless about the world around us. Games have a particularly valuable contribution to make in representing these themes because of their ability to deal with choice and consequence. But they so often punt rather than trying to knock the ball out of the park and do something thoughtful or interesting with this content. The big problem with most violent video games is that they are boring because they don't have anything to say. Trying to ban all representations of violence gets us nowhere; what we need to be discussing is how to generate more meaningful violence.

Why are video games more apt to be violent than sexy? Well, we can start from the fact that the modern model of video games emerged from earlier amusement park attractions like shooting gallaries and pinball machines. The easiest model for them to duplicate is one where interactivity is marked by firing at things. Then we can add to this the challenges of repositioning games from a children's medium into one which has stronger appeals to adults. Culturally, we have been far more willing to let our children consume spectacles of violence than to expose them to the adult realities of sexuality. Heck, if you go back far enough, adults took kids to lynchings and hangings. There's not much record of adults taking kids to brothels. So, the games industry has generally gone with the path of least resistance, following familiar models, and only tampering with one hot button at a time. And, then, of course, there are the technical issues, which I hope we can get to in subsequent installments of this conversation. My own sense is that we really need to rethink the medium before we can produce really sexy games. click to close

Ian Bogost
This hypothetical thirty-year-old gamer, while a statistical composite, actually reveals some interesting lessons. Someone born in 1975 would have been old enough to play and remember the first generation of home consoles and microcomputers — the Atari VCS, the Intellivision, the Spectrum, the Atari 400, the Commodore 64. Such a player would have been eight years old during the videogame crash of 1983, and thus probably would have noticed the subsequent absence of (new) home games in the mid-'80s. This was the time when a second generation of kid-focused arcades cropped up, including Nolan Bushnell's Chuck E. Cheese's chain. This player would probably have walked, bicycled, begged rides to the corner Circle K or the Showbiz. ...read more

Ian Bogost
This hypothetical thirty-year-old gamer, while a statistical composite, actually reveals some interesting lessons. Someone born in 1975 would have been old enough to play and remember the first generation of home consoles and microcomputers — the Atari VCS, the Intellivision, the Spectrum, the Atari 400, the Commodore 64. Such a player would have been eight years old during the videogame crash of 1983, and thus probably would have noticed the subsequent absence of (new) home games in the mid-'80s. This was the time when a second generation of kid-focused arcades cropped up, including Nolan Bushnell's Chuck E. Cheese's chain. This player would probably have walked, bicycled, begged rides to the corner Circle K or the Showbiz. These two years between 1983 and 1985 would have been especially memorable for this player, I think — playing videogames required real effort at this time. I think this generation of players had an especially strong reaction to the US market introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. The return of the home console had a huge influence on players of this generation — I think they took special note of the absence of easily accessible videogames, and became even more invested in the medium. I have no scientific evidence for this claim, but I suspect that these players have a particularly strong relationship with the medium as a result of the interruption of 1983 - 1985. Even if these players temporarily gave up on games during the 16-bit era (when they would have been teenagers with, ahem, other interests), it might have felt very natural to return to the early 3D consoles in the mid-90s or to PC gaming with Doom and shareware, during their early college years. click to close

Katie Salen
Gamers that are thirty are of the Nintendo generation, they are babies of the digital sphere, and they grew up with games as something they did every day. Games have always been integrated into their lifestyle. For most gamers, it's an important part of how they define their leisure time, how they stay connected with friends, how they learn new things, and simply, how they play. It would never occur to them that this is something to be given up once someone enters "adulthood." I think it's silly to think of games as something that only children play and that one would only begin to play again as some form of midlife crisis.

Katie Salen
Gamers that are thirty are of the Nintendo generation, they are babies of the digital sphere, and they grew up with games as something they did every day. Games have always been integrated into their lifestyle. For most gamers, it's an important part of how they define their leisure time, how they stay connected with friends, how they learn new things, and simply, how they play. It would never occur to them that this is something to be given up once someone enters "adulthood." I think it's silly to think of games as something that only children play and that one would only begin to play again as some form of midlife crisis. Historically adults have always played games, long into adulthood, be it chess, bridge, poker, golf, etc. There is no reason to think that the desire to play games goes away just because the games themselves have gone digital.  n° click to close