1. Social Networking: Social Networking is increasingly prevalent in children’s lives. Facebook is now the favorite website among tween (8-11) boys and teen (12-15) girls.

2. Key Demographic and “Sweet Spot”: Online games dominate for boys and girls ages 8-11. 91% of teen boys and 93% of teen girls play games online.

3. Nintendo Dominates Handheld Gaming Space: But thanks largely to the iPad and iPhone, Apple is becoming a significant player especially with girls.

4. Portable Platform Discrepancy: Sony’s PSP has largest gender discrepancy. 17% of teen girls play games on the PSP compared to 44% of teen boys.

Source: M2 Research

The key ones I would like to point out are their figures related to girl gamers – which don’t suck BTW !

Forty percent of all game players are women. In fact, women over the age of 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (33 percent) than boys age 17 or younger (20 percent).

My favorite view of their study is that the average age of game player is 34 years old, the average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 40 years old. Given averages that means that a lot of those 34 year olds are still being bought games by their parents/Aunts/Uncles etc !

While its impolite to ask your age, if you fall into that bracket do you ask for games for your Birthdays and Christmas ?

Source: ESA

Seeking the view of experts, CEOs and other experts the quote of the article is:

I don’t think we just want games where you dress up Barbies”

Ana Kronschnabl
CEO, Fluffy Logic

The piece provides links to those in the industry who are trying to change things and to at least give options for gameplay.

Take a read, what do you think ?

Source: BBC News

It’s only two and half minutes long, but whilst seemingly well-meaning, it’s surprising how many cliches, stereotypes and sweeping assumptions the BBC have managed to cram into this short report. Women are embarrassed of playing games? We’re put off by the violent or ‘noisy’ games created for men? And are you sure that the stereotype is 14-year-old boys? It was my understanding that research has, for several years now, indicated that the average gamer is in their 30s.

Yes, social networking and the burgeoning ‘casual’ gamer market has exploded in recent years, and yes, it’s right that gamers can no longer categorised by narrow, gender-specified identifiers. That said, women are not the exclusive audience for casual, sociable games, either. This report appears intent to sweep us all into safe, easy boxes, struggling to accept that some of us (and in my experience of both male and female gamers, most of us) might buck their incredibly narrow and suffocating categories.

I could go on (it’s taking substantial willpower not to do so, quite frankly). However, this once I’ll keep bide an uncharacteristic reticence and simply suggest that you watch the entire report yourself and make up your own mind. I’d love to hear your own opinions about this piece.

[Source and picture credit: BBC News]

According to Mashable, 28 percent of respondents claimed that one of their main uses for the iPad was gaming, while 23 percent said between the iPad, smartphones and portable gaming devices, the former is “the most enjoyable for playing games.”

It certainly makes for interesting reading. The iPad certainly seems like a pretty decent contender in the handheld market despite the price tag. Maybe it’s the multi -functionality of the iPad that makes it so attractive, or maybe it’s the innovative controls. Let’s just see how it fairs when Nintendo’s 3DS is released, shall we?

Do you think the iPad is a big contender in the handheld market? or do you think it should be left to the big boys Sony and Nintendo? leave you opinion in the comment box below.

Source: Joystiq

The answer, offered by Gordon Van Dyke, producer of the new Electronic Arts modern warfare game Battlefield: Bad Company 2, has to do with technology. Or, more specifically, it has to do with technology needs trumping any sense of consumer demand for representation of both genders.

Programming women soldiers into a virtual war just might not be worth the costs to the game and the servers that connect the people playing it.

The topic came up on last week’s Kotaku podcast, when I asked Van Dyke if there were women in Bad Company 2. I’d noticed that the games I’d played set in modern or near-future settings were almost always fought by men and men only.

“There’s no girls in our game,” he said around the 33-minute mark.

“It’s an interesting thing, though because … It’s fun that you bring that up because I can kind of give some insight into development and how games are made. When you actually put in female characters, typically you have to put in an entire new skeleton model and that entire new skeleton model adds an entire new level of animation and an entire new level of rigging. You basically double the amount of data and memory for soldiers that would need to go into your game.

“So it turns into one of those things that’s like: How much will putting something like this in give us, whether the rewards of putting something like this in [are worth it]. The reward has to match what you have to give up somewhere else. Our games are pushing the edge of the system they’re on at such a high degree that it becomes more of a balancing act for implementing new things — how many vehicles you can have in a game or how many buildings with destruction — because every single one of those things needs to be calculated by the server and transmitted to every single play that’s playing the game. Every time you shoot a building or wall, they [need] to see it when it happens or, if you go past that, at a later date, the server needs to remember that data and then transmit it to all those players.”

It doesn’t require much special programming to change a virtual soldier’s skin tone. Heights and weights, though, usually stay fixed. So too, Van Dyke explained, does gender for likely the same reasons — unless gamers would want their virtual female soldiers to run and move like men.

And what of the trade-off? The ability for the walls in a virtual battlefield to break and stay broken may sound trifling to non-gamers. But within the context of games, it is a literal breakthrough. Walls have been immutable in games since the days of Pac-Man, and while games have, from time to time, allowed barriers to be broken, it’s still a rare feat.

Imagine the gameplay implications of Pac-Man being able to bash through a wall to escape Inky, Blinky or Clyde. It would certainly have had more profound impact on how Pac-Man played than adding a bow to Pac-Man’s “head” and calling him “Ms. Pac-Man,” right?

Video games can sometimes be accused of being behind the times in regards to social issues and minority representation. That women can’t even fight in 2010 war games such as Bad Company 2 and MAG — even as real women reportedly serve admirably in the real military — would seem to be retrograde, but maybe the tech excuse is a good one.

Do female characters need to be put in virtual combat? Or, more to the point, are they more important than crumbling walls?

Source: Kotaku.com

- SEGA announced its latest console, the Sega Zone Wireless Gaming Console (hhmm, snappy title)
- The number of registered Steam accounts grew 25% last year and broke the 25 million barrier this week
- We were told that Batman Arkham Asylum 2 may hit the shelves as early as October 2010. It was then changed to 2011
- David Cameron, leader of the Conservatives in the UK, backs a UK charity dedicated to helping severely disabled children enjoy videogames through cutting-edge technology
- Microsoft’s Xbox revenues were down 11% at the end of the Q4 2009 … and the 120GB has been cut to £79.99 in the UK
- Digital distribution is not affecting hard sales, according to the latest reports
- AbleGamer called for more accessible controllers. We heartily agree
- Final Fantasy XIII will ship with three discs
- Bioware incensed forum members by censoring LGBT talk at their forums
- We were told Gran Turismo will be delayed. Again
- Sonic the Hedgehog 4 was announced
- Visceral Game’s Dante‘s Inferno hit gaming sites in a very unusual way …

Did we miss something? What do you make of the news this week? Tell us in the comments!

At least that’s what the CAPLOCK OBSESSED Sunday Express is crying for this fine Sunday morning.

In a bid to combat what they deem to be the “spiral[ling] out of control” problem of childhood obesity, the Express are calling on UK government to invest the millions of pounds of tax money generated by video game sales into sport facilities for British children. Citing (ahem) expert opinions that blame gaming for everything from the “antisocial behaviour [...] blighting Broken Britain” to the “sky high NHS bill” to the “alarming” Vitamin D deficiency disease Rickets that affects a minuscule 100 British children a year, this obviously fine, impartial, non-sensationalist example of British journalism wants to see “drastic” intervention.

Joining the self-proclaimed crusade, Liberal Democrat’s Health spokeperson Norman Lamb, stated that: “Computer games generate a lot of tax which should be invested into preventing problems like child ­obesity and rickets. Funding new sports facilities through VAT raised from computer games should be looked at. Children have to be ­encouraged to keep active.”

Fueling the fire, a researcher at the University of Essex added that most afflicted were males aged 14-16. “They come straight home from school and play a games console until they go to bed. That includes playing while they eat,” said Dr Sandercock. “There has also been a boom in fitness software like Nintendo Wii Fit but the simple fact is that it’s never going to replace playing sport for real or going to the gym.”

But of the “worrying” 730 hours a year the average child spends “slouched in front of a TV screen” (which actually only works out as 2 hours day, btw), I wonder how this figure disaggregates down into time spent on sedentary games and energetic, motion-controlled sports games? And what about TV? Shouldn’t the Express be be baying for the blood of TV industry as sensationally as its berating gaming?

Whilst there’s little denying that children today are less active than previous generations, our nation’s ills cannot be pressed firmly nor ultimately at the door of the gaming industry. It took many ingredients to cook up the mess we’re in now. Maybe our tabloid journalists and politicians should take a long, hard look at themselves before casting stones?

Via express.co.uk

- We saw a new Naughty Bear trailer and a glimpse of the cover art
- Sony confirmed the PlayStation Arc domain name
- We’re told that video games make us clevererer … um, smarter
- We might actually get some Doctor Who games that don’t suck
- An Islamist group in Somalia has banned videogames for ‘destroying social traditions’
- Climax would be interested in creating another Silent Hill experience (yay!)
- The Beatles’ DLC track All Your Need is Love has generated $200k in donations
- Heavy Rain‘s demo drops 11 February
- MGS: Peace Walker has been delayed in Japan and Dementium II has been pushed back until April
- The next Blue Toad episode will be free
- Finally – for those of you living under a rock – Apple unveiled a new little gadget called iPad …

Did we miss something? Tell us in the comments!

Read it? Right – now discuss it! Any surprises there? What do you think of the gender spread? And are you as surprised as I am that Europe is lumped into the generic ‘other’ sales, unlike the US and Japan … ?

Source: Online Education via Hawty McBloggy