Computer and Video Game Audiences

Henry Jenkins III

Some statistics and analysis
* 50% of all Americans play video games.

Purchase of Video Games

* 97% of people who purchase computer games and
* 92% of people who purchase video games are 18 years or older.

These figures are extra high as they include parents who buy video games for their kids. Though there is still a perception that video games are children's media, the statistics show that the center of gravity within the marketplace for video games is getting older and older.

* 43% of people who purchase computer games are men and 57% are women.
* 53% of people who purchase console games are men and 47% are women.

One does a double take when one sees that more women buy computer games that men, but note that these figures are related to purchase – this has to do particularly with the role of mothers in our culture. It's a confusing statistic because, in terms of play, many more men play video games than women, but what this says is that a purchase mediated by an adult is more likely than not mediated by a woman. When you think of the content of video games, and the clash of cultures that takes place between boys' cultures and mothers' cultures, it becomes a real factor at the point of purchase.

Playing Video Games
39% of people who play computer and video games are women. This is double of what it was 5 years ago. So while there has been a dramatic increase in the number of women players, it is still disproportionately a male dominated market. In the games industry, the assumption is that for a product to be successful, it has to appeal to men first and then have a cross over appeal to women. To target the 39% women players heavily is not a strategy that the games industry has adopted up till now. On the web, it is a 53% female audience playing games but they're more likely to be playing casual games like card games, which is a completely different kind of market.

There are growing signs that even senior citizens may soon constitute a significant group of players in the gaming space. They seem to respond to strategy, puzzle and role-playing games that are slower and need less thumb action, but which at the same time allow them to see interesting environments. The ability to have virtual travel is very appealing to senior citizens. While information on this group is still anecdotal, quite a few companies have started talking senior citizens as a significant chunk of the gamers market in future.

The average age of a computer or video game player is 29 years old. While games are almost ubiquitously played among children and teenagers, the more hard-core gamers tend to be older.

Expanding and Empowering the Audience
For computer gamers

• 30% of most frequent game players are under eighteen years old
• 25% of most frequent game players are between 18 and 35 years old
• 41% of most frequent game players are over 35 years old

For Console Gamers

• 38% of most frequent game players are under eighteen years old
• 40% of most frequent game players are between 18 and 35 years old
• 22% of most frequent game players are over 35 years old

So we see that the PC market skews towards an
older audience than the console market. Some console manufacturers like
Nintendo have particularly tried to target younger players and tried to
be the most family friendly platform for the market. However the center
of gravity is still exaggerated towards older players. There is
currently a reassessment in the games industry about this fact.

Top-Selling Game Genres in 2002

Console Games

• Action (25.1%)
• Sports (19.5%)
• Racing (16.6%)
• Edutainment (7.6%)

Computer Games

• Strategy (27.4%)
• Children's (15.9%)
• Shooter (11.5%)
• Family Entertainment (9.6%)

Historical Sales Figures of Computer and Video Games

• $6.9 billion in U.S. entertainment software sales in 2002.
• $6.35 billion in U.S. entertainment software sales in 2001.
• $6.0 billion in U.S. entertainment software sales in 2000.
• $6.1 billion in U.S. entertainment software sales in 1999.
• $5.5 billion in U.S. entertainment software sales in 1998.
• $4.4 billion in U.S. entertainment software sales in 1997.
• $3.7 billion in U.S. entertainment software sales in 1996.
• $3.2 billion in U.S. entertainment software sales in 1995.

We observe that there has been a great rise in game sales over the past
decade. Of late, statistics are often quoted to show that the numbers
of gross revenues in game sales are equal to or slightly higher than
the gross box office for American movies. These numbers are distorted
on several levels. To start with, they include sale of video game
hardware as well as software, Secondly, the cost of a video game is
considerably higher than the cost of a movie ticket – so there is no
comparison as such between the actual numbers of people consuming both
these media. Thirdly the numbers compared are only box office receipts
from movies in the US, not ancillary products like cable, DVD, video
rentals and sales, etc. Thus Hollywood is still a much more pervasive
medium. However the numbers do look impressive when compared side by
side with Hollywood, and show that there is a lot of money to be made
in the games industry.

Violence and Game Audiences

Game Ratings
Of all games sold in 2002:

• 55.7% were rated Everyone (E).
• 27.6% were rated Teen (T).
• 13.2% were rated Mature (M).

In 2002, 80% of the top 20 best-selling console
games were rated E or T, while 90% of the top 20 best-selling computer
games were rated either E or T. Many people have complained about the
industry ratings – E has become such an expansive category that the
industry is revising its ratings at present to put in more gradations
and nuanced information. In a game it's not just a question of moral
content when you think about what the ratings should mean. With a
movie, a G rating can tell you that anyone can watch it; it's not going
to be harmful to anyone or violate a certain sense of values. But with
games, the ratings would indicate what cognitive level of development
the kids need to be at to play the game, as well as what is appropriate
in terms of values for that age group. Games struggle to reconcile
these two factors. A game might have no bloodshed, profanity or nudity
but just may not be rewarding for a six or eight year old to play. The
industry is struggling with this issue right now and discussing what
are the kinds of categories that can be created to enable more nuanced
information to be made available to parents. The Entertainment Software
Rating Board (ESRB) provides that instead of just letter categories,
the games have a short description after the letter in order to justify
why the game has been slotted into the category – for instance: "mild
stylized violence". The trade off is that in order to have enforcements
you need to have a simple system of block letter ratings so that an
18-year-old store clerk can apply these on the spot at the point of
purchase.

Ratings and Violence
An important aspect to note is that of those under 18 years of age who purchase games, 83% get their parents permission and thus are mediated by adults. Hence only about 15% of video games are purchased directly by kids. In a sense, the whole argument about violence and ratings is targeted at this 15% who are buying video games on their own, without adult supervision. In order to regulate violence legally, one will have to create a whole new class that is not protected by the first amendment. Historically, the only categories excluded from protection under the first amendment are pornography and obscenity but not violence. So the court cases around violence in video games hinge around the question of whether the first amendment should be watered down to allow violence – a whole new category for which there is no standard definition – to be legally excluded from fifth amendment protection and therefore legally enforced, to protect a small market of 15% of game buyers. We should look at the context of sales, where four large chains sell most of the video games in the US, including Wal-Mart, which is very susceptible to a conservative backlash. Many chains have said that rather than choose to enforce ratings; they would simply choose not to carry products rated above certain level. Enforcing a rating is also very different at a point of purchase, as opposed to say a movie theatre, where you have to be screened when you buy your ticket. All these issues are intricately bound up with each other.

Do Video Games Cause Adverse Behavior?
There is a lot of anxiety in the public about whether games cause anti-social behavior. The media effects model is inadequate to think abut what's going on with video games. This is not to say that games have no effects. We need richer and more complex models to understand the process of games. One of the variables to factor in is the metagame – the conversation that takes place around the games – either in the physical game space or in the online community around the games. While people are playing violent games and blowing each other off their screens, they are simultaneously bonding with each other socially either in physical spaces or virtual spaces. So the content may be anti social but the game experience is social. The metagame is also a site of discussion around the content of the game. For example, with America's Army – the metagame became a space where veteran's groups, anti war groups, teenagers, all met on a common space and debated the politics of war – it became a space where people could talk in spite of their differences. Thinking about communities around games and the discussions they stimulate are ways of increasing the meaningfulness of our thought process about the violence. The challenge is to think about new game design that heightens the meaning of the games rather than thinking about how to eliminate violence altogether.

Gender and Game Audiences
There was a huge push about 5 or 6 years ago to develop a female market for games. There was an economic motive besides the political motive to target women as the young women's market was underdeveloped as compared to the young men's market. A lot of start-ups began, run by women who felt frustrated about the lack of enough games for young women, particularly around PC games, and that created a huge debate around gender. The book From Barbie to Mortal Combat was the document of that debate.

One of the arguments that come up against video games for girls all the time is: "Why do we need girl's games? It's not like the other games are exclusively for boys." To that, the answer would simply be to point to the Gameboy – and realize that one of the core pieces of hardware in the games industry is already so explicitly gendered. It's not called a game kid, or game girl – it’s a game "boy". Another argument is: "Movies don't need to be made for women, why should games?" To this one would retort that in fact, movies always have been made for women – what earlier used to be called women's' pictures are today's chick flicks, namely a whole class of films specifically made for female viewers. So these are both disingenuous arguments against games for girls.

The truth is that the games industry is risk averse and populated largely by men, who have grown up playing a certain kind of video games. Interestingly enough, the crossover successes have almost always turned out to come from companies that have a large number of women on their staff. Maxis, for instance, has a large number of women in their design team and other staff – and that's an important reason for the crossover success of The Sims.

The problems while making games for girls are that firstly, research conducted at the time of the book a few years ago, seemed to suggest that the girls who like playing video games were the sporty soccer playing girls, or the "tomboys". The ones who stayed at home to play tended to play with their Barbies. Those companies which developed girls games were trying to expand what games were to reflect this untapped market so they were often hyperfeminine in their appeal. The industry has taken a more conservative approach, trying to broaden out from their base by creating games which both boys and girls might want to play. The second problem deals with retail. Once a game is released, typically, the first two weeks are crucial for retailers – to see if its moving off the shelves or not. The major chains tend to get very impatient with slow moving items on their shelves. So, basically, you're talking about a non existent consumer base for girls' games, for which you have to generate enough properties to make it interesting for them to buy the console (if you're thinking of console games), publicity for the games that you create, getting the stores to retail the games, and then making sure they move off the shelves in two weeks to sustain retailers interest in continuing the product line on their shelves!

The cards were really stacked against the proposition but despite this, a number of titles did well. For example Barbie Interactive, American girl and Brenda Laurel's Purple Moon. But a lot of the smaller game companies got bought over by larger game companies – for example Mattel bought over Purple Moon and basically scuttled the product line as they wanted Barbie products to sell. The games industry erroneously interpreted this as the failure of girls' games as an idea.

Brenda Laurel's Differences between Games for Girls and Games for Boys
Brenda Laurel was the founder of Purple Moon. She has outlined the
differences between games for girls and games for boys as follows:

1. Leading characters in games for girls are
   everyday people that girls can easily relate to and are as real to
   girls as their best friends. So girls like characters that are strong,
   identifiable, likeable, and that they can relate to. But for boys,
   leading characters are fantasy based action heroes with super powers or
   abilities. So for boys, it is their ideals that are important while for
   girls, it is an expansion of virtual friendship sets.
2. The goal for games for girls is to explore
   new experiences with degrees of success and varying outcomes. For boys,
   the goal is to win – the game is linear, and the outcome is black and
   white. Die or start over are the two solutions.
3. Play in games for girls
   focuses on a multi sensory immersion, discovery and strong stories.
   Sound is very important for girls – good music, a sweeping soundscape
   and rich environment are appreciated. For boys' games, speed and action
   are the keys.
4. Games for girls feature everyday real life settings vs. games for boys, that feature non-realistic larger than life settings.
5. Success comes from the development of
   friendships as character bonding becomes a central activity in games
   for girls. In games for boys, success comes through elimination of
   competitors. Boys bond through competition, while girls bond through
   sharing – this are classic gender studies classifications and they play
   out in the game space as well.

   Multi-player Online Games: Audience trends
   Pretty much every game has a multiplayer utility around it. A single player game is also something that is experienced in a larger community. Recent figures suggest that 60% of game play is social – that is people are playing with someone else, and not by themselves. People often play by themselves in order to get good at the game, so that they can beat their friends in a social or competitive setting. Also, around the game, there may be an online community where players trade tips and information, and this would be much larger than their face-to-face social community. Thus the myth of the isolated game player is largely that – a myth, and by and large, games are something that are experienced socially. There are also a number of studies that show that when game systems are introduced into families, the families tend to play the games together at least a chunk of the time. This is more and more the case also because today's parents have grown up with media are more comfortable with it than the previous generation of parents who didn’t know what computer games were.

   Current Players
   Massively multiplayer online games have a huge worldwide audience. Lineage, a game extremely popular in Korea, has1.4 million users and 140,000 simultaneous users. EverQuest has sold to more than 400,000 users, Asheron's Call to over 100,000. Other popular multiplayer online games include Ultima Online, World War II Online, Shattered Galaxies, Star Wars Galaxies and Sims Online.

   Democracy in Multiplayer Game Worlds
   At a recent conference at Harvard, while discussing massively multiplayer online games, the conclusion was that at present, there isn't a business model to support massively multiplayer online games in the US. One of the panelists present described Korea as a fluke, not the future. The success in Korea of these games was attributed to a very specific cultural context and he didn’t see the pattern being replicated in the US. The average multiplayer game players tend to play about 20 hours per week per title and there are a limited titles to play, so there tend to be a couple of big successes and the new games that try and break into the market largely fail. Even a successful franchise like the Sims has difficulties translating over into the massively multiplayer online space.

   There are other aspects of this space that terrify companies. One is that you are giving a lot of control over content to the community – this can be positive or negative. A negative examples would include a story related to Ultima Online where allegedly on a particular Koran holiday, a large number of Korean players got together and slaughtered all the Japanese players in the game, thus wiping out Japan as a market. The game company was left with a dilemma – did they want to rewrite the rules of the game so that the Japanese characters could reboot and rejoin the community or would they have to write off Japan due to the spontaneous action of the games community? Another example would include a story that got a lot of media coverage relating to The Sims Online. It dealt with a teenage girl going online and playing prostitute characters, trading sexual favors in the virtual world for virtual cash (which has resale value on eBay for real money). Essentially, it was a case of underage virtual sex. A muck-racking journalist in the online world uncovered the story in the virtual newspaper in the world of the game and lobbied for the shutting down of teen prostitution. Rather than deal with the issue, the game administrators bumped him off the game. So the journalist took his story to Salon and NY Times and other publications, and the game had huge PR problems due to the negative publicity it received. Will Wright had described the Sims Online as an experiment in democracy, but it seemed that it was a democracy where free press was not an option. Of course, in a real world there is no obligation for a company to provide space for its critics to publish in – if this were a shopping mall and the journalist were distributing a newspaper, it would be stopped too. But then one never claims that shopping malls are democracies! So all these controversies are making companies nervous about what happens when you create online worlds; on the other hand, there are also exciting opportunities in the field waiting to be explored.

   Opportunities for online gaming worlds
   The market for online gaming households is estimated at 40 million online gaming households in 2004, up 25 million from 2000. These worlds offer the best model in online communities that has emerged in recent years – and are exciting sites of experimentation in designing virtual social systems.

   Most of these game companies follow subscription-based models. This brings up the issue of addictiveness. Game companies want players who are totally addicted to the game – hence Everquest is often called Evercrack. Now, if you pay a monthly subscription fee and play more than 20 hours a week – you are costing the company money – not making it money. Thus game companies want to make it a compelling enough experience so that you fork over the monthly fee, but there is no economic incentive for addictiveness – since really obsessive behavior costs the game company! Thus they need to have a mechanism to perhaps discourage people from spending too large amounts of time online.

   These games also offer huge challenges in terms of customer support for hundreds of thousands of players – many of who are online 24/7. Gameplay needs to be balanced. More importantly they need large technical support including adequate bandwidth, server farms to run the game and mechanisms for thwarting hackers.

   Classification of Online Game Players
   Richard Bartle, a designer and a researcher, says that if you think of these games as systems, you'd want to support four very different kinds of players. He calls them achievers, socializers, explorers and killers. Each has different expectations of what the game is going to be.

   Achiever wants to achieve a goal – typically making money, scoring points, etc. and this supercedes everything else. For achievers, a lot of the games offer loopholes, which can enable their characters to perform repetitive actions and collect points even when they're not actually playing. Other role players think of achievers as zombies, just carrying out repetitive action and feel that their actions detract from the immersive qualities of the game. Socializers just want to hang out with people – for them, these environments are better than MOOs or MUDs. They just sit around and talk – a lot of senior citizens in these games are socializers. Explorers like to travel through the game worlds, see the different landscapes, buildings, and activities. Killers like to face something, either a digital creature, or other killers and try and knock them off.

   Bartle argues that the games that are the most successful in this space reward all these different types of experiences and have some balance between them. This makes the creation of these games a process of social engineering rather than content generation – a process of designing a community and figuring out the rules and processes necessary to sustain the different kinds of people in the community, rather than moving a property into a virtual space and creating a certain kind of environment.

   Raph Koster, who helped to design Star Wars Galaxies, said about these online worlds: "It’s a service, it’s a world, it’s a community," and explained:
   "Service: You are going to have to keep a team on this forever. Otherwise your game will stagnate and die over time. This is an expense you will need to budget for from the get-go. You can use volunteers, but you’ll still need to manage them. It’s a World, it’s a Community. Many players—your most valuable ones—will not regard this as just a game. The common events such as funerals and weddings demonstrate that amply. If it is treated as only a game, it is easy to migrate out of."

   Koster's recent game – Star Wars Galaxies, got off to a bumpy start but had a very smart pre-release strategy. He had created an open site and consulted with potential players even while the game was being developed. Because of their contribution to the game making process, many players felt a real investment in the game even before it was launched.

   Content Appropriation in Multiplayer Online Worlds
   New media is shaping the way people relate to media content very profoundly, starting with their ability to archive, annotate, procreate and recirculate content. This applies as much to the game space as to other media like film and TV. In same cases, content is appropriated, like with Machinema, where game engines are used to generate animated shorts in real time. In games like The Sims – Will Wright wants 60% of the future content to be generated from the players themselves, and people are already appropriating the game in all sorts of ways with interesting outcomes. One instance: using the game's camera to get illustrations and animations for their stories on the web. Some of these appropriations are also commercial – for example The Mall of the Sims, where for a monthly fee, one can purchase a variety of items to be used in the game from the player merchants based in the mall. This is supported by Will Wright and the Sims as something that benefits the community. There are about 10 other Sims related fan sites making money. For Wright, a lot of the content he generates for the expansion pack that the Sims sells – comes from these community sites.

   Recommended Readings

   1. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins (Eds.),
      From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (Cambridge: MIT
      Press, 2000). For samples from the book, see Henry Jenkins, “’Complete Freedom of Movement’: Video Games as Gendered Playspaces”, Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins, “Chess for Girls?: Feminism and Computer Games”, and Henry Jenkins, “Voices from the Combat Zone: Game Grrlz Talk Back”.
   2. Henry Jenkins, “From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Further Reflections”
   3. Henry Jenkins, “Lessons from Littleton: What Congress Doesn’t Want to Hear About Youth and Media,” Independent School
   4. Henry Jenkins, “Professor Jenkins Goes to Washington,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1999.
   5. Henry Jenkins and Kurt Squire, “Playing Together, Staying Together”, “The Limbaugh Baby”, “The Sim Treadmill”
   6. Henry Jenkins, “Power to the Players,” Technology Review, June 2002.
   7. Henry Jenkins, “Coming Up Next: Ambushed on Donahue,” Salon, September 2002.
   8. Henry Jenkins, “The Penny Arcade Interview”
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