BU Generation Xboxers
By: Patrick J. Kiger | Source: AARP Bulletin Today | | February 7, 2006
For Kevin O'Hare of San Carlos, Calif., Friday nights are all about computer games.
O'Hare typically goes online at around 6 o'clock to play EverQuest, a fantasy game that unfolds on an electronic battlefield peopled by druids, paladins and "shadowknights." Past midnight he's still interacting in real time with any of hundreds of thousands of players around the world, all of them fantasy characters in Sony Online Entertainment's hugely popular "MMORPG" (short for "massively multiplayer online role-playing game").
"I love the strategizing," O'Hare says.
O'Hare isn't your typical teenager. In fact, he isn't a teenager at all. He's 56, but his passion for interactive entertainment, as video game industry officials prefer to call it, isn't all that unusual. A recent survey by the Entertainment Software Association found that 19 percent of video gamers are 50 or older, up from 9 percent in 1999.
Baby boomers "are more technologically savvy than previous generations," says Carolyn Rauch, a senior vice president of the trade group. "They're more inclined to try the games and take gaming with them as they age."
Older players seem to be attracted to games involving strategy and historical simulations, rather than the gory shoot-'em-ups often favored by younger players, which mostly emphasize hand-eye coordination. Sure, O'Hare is partial to EverQuest as well as StarCraft, an interactive science-fiction game, and Ghost Recon, a game full of secret missions and high-tech weaponry. But he also goes for Railroad Tycoon, a historical simulation in which players pretend to be early-1900s industrialists.
Increasingly, game developers are targeting an older slice of the market with such entries as the Brothers in Arms series—World War II simulations whose complex characters and story lines make them crosses between games and action movies.
"What we've done is create a video game for adults that acts as a sort of time machine," says John Antal, 50, a retired U.S. Army colonel who works for Gearbox Software, which developed the Brothers in Arms games. "You get to step back in time and see what it was like to be at Normandy on D-Day."
Older players have become such an important slice of the U.S. market—which racked up sales of $7.3 billion in 2004 and is growing fast—that MTV recently hired Barbara St. Hilaire, a 69-year-old grandmother from Cleveland, to review games as a "senior" correspondent for the network.
"I used to think I was unique," St. Hilaire, whose 22-year-old grandson chronicles her gaming exploits in a blog, recently told Washingtonpost.com. "But after the blog started, I've met a lot of folks my age who game just as much as I do."
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