Why Is The Video Game Industry Making A Big Mistake By Ignoring Older Adults?

In April, AARP held its first sports summit at its headquarters in Washington D.C. to many people in and out video game industry, the phenomenon may seem head-scratching. An organization focused on advocating for people in the over 50 demographic talking about video games, generally considered a medium for young people?

But, holding an AARP––and the games industry––summit actually makes perfect sense. Nearly half of people 50 and older play video games, according to a recent report from AARP, and about half of those said they play daily. And this is not an insignificant part of the gaming audience.

According to AARP, more than 52 million people over the age of 50 are playing video games, which is nearly a quarter of players in America when cross-checked with the Entertainment Software Association’s numbers.

However, the game industry still routinely ignores or fails to design games with older adults in mind, says Bob De Schutter, a game designer and associate professor at Northeastern University. The majority of players, 38%, are between the ages of 18 and 34, but that doesn’t mean older adults aren’t playing the latest Zelda game and getting something worthwhile out of it.

“If you look at all the literature that exists on sports, sports are what we learn from … and all of a sudden once you’re 16, you’re supposed to stop doing that?” D Shuter says. “Do you think when you’re 30 you know everything you need to know? Do you think when you’re 40 you’ve met everyone who wanna know? Do you think the world stops changing when you’re 50? Not at all. That’s exactly what sports do for us.”

Older adults are already playing games and, importantly for the industry, spending a lot of money on them. According to AARP’s 2019 report, gamers age 50 and older spent $3.5 billion on video games in the first half of 2019 alone. While that’s a fraction of the $35.4 billion in US sports revenue that year, it’s potential territory for an industry obsessed with growth.

De Schutter called the AARP Games summit, which he presented, a “historic milestone” for the conversation around older adults in games, but acknowledged there is still work to do.

Even now, when people inside or outside the sports industry talk about sports for players 50 and older, they tend to narrow it down to health and brain sports, de Schutter says. But most older adults are playing popular mobile games, puzzle games, and other types of “casual” games that are generally more accessible and involve players of all ages.

De Schutter says there’s also a small segment of older adults who enjoy playing first-person shooters and action games. The problem isn’t that older adults aren’t interested in these 50+ player games; is that there are significant accessibility challenges that make it difficult for them to enjoy these games.

The controls can be complicated and the tutorials that are meant to onboard new players can be unintuitive. In recent years, major steps have been taken by some of the biggest names in the industry to make sports more accessible, but there is still work to be done, says De Schutter.

The content of many AAA games also does not necessarily appeal to older audiences. Many of the industry’s biggest games such as “Call of Duty” and “Assassin’s Creed” are rated M for “mature,” but don’t necessarily fully figure it out to provide a mature experience outside of the violence and profanity. What is the meaning of

“They want that type of experience, but at the same time everything is from a power fantasy that’s also a very adolescent power fantasy,” says de Schutter.

Celia Pierce, a professor of game design at Northeastern, says the issue goes back to what kind of games are being made and who is in the room when those decisions are being made.

“The game industry had a manufactured idea of ​​the player and that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says Pierce. “They go, ‘Young people play games,’ and then they make games for young people and then guess who plays the games they made?”

Pierce says there are also concrete benefits to involving older adults in gaming.

“There is an epidemic of loneliness that is especially bad among older adults, and one of the things we are looking at is creating social games for older adults,” Pierce says.

How does the industry begin to make games more accessible to players over the age of 50?

“The way the industry fixes this is with inclusive development teams that bring older players into the ideation, that bring older players in to brainstorm with them and see what they’re really interested in. and build their designs around a wider demographic than just youth audiences.” says De Schutter.

Another reform is addressing the under-representation of older adults in the industry itself. According to AARP, only 13% of game developers are 45 or older, which limits the perspectives those in the room decide about design in the first place.

de shutter says Well written The spread of crunch culture in the sports industry creates conditions that either prematurely end careers due to burnout or make it even more difficult to work as an older adult in the industry. But the young adult-skewing nature of the industry also creates an environment where older developers “resort to lying on their resumes because they’re trying to act like they were less accomplished.”

Part of the solution is to introduce ideas about accessibility and age-inclusive design into game designers, something that De Schutter and a team of faculty at Northeastern are aiming for. Along with Celia Pierce, Caspar Hertveld, Leanne Chukowski, and Miso Kim, De Schutter created the University’s Sports and Aging Group.

“At the end of the day, I am now coaching students to think about sports in a way that is completely breaking ground compared to every other sports program out there,” de Schutter says. “Sports has meaning in people’s lives, and that’s what we want. We want people to be empowered and feel like it’s a meaningful contribution to their lives.”