Gender and Gamers

In any industry, target audience is crucial, so by specifically targeting an audience we can design our game specifically for them.

Our audience? 

In the United Kingdom there are approximately 31.3million gamers, according to the Todays Gamers Survey (TNS Global). Although TNS states that there are over 31million gamers it also states that 73% of the British population plays games, this kind of confuses me because 31 million is a little too low for 73% of the population of Britain so this source may be incorrect or a typo. The base for this survey is 8 years and older who have access to the Internet.

Today's Gamers Survey, United Kingdom Nationl Gamers Survey 2009, TNS Global

As you can see, from graph A, there is an obvious direct correlation between the player age and playing video games. The younger the player, the percentage of play becomes greater. One possible cause for the correlation is the growth of digital media (such as the Internet) becoming so widely accessible.

Gender

The discussion of designing female-targeted games - for the untapped female gamer market - or whether "gender-neutral" games should be the ultimate goal is interesting to me. Should we as designers try to make our games marketable for the target audience of girls? I would of course agree that we should strive for both genders rather than one so that the game appeals to both. Contrary to this there are certain genre of games that target a specific gender and also age. 

From graph B, we can see that there is really no correlation between age and average number of hours spent per week on games. What we see in from graph B is that females generally play less hours per week than males.

We can see already that the percentage of game playing males and females are somewhat equal, so from my view the Games Industry has already tapped in to that market and only time will tell if the average hours per week of play equal out.