More Than a Game

World Without Oil

It’s been reported that the digital game industry is now bigger than the film industry, and dollar for dollar, this has been debated. What can no longer be debated is that, eyeball for eyeball, more people now play games than watch films.

A study released by a marketing research group reported that more Americans play video games than go to the movies. Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell claims that there are more FarmVille players than there are Twitter accounts: 75 million players per month. And with the explosion of mobile games such as Angry Birds and Doodle Jump for iPhone and social games like Mafia Wars on Facebook, games are taking up even more of our time. In a recent presentation at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, game designer and Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, Jane McGonigal said that by the age of 21, a majority of kids will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games. And it’s not only kids playing games anymore. In fact, another recent study by PopCap Games, a popular social gaming company, found that the average player of online social games is a 43-year-old woman. So much for the stereotypical image of a gamer being a kid in his basement mowing down zombies.

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Tags: documentary, Facebook, farmville, gamers, gaming, mafia wars, video games