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The Daily Grind: Are MMO gamers aging out of the genre?
In a recent report, Resident Evil developer Capcom claimed that its playerbase's average age is inching upward and its core users are in their late 30s and 40s, making for the "increasing possibility that some percentage of the existing users will outgrow games altogether." The Resident Evil games aren't MMOs, of course, but journalists and commenters have been suggesting the same pattern for the MMORPG genre for years as a way to explain everything from the rise of "accessible" MMOs to the reduction of grindy time-consuming gameplay to themes seemingly catering to those darn kids on our lawn. Perhaps armchair demographers are wrong and the future holds the promise of retirement homes filled with gaming rigs and World of Warcraft IV. What do you think -- are classic MMO gamers slowly aging out of the genre? Is MMO gaming something we "outgrow," or is it something we're ultimately pushed away from? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Second Life's generation gap
By now, if you've been keeping track of the metrics, it should come as no surprise to you that Linden Lab's virtual environment Second Life is dominated by Generation X and Baby Boomers. Generation Y (also popularly called Millennials) don't make much of a mark on the landscape of Second Life at all. While the boxing and labeling of generations in this fashion seems a little arbitrary, it is commonly done as demographers identify various key socio-cultural differences between the groups, though the edge-cases between them, of course, tend to be a bit blurry -- and everyone, of course, is an individual. The Metaverse Journal's Feldspar Epstein looks at assorted issues with the use of Second Life and education as it pertains to Millenials. In a broader social context, however, the generation gap between the Boomers/GenXers and the Millennials is starkly apparent. Millennials consistently number among the least active users of Second Life. The Baby Boomers dominate the virtual environment's usage landscape, followed closely by the Generation Xers. Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.
