Average Gamer is 37 Years Old

65 here so I'm one of those folks that help 'raise the average'. :D

There are a LOT of older folks in the Flight Sim community, which is probably included in that.

I know that the RAF662, which is a Combat Flight Sim oriented group has quite a few members that are 60+. Our oldest member is in his 80's.

Another member who is no longer active was a P-47 pilot in WWII. Even though he was in his 80's he would was a BEAST in a dog fight.

I also do HL, HL2, Fallout: New Vegas, ect. I'm not all that big in playing online for anything other than the flight sims.
 
03grandam said:
I'm 41, with friends that are between 33-44 so I can see this as being true :).
Click to expand...

Ditto here...

I'm 41, and most of the people I play video games with are around my age...

But, that's on the PC, I truly believe the average console gamer would be younger due to it's price point. A gaming PC is just too expensive for "kids" to have, where a console is a fixed price with no upgrades required....
 
I had to laugh at the study at the end.

I can see it now:
Some guy starts polling moms in a mall: "How do you feel about the effect ultraviolent and sexually explicit games have on young people? How do you feel about the avalibility of these games? Would you support a ban on them? How about the games your children are playing; do you protect them from these types of games?"
Now what is any self respecting mom gonna answer these questions with? Shes not gonna admit she has no idea what her kids are playing after saying she vehemently opposes these games!
So she gives her churchy answers, and then proceeds to lead junior arround the mall, never taking the time to glance at his PSP when she hears: "FATALITY!"
 
I'm pushing 36 and I still game, although if DRM keeps becoming a problem and the PC keeps getting more horrible console ports. Then I doubt I will be a gamer by 37. Well, if you don't consider my SNES, PSX, and PS2 RPG collections and my weekend D&D games....or my Warhammer 40k.....ok, I will probably still be a gamer.
 
I'm 44. I game on the Wii with my kids and sometimes on PC multiplayer games with my son. Like others, I started out with Pong and the Atari console and also spent a fair amount of time at the arcade (Gorf and Robotron were two of my favs). I moved on to PC gaming with the Wing Commander series , MechWarrior series and flight sims. Right now I am now an avid FPS player (can't wait for BF3) but I also enjoy games like Mass Effect.

I can't imagine ever giving up games completely...
 
Personally I have been a computer gamer starting with the first Atari 2600 in '79.
From there I bought a Atari 400 8 bit computer, and gamed mainly mail order shareware.
In the late 80s the Nintendo NES was the thing, after that I went to a Sega Genesis. In '91 I finally was able to afford a PC. That was a 486DX 33Mhz. It cost $2500. This was gaming easy street because of BBS based shareware.
 
I am a 40 year gamer who started playing back in the Intellivision days. :D

I enjoy playing with my kids on the Wii and Xbox, but I leave the DS to them and the computer to me.


I can't decide if my 39 year old wife would be considered a "gamer" or not. She loves Angry Birds and Peggle on the iPhone, but she doesn't even game on the consoles.
 
The article is dead wrong, IMO. The average age of people who pay for games might be 37, but the average gamer, who isn't paying for games, one way or another, is much younger, Plus, the "mean" age for gamers will be older than the "median" age for games, because of old folks like me,
 
I'm 20, so im one of the younger people here and ive been gaming since the 90's as a kid, never experienced the arcade and NES eras though.:(
 
Yeah, so I must have started playing video games when I was 5 or so in the mid 80's at my friends houses. They all had NES systems, so that's what I started on.

A year later we had a NES System in our house. It came with Ice Climbers and for a long time that was the only game we had. as I got older we added games to the library at the pace of one or two a year, and I slowly started losing interest in the NES and consoles in general.

By age 11 I really wanted a Commodore 64. Lots of my friends had them, but my parents never obliged. By 12 or so I had my first PC, a 286 with one meg ram, a 10 meg hard drive and one 5.25" floppy drive. I never looked back to consoles, considering them "for kids".

Eventually - towards the end of my 286's life I found out about overclocking. 8Mhz became 12 Mhz (50% overclock!) and the chips in those days didn't even have heatsinks or fans.

At some point I upgraded to 486 SX 25mhz (SX = no FPU), which also came without a heatsink. Some white paste, and a tiny heatsink and fan later, and it was running at 50mhz. my second 50% overclock :p

Throughout my teens in the 90s Commodores Amiga was very popular among my friends. many had Amiga 500's or 1200's. i always stuck with the PC though.

Later down the road I got a Pentium 100Mhz (wouldn't overclock at all) which was followed by an upgrade to a pre MMX Pentium 150Mhz, which overclocked to 200Mhz. At some point it got a Matrox Mystique 3D (a pre Voodoo 3d card that worked with only 1 game that came with the card) and later an upgrade to a 6mb Voodoo 1.

The Dooms, the Quakes, Duke Nukem 3d, and finally Half Life came and went.

Then came college. These were the Counter-Strike years. The much anticipated Athlons and Durons came out. (I was reading about these all summer before they were launched. couldn't wait for them) I wound up with a Duron 650 which overclocked to 900mhz and a Geforce 2 GTS.

Then it becomes a blur. Summer jobs funded more upgrades than I can remember, (including an Asetek Vapochill which I used to crush 3 CPU's). Towards the end of college I think I had a Thunderbird core 1800+ and a Geforce 3 TI500, if memory serves.

My first professional job funded an upgrade to my first 64bit CPU, a socket 754 Athlon 64 with 1 gig of ram and a Geforce 6800 GT. Then as soon as I finished building it I got caught up in work, parties, dance nights, dating, you know.. life. I completely stopped playing games for over 5 years.

In 2009 I decided it was finally time to put the geriatric Athlon 64 to rest. I built a core i7-920 system but since I no longer played any games, I just put a Geforce 9400GT in it. Well then one day I fired up Civilization IV, and the spark was reignited. Before long I got a Radeon 5750 so I could catch up on Half Life 2 and the episodes.

Then came a GTX470 and Metro 2033 in 2010. Lots more Counter-Strike as well. This was followed by a GTX580 and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series.

All the while my Fiance was getting pissed cause I was playing games and not spending all my free time with her. When we started dating, I didn't play any games at all, so she wasn't used to it :p

Now I am 31. I have the same SFF stock clocked i7-920 and have downgraded to a GTX460 (the SFF power supply couldn't handle the GTX580 very well. I'm looking forward to going full size ATX again, with a 990FX board, bulldozer and a couple of 580's in SLI...

And there you have it, my complete video/computer game history. I haven't played any game on a console since probably 1991 when I was 11. I felt like I outgrew them then and have never looked back.

Call me a curmudgeon if you will, but I still dislike terms like "gaming" and "gamer".

I am a responsible adult. Sometimes I play games. I am not a "gamer" and "gaming" is not one of my hobbies.

These made up neologisms just sound plain dumb to me, and I refuse to use them. :p
 
Zarathustra[H];1037359384 said:
Yeah, so I must have started playing video games when I was 5 or so in the mid 80's at my friends houses. They all had NES systems, so that's what I started on.

A year later we had a NES System in our house. It came with Ice Climbers and for a long time that was the only game we had. as I got older we added games to the library at the pace of one or two a year, and I slowly started losing interest in the NES and consoles in general.

By age 11 I really wanted a Commodore 64. Lots of my friends had them, but my parents never obliged. By 12 or so I had my first PC, a 286 with one meg ram, a 10 meg hard drive and one 5.25" floppy drive. I never looked back to consoles, considering them "for kids".

Eventually - towards the end of my 286's life I found out about overclocking. 8Mhz became 12 Mhz (50% overclock!) and the chips in those days didn't even have heatsinks or fans.

At some point I upgraded to 486 SX 25mhz (SX = no FPU), which also came without a heatsink. Some white paste, and a tiny heatsink and fan later, and it was running at 50mhz. my second 50% overclock :p

Throughout my teens in the 90s Commodores Amiga was very popular among my friends. many had Amiga 500's or 1200's. i always stuck with the PC though.

Later down the road I got a Pentium 100Mhz (wouldn't overclock at all) which was followed by an upgrade to a pre MMX Pentium 150Mhz, which overclocked to 200Mhz. At some point it got a Matrox Mystique 3D (a pre Voodoo 3d card that worked with only 1 game that came with the card) and later an upgrade to a 6mb Voodoo 1.

The Dooms, the Quakes, Duke Nukem 3d, and finally Half Life came and went.

Then came college. These were the Counter-Strike years. The much anticipated Athlons and Durons came out. (I was reading about these all summer before they were launched. couldn't wait for them) I wound up with a Duron 650 which overclocked to 900mhz and a Geforce 2 GTS.

Then it becomes a blur. Summer jobs funded more upgrades than I can remember, (including an Asetek Vapochill which I used to crush 3 CPU's). Towards the end of college I think I had a Thunderbird core 1800+ and a Geforce 3 TI500, if memory serves.

My first professional job funded an upgrade to my first 64bit CPU, a socket 754 Athlon 64 with 1 gig of ram and a Geforce 6800 GT. Then as soon as I finished building it I got caught up in work, parties, dance nights, dating, you know.. life. I completely stopped playing games for over 5 years.

In 2009 I decided it was finally time to put the geriatric Athlon 64 to rest. I built a core i7-920 system but since I no longer played any games, I just put a Geforce 9400GT in it. Well then one day I fired up Civilization IV, and the spark was reignited. Before long I got a Radeon 5750 so I could catch up on Half Life 2 and the episodes.

Then came a GTX470 and Metro 2033 in 2010. Lots more Counter-Strike as well. This was followed by a GTX580 and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series.

All the while my Fiance was getting pissed cause I was playing games and not spending all my free time with her. When we started dating, I didn't play any games at all, so she wasn't used to it :p

Now I am 31. I have the same SFF stock clocked i7-920 and have downgraded to a GTX460 (the SFF power supply couldn't handle the GTX580 very well. I'm looking forward to going full size ATX again, with a 990FX board, bulldozer and a couple of 580's in SLI...

And there you have it, my complete video/computer game history. I haven't played any game on a console since probably 1991 when I was 11. I felt like I outgrew them then and have never looked back.

Call me a curmudgeon if you will, but I still dislike terms like "gaming" and "gamer".

I am a responsible adult. Sometimes I play games. I am not a "gamer" and "gaming" is not one of my hobbies.

These made up neologisms just sound plain dumb to me, and I refuse to use them. :p
Click to expand...

Wouldn't be called a curmudgeon be worse than being called a gamer? ;-)
 
snowcat said:
I am a 40 year gamer who started playing back in the Intellivision days. :D
I enjoy playing with my kids on the Wii and Xbox, but I leave the DS to them and the computer to me.
I can't decide if my 39 year old wife would be considered a "gamer" or not. She loves Angry Birds and Peggle on the iPhone, but she doesn't even game on the consoles.
Click to expand...

LOL!
Yeah, a gamer chick is one that like to play the same games you do. Now that is cool (as long as she is hot to you at least)
But if a gamer is just someone that like computer games than Grandma is a gamer since she loves to play solitaire or other computer card games.
 
Not surprising. And it wouldn't be surprising if the avg. age moved to the right as older people get into gaming. Maybe Baby Boomers, with their newly found free time?
 
Wow an accurate report, I'm 38 and have my private xbox and PC for my "boys games"
On the TV we have a Wii, PS3 and 360 and I play Little Big Planet, Mario etc with my 9 yr old girl.

I also shield her from any content that I deem unsuitable, how about that!
 
39 here and I try to play something everyday. My step-son is 13 and we play MW2 whenever possible and he beats the crap out of me!

Oh, and BTW, he knows it is not real and does not want to kill real people.
 
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