Earlier this week Forbes.com posted an article delving into the findings of a survey conducted by Piper Jaffray on teen gaming habits. Apparently of the 600 high school teenagers spoken to, 80% planned to cut down on gaming, while 70% indicated that their interest in videogames was on the wane.
These findings should be treated with caution, though, for two important reasons:
1. The videogame industry is in a state of transition. The current hardware is at the very end of its lifespan, while the next-generation is yet to really establish itself. It could just be that the survey respondents are tired of PS3, Xbox and Game Cube...
2. Teenagers sometimes lie.
But let's say it's true, and it's global - certainly, in Japan, videogames are not as popular as they once were with youngsters (earlier this year, a Newsweek article suggested that Japanese console-software sales had shrunk from $3.4 billion in 1998 to $2.2 billion in 2005, a 35 percent drop). What would happen if videogame publishers made a seismic shift in their target demographic, from teens to mid-twenties and beyond?
We could perhaps kiss a teary goodbye to the urban mod-'em-up street racer, welcoming instead, a new era of driving games based around navigating your MPV through Swindon on a busy Monday morning with the kids to drop off and the GPS on the blink. We may also have to face a future without rap star/wrestling crossovers and gangsta adventures - a future of Neighbourhood Watch sims in which the gamer lurks behind twitching lace curtains phoning the police every time someone walks past wearing a hoodie.
EA might be forced to cease production of its 'Street' brand extensions, launching FIFA Executive Kickabout, where players take part in good-humored five-a-side tournaments against virtual workmates on a spotless and well flood-lit all-weather court attached to an exclusive gym complex. SSX would become a skiing simulator in which upper middle class families get the choice of staying with the masses in a crowded tourist resort or venturing daringly off-piste on the Minturn Mile.
Sony will follow-up the already twenties-centric Sing Star: Eighties with Sing Star: Dinner Party, boasting a collection of inoffensive soul, jazz and blues numbers from the likes of Norah Jones and Corrine Bailey Rae. Tekken and Soul Calibre will be stripped of tricky special moves and combos - there will, instead, be three moves: 'kick', 'punch' and 'Lets talk it through over a glass of Bells, frankly we're being ridiculous'.
Or will nothing change? Do we all become teenagers with a joypad in our hands?
