homo ludens
Wii-stations in elderly homes, adults playing Nintendo DS Braintraining on the train or during coffee break … digital game and console developers are moving beyond their focus on teenagers and young adults as their target audiences (cf. Nintendo’s blue ocean strategy) and rediscovering the broader dimensions of play. Homo ludens is in all of us.
We engage in gameplay for various reasons, way beyond it merely being ‘fun’ (fun is what ‘sells’ it, but it is not the thing in itself). The human mindset is often much more utilitarian than that. The ancient Greek used gameplay to prepare for battle (armies around the world still stage wargames and simulations for the same purpose), teachers use games to teach children new skills and transfer knowledge, elderly play crossword puzzles to stay mentally fit or cards to keep their social network together. Games can take on many forms and serve various purposes, hence appeal to a wide variety of audiences.
The new messages the gaming industry is broadcasting are no longer merely about ‘gaming is fun’, but shifting to ‘gaming keeps you fit’, ‘gaming is healthy’, ‘gaming makes you smart’, etc. A message we shall be hearing a lot more in the near future will undoubtedly be: gaming helps you solve a problem (cf. Games With A Purpose, see also this article).
On a sidenote: The past few years, most attention seems to have gone to first person shooters, multiplayer rpg’s, etc. : action and strategy. More story-based gaming, which produced some of history’s most successful titles (Remember Sierra’s Quest series, the Miller brothers’ Myst series, but to mention a few) appear to have moved out of sight (often-mentioned reasons for being commercially less interesting: play-once, no tournament opportunities, weak multi-player dimension, lengthy development, …).
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