“People of all ages play video games. There is no longer a ‘stereotypical game player,’ but instead a game player could be your grandparent, your boss, or even your professor.” — Jason Allaire, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at North Carolina State University and co-director of the Gains Through Gaming Lab.
Meet Alex, a 15-year-old high school student from Spokane, Washington. She’s your typical teenager in most regards – Alex is on the softball team, she loves to hang out with her friends at the mall, and she happens to be proficient with a selfie stick. And just like 59% of Americans, Alex plays video games. The thing is, our protagonist isn’t a real person, although she very well could be. Alex is an aggregate of statistical data, demographics, gaming habits and trends that represents an average gamer in 2015. As she grows up and enters new life stages, the games she chooses to play, the time she has to spare and her gaming devices of choice change, just as your habits do.
In an effort to better understand how an individual’s relationship with video games changes over time, let’s follow our theoretical model Alex throughout the course of her life – a narrative inspired by data taken from numerous surveys, studies and research – to examine how a gamer evolves as he or she ages.
