Virtual Reality And Virtual Worlds Should Pay Attention To Older Participants

At the Game Developer’s Conference 2016 Professor Bob De Schutter of Applied Game Design at Miami University, gave an excellent presentation : Beyond Ageism: Designing Meaningful Games for an Older Audience.

Now you may be thinking that virtual worlds are not games, they aren’t, but they contain games and the mechanics of accessing virtual worlds are game like. The presentation Professor Bob De Schutter makes has themes that apply to virtual worlds too and platform providers as well as content creators would do well to pay heed to what he says.

That’s before we get to the sort of games older people play. Professor Bob De Schutter presented research from Quantic Foundry regarding the games people over 50 play. The top three, by gender :

Women over 50

1. FarmVille
2. Glitch
3. Second Life

Men over 50

1. Railroad Tycoon
2. Second Life
3. Microsoft Solitaire

This tells us that a certain virtual world that many of us are familiar with is popular amongst over 50’s. Many of us already knew that Second Life was popular amongst a more mature audience. Plenty of over 50’s also inhabit the likes of OpenSim, High Fidelity and more.

Now, as virtual worlds have an older crowd, the rest of the presentation makes for interesting viewing, it covers issues such as accessibility, ageism and the fact that older gamers want to be challenged, not patronised.

For example, in terms of accessibility, as we get older we are all likely to find some sort of disability in our lives, be it reduced visibility, problems with our hands or other disabilities. Building content with accessibility in mind is an important consideration as we move forward. Larger fonts, different coloured backgrounds etc. One piece of advice here is that it helps if these are options, rather than one size fits all solutions.

Research suggests that older adults prefer games with exploration, social interaction and less focus on reflexes. The latter is possibly because our reflexes get slower as we age and therefore we’re likely to find games that rely on fast reflexes a tad frustrating.

One really important subject that is covered in this presentation but is not really covered as widely as it should be outside of the presentation is that of ageism. Far too many companies seem to think that older people are not interested in games, they think we all do crosswords, play Sudoku or just want brain games. This is simply not true.

Now one of the reasons why there’s less attention paid to older participants may be due to the age of Game Developers, as the presentation reveals details of a GDC survey from 2014 :

• Over 50 – 1%
• 40 – 50 – 16%
• 30 – 39 – 44%
• 25 – 29 – 25%
• Under 25 – 14%

So the percentage of older developers is low, yet in virtual worlds, we do have older content creators. The number of older participants in gaming, virtual worlds and virtual reality is going to grow, there’s an audience there, they want to be challenged, they want to interact and they want to participate.

Younger gamers and participants of course also need to be appealed to, they have disposable income, they charge through experiences and they are actively engaged but there’s also an older audience, for whom indie devs in particular may want to pay attention to.

Virtual World makers, Virtual Reality makes and independent content creators, should all get something useful out of this presentation. There’s plenty more than I’ve covered in the presentation which I linked to at the start of this article, it’s just over an hour long but if you have the time, it’s well worth viewing.

Ageism is something we should all want to fight against, especially as a lot of us will be in the category where it strikes us at some point. I’m still a few years off the over 50 bracket, but I can see it coming over the hill. I can also see that I will still want to game and experience virtual reality and virtual worlds as I get over the hill, don’t forget about us as you think about the content you want to create.