Whenever somebody hears the word « computer games » the picture that comes in his mind is a 12-16 years old boy obsessed with noisy and coloured video games, spending lots of hours in front of his computer or Xbox.
However, not all gamers are like that. Lately, we hear complaints from youngsters that literally do not have room in front of their computers because of their, well, mothers playing Mahjong, Zuma or other video game that attract women more than men. The demographics of games’ players have changed lately, and it seems that now 50% of Britain’s video games players are women.
Although they recognise their attraction to more peaceful games that promote collaboration rather than competitions (like Facebook’s Farmville), the numbers of women playing violent games seems to also increase daily. From Need for Speed to FPS games, women kinda play its all. We might think that they are using games as great methods for relaxation, when stress comes into play, however this would be available for a 15-30 minutes round of gaming, thus there are both women and men spending tens of hours in front of a catchy game.
Contrary to men, women do not like to admit they like playing video games, though the ones that admit it say it is only a distressful method for 10-30 minutes/day. 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 2 hours, the amount of time spent in front of a video games is not really that important, what is important though is that the ratio of women playing computer games increases day by day, and, as we were saying above, it reached somewhere around 50% of UK’s gamers. That is a really impressive percentage, right ?