How much do you reckon you’ve spent on games in your life? A few quid? A few hundred? Absolutely no idea?
That final option was my immediate answer, and probably yours too, so the results of a recent survey by online gaming community GameStrata may shock you. Brace yourselves.
The average gamer will spend more than US$30,500 between the ages of 18 and 48. Yes, thirty thousand dollars. That’s more than £15,000. On video games.
Now that figure covers both games and gaming hardware, and the survey does only encompass a community of dedicated online gamers, but it’s still astonishing when lumped together like that. I could have bought a new car, put a deposit down on a house, or enoyed the holiday of a lifetime. Instead I took Bromley to League One mid-table mediocrity and shot a few pigeons in Liberty City. Depressing, isn’t it.
We’ve seen some pretty ridiculous systems at PC Pro aimed at gamers. Without naming the main culprits, it’s obvious that plenty of marketing departments think that those who play games on their PCs want a machine that looks like a Transformer after a Pimp My Ride makeover.
However, Acer appeared to have wandered into the gaming PC market and taken first prize in the competition for making a gaudy, over-the-top garish machine with this, their new Predator desktop. This orange creation may pack in some decent specs - the top configuration includes a QX9650 CPU and two 9800 GX2 graphics cards in SLI configuration. It’s a little bit ludicrous and, for all of its vaguely embarrasing styling, part of me wants one very badly indeed.
I’ve just spent the greater part of this week writing a flash games roundup for the web, which you can find here. Not only is doing stuff like this and getting paid for it an utterly brilliant part of my job, but it also got me thinking.
And the first thing it made me thunk was this: everybody, no matter what they say, is a gamer.
If, like me, you are fed up of the seemingly continual string of easy headliner stories in the red top and serious press alike which blame video games for the increasing problems of violence, aggression and crime in society, then you will probably rather like this posting. You see one Patrick Kierkegaard of the University of Essex has suggested that there is very little evidence that this is the case. His research, published in the International Journal of Liability and Scientific Enquiry yesterday, actually found quite the opposite: that there is a real argument to be made for such games reducing real world violence.
The really interesting thing being that his research involved actually reading and analysing all the previous research that had been done on the subject of video games and links to violence, the very same studies that ‘experts’ are quick to call upon and which journalists quote from when screaming for the likes of Grand Theft Auto to be banned. Kierkegaard admits that the GTA effect, where graphical realism is really quite intense, is becoming more important and most gamers look forward to each release precisely because of the violence, the crime and yes even the sexual or drugs related plots. However, there remains a huge difference between visiting a virtual prostitute and a real life one, for a start your crotch is likely to remain much less itchy and no actual women will have been exploited in the process (sits back and awaits angry comments from the bra burning brigade and the manbag men arguing that somehow a pretend prostitute does exactly that) and there remains a huge difference between committing a virtual crime and a real one.
How much do you reckon you’ve spent on games in your life? A few quid? A few hundred? Absolutely no idea?
