The Profile of a Gamer

So what is a gamer? In some respects it is a little unfair to group a diversegroup of people into a single title when the only unifying thing about them is just that they play games. However for various reasons, it does help to understand who plays games. Originally ‘gamer’ was used to describe people who played paper role-playing games but the term has broadened as the video games has grown, into a term to identify people who are fans of playing computer games. As a categorisation this is a new phenomena and so understanding its boundaries is an uncertain subject yet there clearly exists a group within society who identify with this tag. While there is still debate over what gamers are (and are not) but emerging findings suggest that they are not the lonely figure as stereotyped in other media forms but are very social, often helping others within their arena and also influencing the media consumption of others around them.

- A gamer can be further sub-categorised into forms such as ‘Casual’ or ‘Hardcore’. - Gamers tend to be younger (the younger the age group, the more of them play games) - About 25% of UK adults can be considered ‘gamers’. - The vast majority use Facebook to both communicate and play games (86% of US gamersaccording to one survey, I expect this to be the same here too, especially as the age group gets younger, the number using Facebook grows again.

There are lots more facts and figures about gaming and gamers on Tomas' blog.