What are the stereotypes again? Strategy is for Tweed-wearing old men and Call of Duty is the province of raving high-schoolers? Well it turns out at least one of those has some truth to it. Gaming analytics consultancy Quantic Foundry has released a study of over 140,000 'Gamer Motivation Profiles' to identify how our tastes in games change as we age.
Quantic Foundry's Gamer Motivation Model splits our motivations into twelve categories, including Social, Excitement, Competition, Destruction, Strategy and Story. The most notable change with age was identified in the Competition category: both sexes' desire for competition wanes as we age, with the initially higher male competitiveness reaching parity with women past the age of 45. Next time you provoke a 15-year-old Rocket League player into a screaming fit, know that he really is as bothered by the match as he sounds.
The lingering perception of strategy as a sedate retirement home genre is nonsense. Strategy was found to be the most stable motivation with regard to age, with men driven more strongly by strategy than women across the board.
It's a mite depressing that overall Quantic Foundry discovered that no gaming motivation increases with age. Life is to blame apparently, with stuff like mortgages and screaming, competitive offspring of their own reducing the likelihood of older gamers to rate any motivation as "extremely important/enjoyable". I'm off to pwn some noobs before time strips the sweet joy out of it.
