Archive notice: This article was originally published on August 22, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Both the younger generation and older PC gamers are getting stuck on the Internet for longer and longer and devoting themselves to their parallel lives in Second Life, World of Warcraft & Co. According to a current study by Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main http://www.uni-frankfurt.de, every third online gamer plays on the net for over 180 minutes a day, reports Die Welt. The survey of 600 Internet gamers aged 13 to 35 also found that the majority are worried about their image in public. For accusations are being voiced ever more frequently that users of online games get stuck in the virtual worlds and lose touch with reality.
The subject of online games is also a focus at the Games Convention (GC) in Leipzig, which starts on Thursday. “Online games will definitely be taken up at the GC. The area is becoming an ever bigger subject, so the major publishers are also devoting themselves increasingly to online games and will present corresponding offerings,” says GC press spokesman Torsten Anke. In connection with GC Family, there will also be the opportunity to question experts in discussion rounds about the problem of online gaming addiction. However, a separate event devoted to the addiction problem is not included in the trade-fair programme, Anke adds.
There is no defined target group for online games. Gamers can be found across all occupational groups as well as in every age group. The fewest heavy gamers are found among students. Here the proportion of those who spend longer than 20 hours per week in virtual worlds is the lowest, at 21.9 percent. They are followed by self-employed people, housewives and househusbands at 33 percent, and employees at 34.9 percent. Significantly more heavy gamers are found in the group of jobseekers (52 percent), trainees (44.2 percent) and school pupils (43.6 percent).
Alongside online role-playing games and first-person shooters, parallel worlds such as Second Life http://www.secondlife.com are currently particularly popular. What they all have in common is that in recent months they have frequently been the subject of discussion in politics and the media. The debates ranged from youth-protection questions through violence issues to the risks of online addiction. The study shows that many online gamers therefore feel obliged to justify or defend their leisure activity more and more. 90 percent are of the opinion that computer games have a bad reputation.
Young people spend the most time on online gaming. In the age group of 13- to 15-year-olds, 60 percent play on the Internet for over 30 hours per week. But the older generations seem to be catching up: Those over 30 are also spending increasingly longer in front of the PC and are almost level with school pupils. Female gamers are also on the rise. Women too are spending ever longer periods with online games. According to the study, every tenth female gamer now plays for more than ten hours a day.
