Get in the Game

Chapter 3Why Do We Game?: Gamer Motivations and Psychology

Gaming was described as a strategic blind spot in earlier chapters. This spot comes from a multitude of sources, but the biggest and most durable of them are misconceptions around who or what constitutes the gaming audience.

The problem is that many of the existing conceptions around the gaming audience are reductive because they've largely been structured around demographic explanations. This is in part because historically marketers have loved to rely on basic demographic descriptions to account for a great many things. When you strip away the complexities, this is pretty much how ~$70 billion worth of legacy TV advertising was sold for many years. Despite all the “advancements” in understanding consumers in a digital advertising landscape, and all the consumer data captured therein, this trend continues today.

The tale of those demographics is one of the few things that the larger business world can apparently agree on. It's not hard to find a number of oddly similar descriptions of the gaming audience in business‐related literature on the topic, even if (somewhat ironically) the reference is a counterpoint for what the gaming audience no longer is: young men in a dark basement, hands stained with Cheetos dust, shirt soaked in pizza grease, pimple‐marked adolescent features highlighted from the dim glow of a TV, fully under their command from in‐hand controller. Various descriptions of the gaming audience continue ...