dot.life

Is your granny a gamer?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 3 Nov 08, 10:16 GMT

Among the dozens of press releases which landed in my inbox last week was one with this arresting message:"A new survey reveals that a third of pensioners are keen online gamers."

Is that a story? Of course it is! The popular perception of online gamers is one of acne-scarred youths in darkened bedrooms, glued to their screens playing World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto, with an occasional pizza break.

In fact, this survey shows it's just as likely to be grandma sitting down after switching off Strictly Come Dancing for her daily Warcraft quests or a little drive-by shooting. And some of them are really addicted - the research shows that 118,000 British pensioners are online playing games for more than 15 hours a week. Wow!! It looks as though all of that feverish marketing from Nintendo and the like about spreading gaming to a new demographic is paying off.

Not so fast. This vision of wrinkled Warcrafters bears as much relation to reality as any other piece of questionable PR that lands on my desk. Look a little further down the press release and "a third of pensioners" translates into 24% of all pensioners, and 30% of state pensioners. Still, pretty impressive numbers, on the face of it. So how was this survey conducted? Well it involved "2,644 people surveyed at the end of September 2008." Sounds like a good sample - but what were they asked?

The question was this: "On average how many hours a week do you spend playing online games over your broadband internet connection?" Uh, oh, it looks as though the survey was conducted online - so all of those 2,644 respondents were people with broadband. In other words, they were among the minority of pensioners who are web users. The most recent figures from National Statistics show that 70% of people over 65 have never used the internet. So, the 24% of online pensioners supposedly playing games actually adds up to 7.2% of all pensioners.

And what about those 118,000 fanatical elderly gamers - 1% of 11.8 million UK pensioners according to the press release? Well even if you accept the extremely questionable premise that you can get a picture of the habits of the entire population from a survey like this, that number comes down to 36,000.

And what did they understand by online gaming? According to the press officer, that could include online bingo or any number of other "casual" games. Right. So we have 7% of pensioners playing anything from bingo to Sudoku to the Telegraph crossword online. Not quite such a good story.

So who is trying to sell this innumerate marketing ploy? It's a broadband comparison site - I won't name them - and their motives are pretty obvious. The website of the market research firm (again, I'm sparing their blushes) used to conduct this survey boasts: "XXX has already carried out thousands of surveys on behalf of our clients to make their brands into newspaper headlines. Simply let us know who you want to target with your campaign and let XXX take aim." It's a common tactic - conduct a survey, come up with some outlandish result, exaggerate that result in the headline on your press release and - hey presto! - your company's product gets free publicity on TV and in the newspapers.

So, while I'll admit that I've occasionally fallen for this kind of stunt in the past, I'm going to resist it this time. But don't be surprised if you pick up a paper this week and read "Secrets of the Granny Gamers."

• Permalink
• Comments