[bilbo0s]

"...This could explain why young females are not influenced as drastically by the same leisure luxury..."

Or...

Maybe young women just don't like video games? Let's be honest here, most of the "hobby" type video games that require dedicated time to be allocated to them are not filled with content that women like to consume. I'd wager that the male/female split in a game like CoD is nowhere near 50/50. (Even though many in the video game industry claim it to be.)

Add to that the fact that many young women likely wouldn't want to fire up PUBG, CoD, or Fortnite and have obscenities hurled at them...

and it's pretty clear why women seem to be less interested in that content.

I think a more helpful strategy would be to attempt to discover why older MEN seem to spend less time in these pursuits than younger men? This might shed some light on characteristics specific to younger men that would explain why they love these sorts of activities so much.

That answer might be a whole lot more pedestrian than we'd hope for. ie - Younger men just have more time. (No kids). Or it could be truly novel, and provide some great insights into human psychology. (But more probably, it's somewhere in the middle.)

[pjc50]

Women are 52% of gamers, even if they don't like those particular genres and certainly don't like the nastier kind of competition: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/18/52-per...

Older men vs younger men: cohort effect? if you're over 40-50ish you didn't quite grow up with games.

[CaptSpify]

I'm speculating in a subject I don't know all that well, but....

Aren't women-focused games generally less long-term engaging than male-focused games?

At least in my experience, the games that I perceive women generally want to play are more "5 minutes here and there" type games vs "3 hours straight" type games. So perhaps there are more women playing games, but they individually spend less time doing it?

Does anyone have stats on this either way?

[skybrian]

In that age range we grew up with classic video games and the first personal computers.

Space Invaders and the Atari 2600 came out in 1977. A 50 year old would have 10 years old then.

I'm a bit younger than that and grew up with Apple II, Commodore 64, Amiga, Mac Plus, and so on. Many of the nostalgic references in Ready Player One were from around then.

[UK-Al05]

A more interesting job is my first thought as to why older men don't use video games.

When my job unsatisfying I do tend to resort to video games to compensate.

[majormajor]

Older men golf or (if not quite as old) play basketball. :) Physical games have much more immediate stamina limits, for starters, in terms of time-spent comparisons. Thinking more about golf, that one has more of an economic limiter than basketball or video games. Perhaps there's a dangerous sweet spot that games are hitting - cheap enough that you don't have to work a ton, attractive enough that you don't want to. Which would result in a different discussion of if that's good or bad.

Either way, you still have a primarily-male competitive activity being a huge thing for older demographics, which is interesting. The "is it upbringing or nature" question around sports participation by gender is an old one, my hunch is that video games is just the modern version.

The 30-to-40 generation is in the middle; gaming for a while was a much more in-person thing pre-universal-internet-access. So that probably resulted in different habits as life more and more interrupted the ability to throw LAN parties together.

[trs80]

> Maybe young women just don't like video games?

Perhaps this can be a contributing factor as well. Problem is, I mentioned this in my original statement. Did you not see? Doesn't have to be either-or, you know.

>discover why older MEN seem to spend less time in these pursuits than younger men

Maybe they got jobs, had children, etc. Just speaking from experience. As an adult I have less time for games nowadays.

[watwut]

I haven't seen anyone claim that women and men play cod 50/50. The claim "many in the video game industry" had was that women play a lot more videogames of you count all videogames including candy crush and farmvile. Which is true. Women play games much more then CoD ratio of players would suggest.

You literally took the game with worst male female ratio and use it as general argument about who plays games in general.