Advice to Over-40 Crowd: Start Playing Videogames

Kevin Maney writes: Maybe it's time to stop being surprised when studies show that videogame fans are normal, sociable, successful -- and in fact are the future of business. Like, duh -- most of the population under A Certain Age grew up with videogames. Anyone who's paid any attention should know that games of the past five to ten years have become something people do with friends as much or more than something they do alone. One look at the Dance Dance Revolution craze of a couple years ago should convince you of that.

One of the more recent realizations is that if a whole generational wave plays videogames, the aging generation that doesn't is going to have to adopt to the gamers, not the other way around. And studies and books have been saying that's going to alter the way people learn, do their jobs and manage. In 2004, in Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever, author John Beck and Mitchell Wade found all sorts of ways gamers would be a different breed at work.

For instance, in video games, you're always the star. Once in the workforce, Beck and Wade found, gamers want a chance to be a star. Boomers might take that badly, thinking they have a bunch of prima donnas in the office. But gamers don't want to just do their jobs -- they want to lead and stand out. And that can be a good thing.

In games, there's always a solution -- you just have to find it. So gamers, as a generation, are more willing to try anything and pound on a problem, believing there is some way to solve it.

A more recent book on this is Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business, by David Edery and Ethan Mollick. They generally come to the same conclusion -- that gamers are in the workforce to stay, and they'll change work and companies in profound ways. (Edery is an Xbox exec, so he probably HOPES so.) At the beginning of the book, the authors offer this bit of perspective that may be helpful to 50-year-olds wondering how this could be true:

"The games we play when we are children, be they Little League baseball or cops and robbers, prepare us for the more serious games we play as adults," the authors write.

For a broader look at this, try Don Tapscott's Grown Up Digital, which is a study of the generation that grew up not just with videogames, but the Internet as well.

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