Elderly in Games
This morning’s reading of video game blogs discovered quite an interesting article by Matthew Kaplan from GameCritics.com . The article brings up how the elderly are currently portrayed in video games and touches on their minority status in protagonist roles, beyond the cliché role of the grumpy old man (using Bill from L4D in their example). In this article they ask: are we going to see more elderly heroes? The main gaming population, the kids that grew up playing the NES and Atari, are now in their thirties. Back when I was a kid I remember many games where the protaganist was a child: games like “Kid Icarus”, “The Boy and His Blob”, “Nemo’s Adventures in Dreamland”, or “Zombie’s Ate My Neighbors” and “Earthbound”. In my memory the child protagonist was a rather dominate choice of playable character, though the reasoning behind this could be simply that was the targeted demographic for video games of the time. But with the aging of the gaming population, as the article brings up, will we see larger use of elderly protagonists? Where this issue really gets me interested is in how you can create a game that has such a protagonist, coming up a game premise that would allow for, explain, and encourage the use of an elderly protagonist.
But, I digress. Kaplan’s article presents the issues far more succinctly and is defiantly worth reading. So, what are you still doing here?