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According to a study from Jupiter Research, people in homes where the annual income is less than $35,000 a year spend about 50% more time a week playing video games than those in homes with incomes above $74,000.

According to the report, this is because “video games are cost-effective entertainment and consumption statistics skew toward low-income households for console penetration, time spent playing games, and number of titles purchased.”

The statistics show that teenagers, as a group, were more concerned with value than were other groups. In fact, one-third said the most important factor in purchasing a game console was the lowest price, with 25% seeing the ability for the console to also play DVDs or CDs as most important.

This report is particularly interesting as educational institutions and third-party vendors who support education (publishers, software vendors, etc.) become increasingly aggressive in trying to reach the buying power of this demographic group.

There are certainly nuggets of information in the Jupiter report that point to suggested directions for those in the education business.

1. Value is important. Inexpensive is good, but young buyers are also discerning about quality and added value. Educational products from courses to textbooks to “the old college experience” are being compared and judged more discerningly than ever before.

2. The desire for interactive experiences is high and increasing. While gaming has yet to reach the popularity of going online to interact with friends or watching TV, video game hardware and software sales topped $10 billion in the United States alone in 2002.

3. Gender assumptions can be myths. One of the traditional assumptions about gaming is that boys like gaming more. The Jupiter report’s author dismisses that notion. Based on the report’s findings, Jay Horowitz says “Do boys like games more than girls? My assumption is no they don’t, and the market is underserving women. I don’t fundamentally think that boys like games more than girls.” What the report did show is that there were differences in the type of interactive entertainment preferred by the two genders. While action and adventure games were most popular with boys, nearly half the girls surveyed favored “parlor” games.

The difference in “interaction styles” between the genders is just the tip of the iceberg. These preferences also extent to individual players or learners in general. Perhaps we should even consider adding preferred “interaction style” as a subset of learning styles in general.

Whatever the case, this report shows once again that gaming is an element that must be taken into consideration. A decade ago, video started becoming de rigueur in education courses and products. Now that gaming has surpassed the movie industry in terms of gross earnings, we should anticipate that genre becoming an integrated component of education as well.