XplanaZine

All you have to do is watch the education blogs over the Christmas holidays to know that consumer trends in the gaming and education industries can be pretty different.

The education community has been on vacation, enjoying a well-deserved vacation and making all kinds of great resolutions about the coming semester or trimester. There are a few big conferences and some mini-session courses but, for the most part, this is a time when we don’t teach and students don’t study.

For the gaming industry, on the other hand, the holiday season is the biggest and most important time of the year. This year, for example, approximately 50% of all gaming revenues will be generated in the gaming quarter.

While there are obvious differences in seasonal trends, there are also some interesting parallels.

Games, like education, are all about learning. Whether you are trying to memorize patterns in MS. PAC- MAN or learning new strategies in Halo 2 , games are all about learning and evolution. Same with classes and education, I hope.

One recent area where the two industries run parallel to each other is in the growing trend of adult learners and players. It seems that education latched on to the adult learner much earlier than video games did (amazing — education was ahead of a curve!), but that may be as much about the age of the industry as anything.

Both started out as industries for kids with pretty definite cut-off points. Businesses succeed through growth, however, and it was only a matter of time until we figured out that limiting education to people under thirty was a pretty severe handicap. Now that we’ve embraced lifelong learning, everyone can claim projected growth and education an industry can receive a needed jump start.

Over the past two years, gaming has really reached out to the older audience. The number of games rated “M” for mature themes has risen to 12% of the rated games on the market. They have seen the adult market growing and are moving rapidly to respond.

What I do find interesting about both education and gaming is how they are responding differently to the adult markets.

Education, in my opinion, is adapting to the adult demand with casual infrastructure changes. We create better access logistics so that our offerings suit the adult lifestyle.

Gaming, on the other hand, is addressing the demand by actually creating content tailored specifically for adults. They are creating more games with mature themes and complex reasoning.

Where will all of this lead? It’s hard to say. My personal feeling is that education, like gaming, will come to grips sooner or later with the fact that one size does not necessarily fit all. Maybe that’s the real threat that for-profits like University of Phoenix pose to traditional institutions. These startups are willing to propose an altered paradigm where monopolies don’t exist and where the customer demand dictates the product.

It’s fun for me to imagine educational content tailored to age groups. Different collaborative exercises, different examples, etc. Think it’s impossible? Maybe, but capitalism and competition have an interesting way of introducing the impossible into the fray.

All I know for sure is that it’s going to be fun to watch.

Game Sales Thrive Thanks to Big Kids

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