With a peak at 77 % in 2021, more and more French parents declare that they play video games with their children, according to figures from the union of leisure software publishers. Confainment or real substantive trend effect? Several parents tell these parts with their offspring.
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The containment of spring 2020 accelerated things, but for Laurent – six to eight hours of video games per week – it was inevitable that his 5 -year -old daughter soon or later claims the Joypad. So when she talks to him about it, a little over a year ago, he cannot resist but “looking for something beautiful, narrative, easy …”. It will be Spiritfarer.
“I had tested the game, it immediately worked well. She embodies the cat that accompanies the main character I control.”
Matthew, who works in the video game industry, has made her eldest daughter discover, 12, several solo games like The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening or Rayman, while the latest, 8 years , explored Minecraft. During the first containment of 2020, it was thanks to Animal Crossing that this separate father was able to maintain contact. “I bought three copies of the game, I built a house on my island with a room for each of them …”
This important video game relationship, Audrey lives it with her 9 -year -old daughter, who got a passion for Roblox multiplayer games. François, 45-year-old Brussels, who claims thirty-five years of practice, an arcade terminal at home and to “have finished every soul”, crossed confinement with his son, three decades less, thanks to the very full-bodied Sekiro.
generation of “gamers”
All are far from isolated cases, and are even more and more numerous: according to data from the union of leisure software publishers (Sell), 77 % of French parents played – with variable regularity – with their children In 2021 , or eleven points more than a year earlier, fifteen more than in 2014. Certainly, these figures are to be taken with care, prevent sociologists Laurent Trémel and Samuel Coavoux: on the one hand, “Because industry wants to promote a positive image of video games”, according to Mr. Trémel; On the other hand, in the eyes of the second, there are “methodological limits” in a survey carried out on a panel of 4,000 people.
The fact remains that this data echoes a fundamental trend observed in the industry “since the arrival of the Nintendo show consoles in the 1980s”, according to Samuel Coavoux:
“The generation of players born in the 1980s and 1990s is the generation of parents in 2020: they grew up with parents who did not play, but they are parents with a real video game culture, that they can Transmit. “
Now franchises like Zelda, Mario or, more recently, Pokémon have retained these players until today, and thus favored the family practice of video games, which tend to confirm other figures in the Sell: while The vast majority of French players are adults in 2021 (88 %), almost half of the games offered (44 %) are classified PEGI 3 or 7 (that is to say playable from the age of 3 or 7 years), way for publishers to offer titles that can appeal to as many people as possible. And these figures do not take into account the dematerialized sales of Nintendo, the world heavyweight of transgenerational games.
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