How playing video games can improve your life during retirement [View all]

[LuckyTheDog]

The teenagers who were hooked on Pac-Man in the arcades and amusement parks of the early 1970s are getting ready for retirement, but many of them have never stopped playing video games. In fact, it doesn’t look like they are going to stop gaming anytime soon.

The percentage of U.S. gamers who are over age 50 has increased rapidly, from just 9 percent in 1999 to 27 percent in 2015, according to the Entertainment Software Association’s annual reports. This is a global trend. In Europe, a 2012 study by the Interactive Software Federation of Europe found that 27 percent of people between 55 and 64 played video games; in Australia in 2015, 41 percent of people between 65 and 74 played video games.

These numbers may seem big, but they are just the tip of an enormous iceberg. The silver-haired gamer generation is not nearly as large as the number of current high school and college students who are obsessed with gaming and e-sports. Today’s number – 37 million American gamers over 50 – could balloon to 105 million by 2045, if U.N. population predictions bear out and the share of gamers in the population remains the same as was found in a 2008 Pew Research Center study.

MORE HERE: http://yonside.com/video-games-improve-retirement/