What topic I will be writing about

The shift in gamer demographics

After reading through the brief for this terms contextual studies assignment, I started thinking about which topic I should based my written piece about. As there is quite a wide range to choose from, I was finding it a little tricky to narrow it down to one area that I wanted to focus on. Although there was one core thing that I kept in mind when making my decision and that was that my tutor has said that we needed to focus on a area where we were going to learn something new, instead of just sticking to a topic we know very well. This managed to help me steer clear from a couple of areas that I was thinking about focusing on, which were characters and the progression of games. The reason for this was that game characters is usually a topic that I am most interested in so I didn't want to research more into this subject, along with the progression of games, as we have already done similar work on the time line of video games before.

So I decided to steer clear of these two options and pick an area where I was bound to learn something interesting and new. One subject about video games that has always interested but I have never really looked into the numbers behind it and that is the change in gamer demographic and the popularity of video games since they began to be produced. This is an area that I would love to learn more about as I feel it is important, I want to work in the games industry in the future to have a bit of knowledge on the history of the consumers of video games and how the target audience has grown.
Settling on this topic helped me start to think about the construction of my essay and what it will be built up on. Below I have written a few examples of areas I can research into and then include in my final draft.

• Who was playing games at the birth of the games industry? 
• Why has there been such a change?
• Who is playing games now?
• Female gamers and women in the industry 
• The availability of games in the present day
• The growing fan-bases of different game series
• What is the future for the gaming fan base and the games industry? 

Now that I have thought about a few topics that I could mention in my essay to help bulk it out and reach the 2,000 word limit, I am now able to to a larger amount of research into the subject of gamer demographics and hopefully learn a lot of new information on the subject.