Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 249)

Trigger Happy
251
Statistical insights into videogaming in Japan are
richly furnished by the 1997 CESA
36
Games White
Paper. It reports that attendance at the 1997 Tokyo
Game Show was 82 percent male (while very heavily
male-oriented, then, this still means nearly a fifth of
attendees were female), while the median age of
attendees was 25 to 29, and the most common
occupation was that of “office worker.” (Videogames,
then, are not just for kids in Japan any more than they
are in Britain or the United States.) Meanwhile, the
extent to which Japan is leading the West in terms of
videogames’ status as a mainstream entertainment
medium is shown by a poll of 6,000 people, of whom
more than a third (35 percent) currently played
videogames. Another fifth used to play them and
probably will start again in the future, while an eighth
had “never played before, but would like to try
depending on software.” Less than a third of the
population (31.7 percent) responded that they had
“never played before and had no wish to do so.”
Now, Japanese women who are interested in
videogames have notably different preferences than the
men. When asked to rank their favorite titles, more
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36 Japan’s industry body, the Computer Entertainment Software
Association.