Four in Ten (40%) Parents Say Video Games Are Increasingly Becoming A Family Activity

Six In Ten (57%) Parents With Children Play Video Games With Their Children

Ottawa, ON – It appears that for many families, family night means gathering around the gaming console or computer, with a new Ipsos Reid poll conducted on behalf of the Entertainment Software Association of Canada revealing that four in ten (40%) parents ‘agree’ (12% strongly/28% somewhat) that ‘video games are increasingly becoming a family activity’ in their household.

Furthermore, six in ten (57%) parents of gamers say that they play video games together with their child, with fathers (61%) being more likely than mothers (53%) to say that this is the case. In fact, four in ten (41%) ‘agree’ (6% strongly/35% somewhat) that they prefer their children to ‘play video games than watch television’.

In terms of the availability of family-friendly games, seven in ten (69%) parents ‘agree’ (25% strongly/44% somewhat) that ‘there is currently a good selection of video games available that are well suited to playing video games as a family’. On the other hand, just one quarter (24%) of parents ‘disagree’ (10% strongly/14% somewhat) that there is a good selection of games that families can pay together.
Among adults aged 18+ who have played video games in the past 4 weeks, the average (mean) age of a Canadian gamer is 40.3 years.

These are the findings of an Ipsos Reid poll conducted on behalf of the Entertainment Software Association of Canada from June 19 to July 8, 2008. For the survey, a representative randomly-selected sample of 652 adult Canadians was interviewed by telephone. With a sample of this size, the results are considered accurate to within ±3.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, of what they would have been had the entire adult population of Canada been polled. The margin of error will be larger within regions and for other sub-groupings of the survey population. These data were weighted to ensure that the sample's regional age, sex and parent composition reflects that of the actual Canadian population according to Census data.

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