Late last month, comScore Media Metrix released their Game Metrix, a syndicated study analyzing gamers' cross-platform attitudes and behaviors on a quarterly basis. Among the major finds of this study was the fact that those who play games are, on average, 41 years old with an annual income of roughly $55,000. Perhaps more surprisingly, however, 52 percent of all gamers are women.

These findings call into question conventional wisdom about gamers and gaming. Keep in mind that many of these "gamers" being counted are playing things like solitaire and bridge online. They might not be spending much, or any, money on their gaming habit and they might not even feel the title "gamer" applies to them. To clear up the confusion, we talked to Jessica Rovello, the Chairwoman of Arkadium, a developer of Internet games and advergames, about the older, female gamer market.

The reason so many women are gamers is that the definition of what a gamer can be is so broad. Gamers, of course, include those people who buy systems on launch day, or spend thousands of dollars keeping their home theater system up to date. The group also includes the soccer mom who plays several hours of solitaire at her computer each week. That one person may be defined as "hardcore" and the other not does not really matter.

"What the latest comScore release says is the sort of thing that people in the casual gaming industry have known for a while. Women dominate in number of people and the hours put in. This report puts that a little more into light," asserted Rovello. "That being said, women in gaming should send a message to game markets across all platforms, and you're starting to see it on traditional game platforms, with things like Brain Age. Older gamers and women really get into that."

Another major finding of the comScore study was that the recommendations of friends or relatives have more effect on sales than anything else. When asked about the findings, and how marketers could respond, she said, "I can only speak to the casual space. There's the $19.95 model where you try out a game, then decide eventually to purchase it for $19.95. I think marketers are going to change the way they market their games when the industry changes the way people purchase their games."

Ok, so we've established at this point that many women, over the age of 40, do in fact play games. For marketers, the golden key in the next couple of years is going to be to find a way to draw that group into more core games. Barring that, they'd certainly want to tap into them more in the advertising sense with more revenue.

"I think casual games have the appeal for a number of reasons. Firstly, casual games are quick to learn, hard to master. 40-year-old women are running a business or family or both. They don't have time to read a 40-page manual to learn things. They don't have the time to devote to core games," explained Rovello. "Secondly, playing online lets you forget about the outside world. You're just able to play a game of Mahjong and forget about everything else. It's something that's fun and enjoyable and there's also the community aspect that people like."

"My field is doing a decent job of marketing to women in their forties right now," she continued. "We know in the casual game space, women are playing our games. That said, you'll find that many of people running, managing and developing games are men. Things targeted at women tend to be stereotypical; why would an adult woman want to play a game with girlish themes like rainbows and unicorns? They could broaden their support and move away from imagery like bubbles and stars.

"Nobody expect the games to appeal to women immediately. In the casual game space, we've put ourselves into a pigeon hole; it is not open to new ideas that they don't think will appeal to people outside the space. If core developers made games for women, they would find an audience, similarly to how games made for forty-something women appeals to that bracket as well. For older men, you don't see a lot of shooters and racing games, because the developers don't think there's a casual game market for it. I know plenty of guys that grew up with an Atari or Colecovision or NES, and they're just as much into games as before, but they don't dig the complexity."

So until more of these forty-something women can be drawn into the core market, it begs the question of what can be done with the casual gamer market and advertising. It's a touchy subject, though, since often these casual games don't lend themselves to in-game ads. However, what has been done, and what will be done, with advergames in the casual market to date has been working quite well, according to Rovello.

"I can't really speak to in-game ads; that's more what's going on in the core market," confessed Rovello. "However, the reception to advergaming has been fantastic in my market. They're consistent and have been among the top titles."

"It's always a fine line of how many ads you should put into a game. When it's reasonable then people really don't mind it. It's kind of like when people started using ads on TV or movies. If it's in context, people don't mind. If it's done correctly, it benefits both the player and the advertisers. With advergames I think that it's got to be the right combination of products and gameplay to appeal to that audience and it's got to appeal to any audience. There are things that we know for the most part about 40-year-old gamers. For the most part, they don't want to be playing shoot-'em-ups, so you have to make a game that will appeal to that demographic," she concluded.