Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
I’ve been trying to track down statistics on video game usage. There is one number that keeps coming up over and over: by the time we’re 21, we’ve invested 10,000 hours in gaming. It’s tossed around like a well-established fact, with very little in the way of actual citation. For example:
The average young person racks up 10,000 hours of gaming by the age of 21 — or 24 hours less than they spend in a classroom for all of middle and high school if they have perfect attendance. It’s a remarkable amount of time we’re investing in games. 5 million gamers in the U.S., in fact, are spending more than 40 hours a week playing games — the equivalent of a full time job!
Well, I finally took the time to track down the origins of this number, which I’ve captured in the below image. Oh, brother…