Grandma's Got Game

Getting around New York this week is about as easy as winning the Powerball. Outside of the usual tourist mayhem we have the United Nations General Assembly in session, the Clinton Global Initiative in town and Advertising Week. Together they make a perfect storm of traffic hell and the reason I swore off working in midtown a few years ago.

Yesterday I became one of those people I usually scream at to stay home during weeks like this. No, I wasn't picketing for net neutrality outside the United Nations. I was speaking on a panel at the OMMA Global conference located in the middle of Times Square. Yes, Times Square, the worst location to navigate on a good week. It gets better. I was the lone woman on a panel entitled "Grandma's Got Game!" Oy.

After getting over the initial sting and applying some shoe polish to my temples I got down to work with my fellow panelists, including Kyle Lewis of AARP.org and Ralph Rivera of AOL. For the next 45 minutes we discussed the phenomenon that is 50+ casual gamers. For those of us who have been in the games business for a few years we've known that grandma, grandpa, and great uncle Fred are the little secret that drive millions of game plays monthly across a host of sites. But the idea that seniors play online is news to lots of advertisers and publishers.

According to Lewis, games make up 50% of AARP's total site traffic, an incredible stat for one of the largest member organization in the U.S. So what does grandma play? Lots of games in the casual realm - from old favorites like solitaire, to newer puzzle and brain games.

And while grandma may not be part of the social games revolution going on in Facebook, she's social in her own way, playing and chatting day after day and hour after hour in the same game rooms with the same friends she met on her favorite website months or even years ago. As Rivera wisely put it, "Social is the new community." We've let a buzz word convince us that something new is happening, when in fact it's the same behavior we've seen around games for the last ten years.

So will the PC replace the Bingo hall? I think it already has.

Follow Jessica Rovello on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ArkadiumGames