While the M2 Study has been burning up the tweets among librarians (and how much time youths are spending on phones and TV entertainment), very little focus has been placed on the gaming aspect of the study.

You can draw the conclusions you want from the study, but here are some gaming figures:

  • 50% of Generation M2 has a video game console in their room. 87% own a console somewhere in the house.
  • Generation M2 owns an average of 2.3 video game consoles (that means many studied owned a Wii, PS3, AND Xbox 360).
  • 5% of media time was dedicated to console gaming (and with more time broken down gaming on the computer or phone, a total of about 11% of media consumption is from gaming).
  • The numbers are deceiving, because they are averages. There are more youths gaming now than 10 years ago, and they are spending more time doing it. A large reason for the increase in gaming is phones and handhelds (think Nintendo DS and PSP). For those who game on a console, they spend 90 minutes a day.
  • Males spend about 4X the amount of time console gaming than females, but males and females are about even when it comes to gaming across any platform. As a point of comparison, though, males are larger media consumers than females.
  • Hispanic and African Americans spend more time gaming than White youth.
  • The youngest demographics in the study are gaming the most, probably due to the increase in sophistication of games.
  • Youths are texting & listening to music while console gaming.
  • Most of the games 8bitlibrary.com suggests for collection development are the games the youths spend the most time playing!

Here’s the link to the Kaiser Report: Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds