The Gamer Generation is taking over the reins from the Baby Boomers

Are you finding it difficult to deal with kids who sit many hours a day behind their computers playing computer games?
Well think again.

Dawn has broken over this new Gamer Generation as the Baby Boomers fade away.

Right now there are people in their twenties and early thirties who have never known a time without digital games.

They grew up in a world where Playstation was the biggest success in Sony's profits, and where Nintendo sold 1.4 billion video games. Even if the Game generation is different - will that matter to the rest of us? Absolutely. The Gamer Generation is already far greater in numbers than the Baby Boom Generation ever was. Right now, there are far more people who "speak" the language of games than there are Baby Boomers who don't.

Important to all of us is that the Gamer Generation is changing the way we do business today. Gamers believe winning matters - that much isn't surprising. But Gamers are actually savvier in many ways than their non-gamer counterparts, and may surprise the business world with their performance and skills.

Do any of these Gamer traits sound familiar to you?

• If you get there first, you win.
• Trial and error is the best strategy, and the fastest way to learn.
• Elders and their received wisdom can’t help, they don’t understand even the basics of this new world.
• There’s a limited set of tools, but some combinations will work.

Maybe some of these traits frustrated or surprised you, or maybe you’re seeing your own Gamer traits or those of your kids. Unlike Baby Boomers, Gamers want to be heroes. In their world, heroism is what it is all about. The question now is how to best harness this incredible new generation to help them achieve professional excellence and understand that after winning you should also show compassion for those who did not win.

John C. Beck, President of North Star Leadership Group, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for the Digital Future, and a Senior Advisor at the Monitor Group, will keynote the international G.A.M.E.S. Synergy Summit to be held Wednesday-Friday, January 26th-28th, 2005 in Orlando. Dr. Beck researched and co-authored "Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever" (Harvard Business School Press, Fall 2004). He will share insights about the strengths, abilities, attitudes and learning styles of the under-34 gamer generation, distinctly different from the Baby Boomers, and how enterprises across all disciplines can adapt to encourage their best performance. An acronym for Government, Academic, Military, Entertainment and Simulation, the G.A.M.E.S. Synergy Summit brings together leaders from each of these convergent sectors to discover new ways that interactive game-based technologies can address a broad range of beneficial, non-entertainment applications.