A survey has revealed some surprising results, and younger people are not exactly interested in 18+-rated content…

According to the survey, today’s teens are more interested in stories about platonic friendships and social groups than romance and sex, and game developers are taking this and other trends in teen media consumption into account. Speaking to a crowd of game industry professionals at last week’s D.I.C.E. Summit, TV executive turned game studio founder Sharon Tal Yguado and Roblox Vice President of Civic Engagement and Partnerships Tami Bhaumik discussed what teens want. According to one study, 73% of young people ages 16-24 say they sometimes or always feel alone, and many also report feeling sad and hopeless. Bhaumik attributes this to a number of things, including climate change, the state of the world, the state of everything, climate change, and social media.

Yguado, citing research from the UCLA Center for Scholars and Storytellers, said young people are not the shallow, faddish TikTok addicts they are made out to be, because they are interested in things like safety, kindness, acceptance, physical fitness, friendship and spiritual connection. They care less about romance! In UCLA’s 2024 Teens and Screens report, teens were asked what they would like to see in the media, and “romance and/or sex” ranked 15th out of 21 options, while its opposite, “content that does not include sex or romance,” ranked 8th, and the answer “friendships and social groups” ranked 5th.

According to UCLA researchers, this so-called “nomance” attitude is on the rise. In the 2023 report, 51.5% of teens wanted content that focused on platonic relationships and friendships, down from 63.5% last year. The proportion of teens who believe that sex and sexual content are not necessary to advance the plot of TV shows and/or movies has also increased from 47.5% to 62.4% in one year. Even without the survey data, the perception that today’s teens are particularly uninterested in romance and sex has been commonplace on social media in recent years, and pandemic isolation and growing anxiety have led to a wallflower generation.

As a result, teens are having sex less often than in the past. In 2007, both Mass Effect and The Witcher were somewhat scandalized by nudity, but the big mainstream games with lots of sex (e.g. Baldur’s Gate 3) are a recent phenomenon.

Source: PCGamer