Surveys say that today's youth are more interested in stories about platonic friendships and social groups than romance and sex, and game developers are taking note of that and other trends in teen media consumption.
To a crowd of games industry professionals at D.I.C.E. Summit last week, TV executive turned game studio founder Sharon Tal Yguado and Roblox VP of civility and partnerships Tami Bhaumik spoke about "what teens want," presenting recent research and their observations.
The first observation: Kids are lonely. According to one study, 73% of young people ages 16 to 24 say they sometimes or always feel alone. Many also report feeling sad and hopeless. Bhaumik attributes this to everything: the state of the world, climate change, social media feeds.
It isn't all doom and gloom. Citing research from UCLA's Center for Scholars and Storytellers, Yguado said that young people aren't the superficial, fad-obsessed TikTok fiends they're made out to be: They care about things like safety, kindness, acceptance, physical fitness, friendship, and spiritual connection, she said.
Teens are less interested, however, in romance: "Like I seriously am worried about the population in the future, because these kids do not care about romance," Yguado said in a joking-but-not-joking tone.
In UCLA's 2024 Teens and Screens report, adolescents were surveyed about what they want to see in media, and "romance and/or sex" came in 15th out of 21 options. Its opposite, "content that doesn't include sex or romance," came in at 8th place. "Friendships and social groups" came in 5th.
This so-called "nomance" attitude is on the rise, UCLA researchers say. In 2023's report, 51.5% of adolescents "desired content that focuses on platonic relationships and friendships," and in 2024's report it was 63.5%. The percentage of adolescents who said that "sex and sexual content are not needed to advance the plot of TV shows and/or movies" also rose over the same period from 47.5% to 62.4%.
Even without the survey data, the notion that today's youth are especially uninterested in romance and sex has been treated as common knowledge on social media for the past few years, the story going that Covid isolation and increasing anxiety has created a generation of wallflowers. Studies do show that adolescents are having less sex than they did in the past.
But it bears mentioning that big mainstream videogames already don't contain a lot of sex and romance compared to other media. Not even 20 years ago, the tame nudity in 2007's Mass Effect was scandalous in some corners. Big mainstream games that are heavy on sex, like Baldur's Gate 3, are a recent phenomenon.
As a kid in the '90s, I remember being annoyed that they'd always put some soppy romantic subplot in movies that were otherwise about explosions, and no one seemed to worry that my generation hated sex and romance, so I'm a little skeptical that it's anything romance novelists and RPG designers should worry about. Granted, I make a poor example: I'm not married and don't have any kids, so maybe I was just ahead of my time.
