It's becoming something of an adage: "families that play together, stay together". If the saying's true, then over a third of American families must be very happy indeed. Study results published by the ESA have revealed that 35% of America's parents are gamers--and four out of five of them share the hobby with their children.

As the gaming generation grows up, these statistics aren't too surprising, but there are a couple of interesting factoids from the report: the average gamer parent is 37, and so didn't necessarily grow up with video games (in fact, the average time spent gaming is 13 years).

Also, 47% of these gamer parents are women--a figure that reflects the proportion of women gamers in general when you take casual and card games into account. Whichever way you read the statistics, gaming is becoming of central importance to many households, and it's here to stay.