It's possible to walk into any book store and find titles categorized not only by genre, but also by age level. There is a children's section in most larger chains, and the young adult section seems to have exploded in popularity over the past decade or so. Occasionally you might find a store with a section for the elderly, but that's a rarity. Stores like Gamestop that specialize in video games might have a section for children, but typically they're organized by console, with the educational titles sharing wall space with the PC games. The benefits for organizing titles this way seem obvious: parents who come in looking for games to teach their kids math or spelling, for instance, can be directed to the section that contains titles they might find interesting, which saves them time.

For children, there is a history of developmental science to rely upon that guides game designers in their deliberations over what sort of stimuli a child of a given age should be exposed to. After, let's say, age 13 and older, however, it seems to be assumed that the youth in question has stopped developing by certain milestones, so there is no need to create further categories for age. However, there is also a significant body of work concerning the way advanced age begins to degrade cerebral function in adults. We now exist alongside a generation that have been playing video games since their inception, and this generation shows no appreciable signs of giving up their longtime hobby. So these players will begin to see their cognitive functions decline in strength and accuracy, specifically in the realms of memory and the processing of new ideas. Studies have shown that the practice of continuing to challenge one's mental faculties consistently throughout one's lifetime can help a person retain higher reasoning functions for many years past the historical point where the begin to naturally degrade. If children get games that help them with their development, could older adults get games that help them with the challenges presented by their latter years?