Appealing to a larger audiance with games

At the moment it can be said that the games industry has a similar attitude towards its audience as fine art does. When an artist creates a piece of art they show it off in an exhibition, only people who have an interest in art attend and only their opinions affect the artist, the artist in a sense caters her works to the opinions shared by art critics and people who are interested in their work. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this system, until somebody outside of sharing the interest attempts to look upon that piece of artwork, now an artist would say that their piece expresses a very simple emotion that all humanity shares, but if that was actually the case everybody who ever looked at that piece of artwork would feel the same emotions and easily decipher its meaning or at least another meaning from it. However the fact of the matter is most people you show a fine art sculpture to will say the same thing:

"It's just a pretty shape."

Obviously that is not all the artist is trying to express with their piece of art, I don't think there is a single piece of artwork this is all face value. They say that art is subjective in this sense, however that doesn't make it more popular and it doesn't make it reach more people, if anything it segregates it.

In a way this has happened in games. Computer games have always had their core market in mind and their target audience has stayed largely the same for the last 40 years. They appeal to the mid-teen white male almost religiously, this has lead to a stagnation in gaming as the themes are overly explored, games compete to see which can get the most action and adrenaline into a title and more importantly other themes are not explored.

So I need to look into things that people to the age range 30-50.

Well there are a lot of things that are appealing to all ages, one prominent thing that appeals to all ages is mystery. Mystery and puzzles are part of human nature and do not have a particular group to which they appeal to more, in that sense they better suit a mid-core game. Another thing that can be marketed to all ages and genders is story and narrative since everybody loves a story!