So, hear me out.
I’m a 47 year old guy and I’m not ashamed to say that I enjoy video games. I always have, from playing Head over Heels on a Speccy +2 to ESO and Valorant on my self built PC.
Due to various life circumstances, I’m also on the dating scene and to most women I meet, around my age, video games are anathema. When I say that I like them it’s usually meet with an “oh dear” or a “my son would probably love to talk to you about them, I find them really boring”
I have two boys, both teenagers, both play all the time and sometimes we all play together (although they are better as they have more time to apply to games). Their friends are amazed that I will talk about games with them, that I know someone about games and that I play games. None of their parents want to talk with them about what is effectively their main hobby that they do all the time (big sad).
So the question, there must be some sort of cut off age at which video games are no longer an acceptable pastime. Is it absolute age based (nothing after 35) or is it something to do with the progression of games into popular culture and people born after, say, 1986 will not see it as unacceptable?
I don’t have an answer, I just think it’s an interesting question. Thanks for reading, let me know what you think!
Edit to add: I’m not planning on stopping through peer pressure, just wondering about the phenomenon!
Saying you don’t like playing video games is like saying you don’t read books or watch cinema. It’s its own medium.
I got in a fight with a guy on reddit earlier this year who kept circling back to my post history (because of course he did) and the fact that there was trace evidence that I was a gamer. It didn’t matter where that conversation turned or what was ever said. It didn’t matter that most of my posts at the time were about life, marriage, and fatherhood. All that mattered to that idiot was the perceived smoking gun that I was a gamer.
I never once engaged him in that matter, which I’m sure only pissed him off more, but I remember wondering how a person could be so out of touch that they believe gaming in the year 2023 is some kind of fringe hobby. I figure that person was either an aging Gen X or Boomer, or a an absolutely colossal boner who missed out on some critical social development in their youth.