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!
You and I (45) are part of the first gamer generation, the first generation that had the opportunity to grow up around video games. As such, you’d expect gaming be a normal hobby for people of our age, and to some extent, it is. However, many people have grown out of games and consider them childish. I think that this is because the games of our childhood were very simple and shallow entertainment. Over the years, games have come to address more and more serious topics with a depth not unlike that of “higher” cultural media such as film or literature, but the people who grew up and left gaming behind before this development don’t know that. Their only experience of games may be the simple, “childish” games of the 70s and 80s, so they consider gamers childish as well.
I think it’s this. I’m younger, but I’ve heard many stories of people y’alls age and older who never had any interest in games suddenly getting super into a newer one. Videogames have simply evolved so much since you were young. It very much was silly entertainment at one time, and I can’t blame a lot of people for just not being interested back then and not looking that deeply into it now.
You’ll have a hard time finding people your age that are interested, but I think they’re out there. And you definitely don’t want to abandon a hobby or interest just to fit in with what someone expects.