Games are a hobby; they are a challenge to succeed which I take at my own pace. If there are people to game with, thats fine, but I’m done chasing the footsteps of anyone else’s enjoyment.
If you are leveling faster and moving on?
See-ya. 
He’s not rapier than I am! Take it back!
Well, I’m a twelve step gamer. Level twelve!
http://www.esrb.org/about/video-game-industry-statistics.jsp
Average age of gamers = 34
Average age of frequent game purchaser = 39
Average number of years gamers have been playing = 12
67% of US households play games
40% of gamers are female
according to a 2009 survey 273 million units were sold = 10.5 Billion dollars revenue
I play games and I am 70 years old and I’ve been playing since 1999, but today’s games are not up to par with where they should be.
We should have flight sims by now that are almost like flying the real thing, but we don’t. Instead we get unfinished games like Forza 5 where they want you pay extra for the best cars.
At $59 a game and $75 for a deluxe version all I see is greed :mad:
I’m lucky. Not being a hardcore gamer, and not having played many games at all for a number of years, I get to go back and play games from ten years ago. They’re cheaper and I don’t need the latest gaming computer to run them. 
If you think bookworms don’t neglect their hygiene, I highly recommend visiting your local library to disabuse yourself of that notion.
Again, it’s such a broad scope though that it’s almost meaningless. I don’t spend all my time playing games but I play enough that I can hold my own in a conversation about what games are good, which ones ones were buggy messes and so on. But that’s only for PC games – I wouldn’t have anything to say to a guy who plays imported JRPGs on a console. Off the cuff, I’d certainly be inclined to call someone who imports games from Japan a “gamer” though. I guess you could compare it generically to “sports fan” where a hockey buff has little in common with a basketball buff but you can be a baseball fan without spending all your waking hours obsessing over baseball.
Media likes to sex up stories like that. “Woman ignores infant for six hours to watch Judge Judy marathon” doesn’t make news like “ignores infant to play World of Warcraft”. People had been (sadly) abusing infants and toddlers since the dawn of time but it only makes news when you can say “because toddler was crying during XBox game” as though that’s the first time a shitty father beat the shit out of a toddler for making too much noise. They make the news because they (a) Fit a preconceived notion about “gamers” and (b) provide an easy answer to a horrible event: “Oh, he did it because of video games!”
Hell, half the time these stories are from friggin’ Korea or China. When was the last time you read a story about a random mother in China ignoring her hungry child? Place has a billion people so statistically it must happen. But a kid gets ignored so she can play StarCraft II at an internet gaming cafe and somehow it’s news worthy of reporting in the US media market.
I think I’ll just wait for the OP’s next drive by thread on the subject before commenting.
Bingo. I’m 41, and my online gamer friends range from a low of 34 up to my 41, with most of us being somewhere between about 38-41.
We all got into video games way back in the day with the Atari 2600 system, and through various pathways (C64, NES, Sega Genesis, Apple II, PC, etc…) we all have continued to play ever since.
And we’re not a gang of dorks living in our parents’ houses either- one is a BA/project manager, one’s a sound engineer for a video game company, one’s a telecom project manager and former Army officer, another’s a former Army NCO and current graduate student, another is a high school history teacher & soccer coach, one is a writer for video games and other online entertainment, and another’s a car loan guy. All but two of us are married, and half of us have kids. I’d say that we all play games either on our own or together for something like 10-15 hours a week. We live all across the country- Houston, Dallas, SF Bay Area and Nashville.
In many ways, we play games together more as a social activity than to play the actual game. We usually get some sort of alcoholic beverage or… in one guy’s case, herbal smokables, and play the game and chat. Kind of like being in a bar, but with a communal activity that we all enjoy.
I do think that some of the MMORPG games have kind of a perfect storm of escapism, metered reward, and social interaction that hooks some people hard and fast, and they have a hard time not orienting their lives around it. Generally speaking though, the people I’ve known who have had trouble with those sorts of games already had problems outside of them- bad relationships, low self esteem, depression for whatever reason, etc… The MMORPG just let them go be someone and do something that they felt good about, and it’s not surprising that they prefer that world to the real one, where they don’t feel good about whatever it is that’s bugging them.