Another thing, FFXIV also has a free trial that allows you to play up to a certain level (30-35, IIRC) if you just want to test it out.
I am 58 and am a hard core gamer to the very end. Been playing games all my life. Both kids are also gamers as well, but my daughter has slowly moved onto other hobbies at this point in her life. Son is a chip off the ole block. I will game until I can’t anymore as it is rooted deep within me (along with a hardcore love of sports). I wear my gaming love like a giant badge of honor. If others frown upon it, that’s their loss.
Any steam gamers around here? Always looking for new gamers to play co-op and multiplayer games with.
I don’t see the stigma in groups that I run with or people that I work with, and I think it’s dying off. There certainly is a meme floating around that ‘video games are for children’, but it doesn’t seem to have that much attraction, and the people who stick to it seem to be very traditional-minded and not the sort I’d be welcome to openly hang around with.
I’m 45 and this isn’t my experience at all. OTOH, when I do hang out with a bunch of guys my age, it’s almost always people who do tech work or that I know through physical gaming, as I don’t seek out just a group of ‘guys approximately my age’ as a social circle (and I have to use ‘my age’ pretty broadly). Most of the time I’m hanging out in groups with varied genders and varied ages so don’t have that specific of a focus, and even in those groups there are plenty of guys 45 and up who play games or like talking about them. And generally games are a more popular topic than sports.
I think the groups you’re hanging out with are groups that tend to select against gamers and go for more of the ‘traditional man’ stereotype.
Could be… although I work in tech as well, and I’ve found that most of the older tech guys still aren’t gamers- lots of home brewers, sci-fi geeks and anime fans though. I think they’re just not gamers.
A lot of what I’m getting at is relatively random men I deal with- Cub Scout dads and my kids’ school’s Dad’s Club. One guy is a gamer and we’ve actually talked about it a fair bit, but most of it is not about gaming- lots of sports and traditionally macho stuff though.
Around here, playing video games as an adult is more the norm than not. I wasn’t aware there was any stigma attached to it at all.
I agree. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry. Hardly anything childish about that.
Well my mother sure thinks so…
Though I will say that I think bump is onto something here. Not necessarily stigma, but more reticent to bring it up. I am 39 and have one friend in his 40s and we talk about Switch games. I don’t really talk about gaming too much with other people. I know one guy who is in his 20s who likes PC gaming. Most of my other friends don’t seem to game or don’t really care to talk about it.
There is a lot more “Have you seen the new (show)” than “Have you played (game)”.
That’s really what I’m getting at. It’s not like it would have been had my Dad gone at 47 years old in 1992 and said “Yeah, I play video games.” (he didn’t, but that’s beside the point)
Back then, that would have been viewed as something less than manly/less than grown up in a way that being a computer enthusiast at the same time wouldn’t have been.
Today, nobody is going to look at me funny for saying that I play video games, even people 5-10 years older than me. But it’s not brought up, or a common topic of conversation at all, unlike sports, TV (broadcast, cable and streamed), movies, local news or even the weather.
It could be a lingering stigma, it could be just lower numbers of gamers in my age cohort, or it could be Hoopy Frood’s cultural zeitgeist concept- I’m not sure.
Thought I posted this previously in this thread, but maybe it was “eaten”.
I’m 48 and I would tend to agree with you. Probably has something to do with the fact that our age demographic are the first to grow up with videogames, starting with Pong, Pac Man and all the other classic arcade games. People a bit older never really got into videogames as a kid. So what tends to happen is as new styles of games or new platforms come out, people our age tend to “grow out” of videogames instead of exploring the new ones.
I think there is still a bit of a “stigma” though. At least how it is portrayed in the media. Like whether it’s Thor in Avengers Endgame, Joaquin Phoenix’s character in Her, or Vince Vaughn in any number of his films, adult characters playing videogames are often portrayed as having too much time on their hands, lacking real-world social connections, or escaping from their real-world problems. They are typically shown playing against some unseen obnoxious child, with whom they often engage in juvenile behavior such as smack-talking and name calling.
I guess? But it seems to fall under the category of hobby than a general topic of conversation, and people don’t really bring hobbies up in casual conversation. Sports are a little different and even there, that’s more an American thing - sports in casual conversation don’t happen the same way in other countries, if they happen at all.
Turns out several of my friends and co-workers are into a wide variety of things, like competitive shooting or crochet or carpentry or marathon running or whatever. Those just don’t come up in casual conversation and wouldn’t if there hadn’t been several opportunities to get more familiar with them.
I put gaming in that same boat - it’s not something everybody can be assumed to do or have an interest in as a hobby so it doesn’t come up very often. It’s not really to do with a stigma or even an unusual reticence but just recognition that it’s not polite to get into conversations on hobbies without knowing if the other person has any interest in it. I, for one, have nothing against crochet, but I would be bored to tears (and have been in the past) if I had to listen politely to somebody discuss crochet at length.
And likewise, I have a close group of friends, a subgroup of which might talk about gaming. But there are others in that group that don’t, and you can see their eyes glaze over when it comes up. Everybody has their hobbies, and they’re not always interesting to other people.
I’m 42 and I definitely find that I rarely have time to play like I did when I was younger. I’m still a gamer but I maybe average an hour a day on console and much less on PC. Mobile gaming, that I do often but that’s because my device is always with me for idle moments.
If I blew off time with the family, taking care of my car/housework/finances/etc. then I’d have lots of time to game. But shirking those responsibilities would make me a loser. There should definitely be a stigma against people my age who prioritize gaming over other things.
That’s kind of my feeling, as well. And it’s rare I’m playing the same games my friends are playing, so if it were brought up, it’d be maybe a couple sentences in a conversation that is mostly about our lives, the world, and music. We don’t really talk about TV shows or movies, either. Sports occasionally comes up, depending on which friends I’m with, but it’s rarely an extended topic of conversation.
It’s about me. TV pisses me off. Too old for video games? I do not think so.
I don’t think there is such thing as too old for video games, they were designed to entertain people no matter what age, like sonic. The dude who made sonic probably never told himself, that “this game is only for people in age 12-15” or sum like that. Okay, maybe there are a few exceptions like - games that are only for toddlers…(I assume there is sum like that, I am not sure), and also there are games like slots orvideo poker which are made for “adults” only. You can’t let a child play slots or video poker or scratchcards… But I have played sonic as a child and sometimes I play it now… what so weird about that? And yes, my lil brother plays Fortnite and I think he will play Fortnite at one point in future, maybe because he likes it or maybe because it brings him the feeling of childhood. (I tried my best to show the examples of games in case someone didnt know, so bare with me) . Also this is just my opinion 
peace
I think there should be less emphasis on age, and more on just plain responsibilities. I’m 31, and hold down my job just fine. I’m not married and I don’t have kids though, so that’s fewer responsibilities than another woman my age might have. I can devote more time to gaming without neglecting other areas of my life. When it gets to be a problem isn’t when you reach a certain age, but rather, if you’re neglecting those other very important areas.
There are a lot of not so young A-Listers involved as well. For fun I wanted to see if I could list 10 A-listers involved in games without the google or thinking to hard.
I came up with:
Quentin Tarantino
Jennifer Aniston
Penn and Teller
Ray Liota
Burt Reynolds
Lynda Carter
Norman Reedus
Bruce Campbell
Katie Perry
Samuel L Jackson
Dennis Hopper
So there’s 11 and I can think of more. I added Katie Perry because she didn’t just license her songs, she rerecorded them in Simlish for The Sims franchise. Lot’s of musicians have done this and while I’ve heard of many of them none are big enough to stick in my memory. I added the 11th in case you disagree.
I don’t know all of these peoples ages but I’d say most of them are in the age group that supposedly stigmatize games.
Most of the people on my list worked on A list games which I assume was for A list money. You won’t find them flooding the market because most games can’t afford them.
LOL
I found a link to some Simlish versions of her songs:
My mother played video games until her eyesight got too bad (she really liked Doom). There’s no such thing as “too old”, only “too sick”.
My Granny played video games until she couldn’t see the screen anymore. Probably well into her 80s before she had to stop playing. She loved puzzle games and card games.