Anecdotal. May or may not have happened. Probably didn’t… Yet.
The current wisdom is that staying mentally active wards off the effects of senility and age related cognitive disorders.
I’m within spitting distance of 50 and have been FPS (First Person Shooter) gaming since Wolfenstein and Doom were state of the art in '93. Today I’m playing Assassin’s Creed: Unity, Far Cry 4, Battlefield 4, Bioshock: Infinite, and a few others. All at the hardest skill level where it’s an option. And all requiring excellent hand/eye coordination and fast reaction times. I don’t see myself slowing down any time soon, I’ll see about updating this thread when I’m 70.
The flip side is that people who spend all their time gaming is that they’re pretty much sedentary while playing. And generally aren’t snacking on carrots and celery. Not all of them of course, I’m a black belt and regularly work outside and hiking/caving are my idea of a great vacation. But there are enough couch potato gamers that it has become a stereotype.
Are we looking forward to a bunch of octogenarians sitting around Sunny Acres Retirement Villa playing on the xbox 2880 or Playstation XI yelling about banging each other’s mothers? Retirees who can solve level 5 sudokus in their heads? Something else?
I’m hoping for an oculus rift ver 2.3 Advanced so I’m not squinting to read names of other players in the retirement home. Talk about momma jokes at that age? Hell no, I’m bangin your daughter after I tea bag you.
And I’ll reminisce about the good ol days when launches were perfect, patches were free dlc, other players that you didn’t know were all about teamwork, and my connection pulsed both ways uphill to my computer.
Full disclosure; I’ve never teabagged anyone in game or in real life and am at best very meh at gaming, but if you won’t tell those old asshats in the 'Home I won’t tell them either.
I am not sure specifically what the OP is asking.
My dad is 68 and still plays video games. He likes first person military style shooters best but plays some casual Nintendo games.
He had a lot of trouble at first when I gave him my old PS2 (what the hell does this have so many buttons for? I have to look down every time I want to do something!) but managed to pick it up. I haven’t sat down and watched him play for a while but he has beat difficult games before. He still seems fairly sharp mentally. Both of his parents are in their 90’s and although they need a lot of help they are still living in their own home by themselves.
On the other hand my wife is in her mid 50’s and plays casual ipod/android games constantly. I’m getting a little worried about how forgetful she is becoming (her parents both really went downhill mentally a few years before they died, both in their 70’s). We’ve only been together for 4 years so I don’t know what her memory was like before that.
But yeah, the first generation to play games en masse will be starting to enter retirement and nursing homes soon. I too wonder if we will see less mental problems than in the past due to game playing. I definitely see more old people playing Wii type games and less first person deathmatches. But people who still have decent reflexes and are sharp could play Call of Duty 25 or Dwarf Fortress if they want to.
All I know is if I live to 70+ and go into a home, I will still be working on my Steam backlog…
I don’t know anyone older than me (38yrs) that plays actual video games outside of Candy Crush or something. I used to love almost every gaming genre but as I get older, i get pickier. Nowadays I only like FPS with latest graphics. I just can’t get into anything else much at all. I just want to explore and enjoy a detailed setting that’s different than where I live. I once used to game daily in my spare time but now I’d rather mess around on my laptop.
I know a few guys my age that haven’t played a video game since the PS2 days. I don’t really picture retirement homes being full of gamers…some perhaps but not all and I doubt I will as I’m already gradually losing interest. Books make me sleepy so that will never happen either. I hate watching TV so I have no clue what will occupy my time at 70 but I kinda doubt I’ll live that long anyway, I’ve already outlived quite a few people I went to school with.
As far as sedentary goes, so is watching TV, building scale models or many other hobbies. Even RC airplanes require little more than going outside to sit in a chair.
What I think will happen is the generation of video gamers, like guys in their twenties and thirties, may still be playing in their 70s, but due to nostalgia it will be incredibly pixelated ‘old school’ games. They will be seen as Old People Video Games; kind of like a Buick or Cadillac are old people cars. Even terminology will shift and evolve, so phrases like ‘owned’ ‘shotty whore’ and ‘noob’ will sound painfully fogeyish.
In the 2060s hipsters will pick it up again, people will start wearing those dumb pixelated ties and a device that makes unique sound effects when you walk, jump, throw something or fall down. So you’ll have a neighborhood full of kids that look like real life Nintendo sprites while some octogenarian screams, " EIGHTBITS"! As kids bipbipbip across his lawn.
Hey, you noobs get off my lawn! I’ll call your daddy and tell him to pwn you and he’ll get into your base and start killin ur doodz before you can boot up a GameCube! You’ll be flashing all day tomorrow looking for a heart or two! Master using it and GTFO!
I do think that playing video games will keep people sharp. The body gets soft when you don’t use it, same with the mind.
Us gamers just have to force ourselves to go outside and take a walk once in a while. Really after 2 or 3 hours of gaming I’m ready for a break anyway.
Extended gaming sessions will kill them off in short order. (I suppose that should be “us”.) Kids can go the distance, but old people doing 12 hour stints will dehydrate them without knowledge. Repeatedly doing it will skew the actuarial charts.
Why not? My daughter keeps solving while having left temporal lobe seizures. Must be another part of her brain that she uses because that part is mush, literally.
I think you’re seriously overvaluing nostalgia. I started out on 640x480x256 grade games and I have no interest in playing them again “for old times sake”. Give me cinematic Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty all day long.
if this is serious, why? One of my gaming friends got me interested in karate. Another one of the group manages the grotto for the caving group.
I do believe that the couch potato, Cheeto eating, Mountain Dew drinking stereotype has its basis in reality. They’re just not the majority. Most of us are just average people in average health who enjoy a good gaming session.
I am a 60 year old granny. My first video game was pong:) I now play FPS’s almost exclusively. Borderlands, Bioshock, Fallout, Farcry, etc. These games are soooo much better than the games of my youth. Can’t wait to play new games in my “golden” years.
Its funny you mention this. I read an article where they used the Wii system and Wii sports as physical therapy for the elderly. Yes, granny likes to sock someone in boxing. My 75 year old Mother who has never played a video game in her life, actually got a kick out of the swordfighting in “Adventure Island”.
I think they will have their place. Maybe more strategy than fast reactions.
No, we are going to see a lot of murders as gamers get into homes with no high speed internet and they get cut off from their addiction … last couple places I visited friends at had either NO patient access to internet, or old dial up speeds that are basically for email level stuff.
I know that would drive me freaking insane. Though I am digitizing my old paperbacks and stuff that is out of print, I have around 5 000 books and there is no way I am going to be able to have a room and fit all my books, music and movies… and if they try to de-computer me, they will have a lot of murder going on, I NEED my mental stimulation.
In short - today’s retirement facilities do not seem set up for the Information Age. They damned well better fix that major freaking problem SOON.
From what I’ve seen of some of the serious gamers, they are so out of physical shape that many won’t make it into the Golden Years. I work in IT (and that’s bad enough) and many of my coworkers are gamers. It’s sad to see how bad off they are physically.
Of course this isn’t true in all cases, yada, yada, yada.
I’ve noticed a definite drop in my overall skill level with FPSs. At one time I was a twitch-headshot-railgun-god on Quake and Unreal Tournament (ladies, please, just steady yourselves on the feinting couch) but now I struggle to be anything close to a 1:1 kill ratio. That guy at the bottom of the leaderboard every game dragging down your score? That’s me.
Sure you can. You just have to be more judicious about it.
I mean, I’ve always been in about the 2/3 percentile on most games that I’ve played. Not really good, but far from terrible. This is from the old Atari 2600 days where I could beat 2 out of 3 kids I’d play, all the way up through say… Titanfall or Battlefield 4, in which I’m somewhere between 5th and probably 8th on most games (10-16th on Conquest Large maps).
The main difference is that these days (job, wife, kids), I play one game at a time, and if I’m lucky, I get in 5-10 hours a week. Back in the day, it wasn’t hard to be that good at 2-3 multiplayer/online games AND be trying to work through a RPG type game.
