Listen here youngen. The average age of gamers keeps getting higher every year. Why? because the vast majority of gamers are actually between 37 and 44. Again why you might ask? There were consoles out long before the Nintendo and Xbox and PlayStation. The ColecoVision comes to mind personally. Also, we were the first generation of kids to get to play games on those consoles. Growing up I had a Sear's IntelliVision (a Coleco knockoff) then a Commodore 64. I played many a game on those systems. I even played my first text based M-U-D on the Commodore 64 on a hayes 1200 baud modem. Then as we matured the PC came out and we all played games on them through High School. Even still this was before Windows 95 and the emergence of the Internet. Then a lot of us got cool jobs after High School or College. And now we could afford to by the latest computer, CPU and Video card. A lot of us played Ultima Online then EverQuest. Fast-forward to 2014 and I see no sign of slowing down.
So to answer the question: I am to old to play MMOs/Games when they finally have to pry my gaming keyboard and mouse from my cold, dead, fingers.
(as a side note: the average age of an MMO player is probably even higher since most MMOs haven't made it to the console yet.)
I think the question about age is not so much about playing itself, but about which kind of games we play. And this isn't just about gaming for that matter, psychologically there's a time for everything so to speak: on the short term (how you are going to spend your week) and on the long term as well (your year, your life), we pass through different 'stages', eminently subjective ones, and we tend to feel that we appreciate some stuff more, some other stuff less, as time goes on—and sometimes it reverts back.
I'm 31, and the kind of games, movies, music, books, series, but beyond that relationships (romantic interests and friendships, co-workers, etc.), jobs, sundays and mondays, has changed a lot since I was 20. And when I was 20, it was already quite different from when I was 10.
It would be pointless to tell what I like or dislike more or less, obviously, that's just about tastes; but a more objective take on this might come from psychology.
The human brain tends to become 'complete' around the age of 25, namely usually finishing by building prefrontal structures: these are the parts related to planning, long-term goal seeking, organising skills, etc. A number of studies show that before that age, people tend to be more "short-term oriented", less able to foresee distant consequences; and that conversely, people after this age tend to be more able to plan things, to say "ok I'll do this now because then I'll be free to do that, and that fits better in the evening anyway so let's occupy my day with something else" and so on.
There's another phenomenon related to ageing that could be described as such: the older you get, the more experience you have of life, and the more you become able to assess how things relate to you personally, subjectively: what you like, what you dislike, what's good for you (or likely to be), what's bad for you. Simply put, older people usually have more realistic expectations about life, because they kinda know how things usually unfold (so, no less dreams than younger people, just more likely to become true for them based on their previous experiences).
When you combine these two natural processes of human 'growing' or 'ageing', you end up with subjects that are typically:
More able to decide (generally), in our case more able to identify which games will give them the 'fun' they look for.
More able to "see through things", for instance what's the endgame of a particular game mechanic, or what's behind a fancy marketing pitch (again, not necessarily objectively, more in a form of valuable prediction of their personal response to this or that feature). Simply put, older people are less easy to surprise. And their opinion is more and more true… in their own perception (not generalising that perception is however, for some people, possibly harder and harder, haha).
Less able to fall for short-term benefits if these contradict long-term ones (the 'if' being of utmost importance here).
If you play less today than yesterday, it's probably because your expectations are higher and more likely to be satisfied when you place them into an activity, and you found better ways today to invest your time into something that is likely to make your life essentially "better". It's not that you like gaming less, but probably you 'like' your wife, children, job, or even just another hobby, more… If you're an avid gamer who's been there, done that, then you also are more hard to please from a game-maker perspective, because the kind of "naive enjoyment" any game can provide you will be measured against nothing short of the best you ever had in life—and being older means you probably found some subjectively awesome things already.
It's good, somehow, because it will probably push you towards "new things" if you are curious (horizontal approach), or towards "better things" if you're more of a collector-expert kinda person (vertical approach). It's also probably why artistic fields can never reach perfection either, at least not in a way remotely comparable to technical achievements: the reference frame, the very scale against which we measure (or more modestly judge) things is ever-changing because human themselves are changing, short and above all long term-wise.
Which leads us to the cliché phrase "it was better when < add any past reference >". Based on what we said, it would seem natural that it is true subjectively (as we perceive it, without it being true objectively, if we could measure and compare things). Two other processes, probably not related so much to the ones above, tend to also feed the subjective truth of this perception. One is "selective memory", the other could be called "deep pattern conditioning".
Memory selection is quite commonly known, it has to do with avoiding most of us of turning into PTSD victims. The basic idea is that as your brain processes memory from the past (literally re-arranging neural patterns into more efficient, or rather essential ways), it tends to disconnect most of it from other areas of the brain (other, new memories 'block' old memories from having a direction connection to some areas), particularly the limbic brain (inner part of your brain processing emotions). What this means is that older memories are less vivid, they produce less of an emotional response, if at all. It's essential, in a darwinian perspective, if we are to "get over things", both good and bad. For some unknown reason (as far as I know), in a process that has to do with rapid-eye movement (EMDR technique), every night while you dream, you brain disconnects primarily the "bad" experiences from their emotional response, in effect allowing us to reflect on these events after the emotional charge has waned.
Simply put, yes, we all tend to wear pink-colored glasses as we look further into our past. But if we didn't, we'd also be emotional wrecks, so there's that. Recent negative feelings will most often be more vivid, weighing, perceived as 'big', than their older counterparts of equivalent negativity. It sounds obvious, but it's good to know it's also confirmed by studies.
Deep pattern conditioning (a totally made-up name I came up with for the purpose of writing this) is a well-known characteristic of human minds, but what's less known is that it's been proved psychologically. Simply put: what you experienced during the time when your brain was forming (remember, up to 25 or so) will play a predominant role in how you analyse things during your whole life, notably in the matter of tastes: there are very few chances that the music you liked a lot when you were 15 is now totally awful to you, there are very few chances that a game genre you despised during your whole adolescence is now conversely the best to you.
It's like these first experiences were used by the brain as "reference patterns", against which most of what we'll experience later on in life will be confronted. These early reference patterns also play, evidently, a key role in conditioning us to approach various things in a way that at leasts satisfies what we learned (what's true for us, what's not) during these early experiences. It doesn't mean you won't like other things, it simply means you're not likely to stop liking these ones, "deep inside" literally, even if you don't actually listen/watch/play/read them very often. Even things that go by (think of your first love…), there's often a capacity of human beings to "love in the past", essentially feeling something that is no longer actual as of the present time, but nevertheless real in the past and still felt as such. I have a theory on that actually, but it would take us to general relativity considerations on the dimension of time and our simultaneous existence at different times, so I'll probably leave it at that! :-)
Most of what I read about people ageing and seeing their tastes and choices evolve along their life kinda fits these basic tenets, even if obviously, as with everything in matter of human psychology, principles we tend to prove by scientific method are more "general trends" than binary truths about every individual and their mother.
Personally, I totally fit into these patterns, even though I tend to fight some of them, some of these instincts, on a long-term basis.
For instance, I've always liked role-playing games and space opera; but as I aged I found that what drives me are fictional universes (what if's), and that writing was as good, if not actually better, to seek the 'fun' in imagining living in such alternate places or times. Since I make a point of trying to criticise everything objectively, even the things I like the most (indeed sometimes to admit that a given thing is utter garbage but that I like it nonetheless… haha), well I find myself more and more reluctant to play new RPG's. It's like as if I've been burned by them so much that I can now see through the mechanics too much to suspend disbelief any longer (or maybe it's a general trend in making shallow games full of time-sinks and grinding DLC… but then again even with great older games I find my ability to replay them suffering more and more).
As for MMO's specifically, I think it's obvious that this genre caters to some needs (notably social ones) that play well with older people whose work hours and daily go outs are in direct conflict, especially in dense urban areas (more time commuting, less time to see and spend time with friends). So it's always nice to play with a bunch of friends at night, and persistent worlds make the connection easier, less arbitrary to happen. That's a strong argument in favour of MMO being a good genre for "adult" people of all ages.
But the general trend, commercially-driven, to make more money out of less content (the whole logic of coding artificial time-sinks and grindings) may be burning out a lot of people. There's always a new intake of players, notably younger ones and late-bloomers, but the outtake is pretty much as big (hence the MMO market is growing globally but not so much in already "MMO-enabled" countries), whereas gaming as a whole is indeed growing, so I think this relative lack of performance has to do with the genre itself. The very nature of this shortcoming being in direct conflict with people's experience (in real life, as we talked about above, not in-game XP ), well I think it obvious that most of us will either lower our expectations enough to appreciate this or that MMO, or will simply move to other things (until, possibly, this genre breaks its codes and gets better).
As it stands, in MMORPG's, in-game experience (XP) is actually in direct conflict with real-life experience when we go through grinds and time-sinks, and I don't think it's satisfactory (both from a game making perspective and a sensible gamer perspective). At some point, this logic will make MMORPG's hit a hard market cap, and/or will considerably lower the revenue per game when production costs are going down.
Maybe, like strategy games, there's a definite public for the genre at any time (not everyone can enjoy this or that genre, some being more popular than others), and MMO won't ever grow anymore.
Maybe, and that's my contention, the MMO genre, and beyond that video games themselves, are still very much in their infancy (it's like talking about cinema around the Metropolis era, 1929), and still have to find new ways of satisfying their audiences—and that will require a lot of technical evolution in how we (can) make them, a lot of artistically evolution to coin better ways, etc.
Right now, looking at the whole MMO market, I think the genre is ripe for the next level of popularity, but not strictly as MMO-RPG's: what I foresee ever since the early 2000's are a hybridisation of pretty much all other genres, in a persistent form. It won't be for all games (fortunately), it won't be for all genres (more or less suitable depending on actual mechanics), but it can and probably will happen. Any competitive setting (car racing, sports team, fighting, etc.) can be implemented in a persistent global universe in which people can compete against other players not randomly (typical multiplayer match) but rather in long-term iterations of their team, or car, or fighter, soldier, what-have-you, much as we enjoy in MMORPG's.
If you think about it, just as "RPG" mechanics have been added to pretty much all other genres, simply because "RPG" mechanics are about representing, modelling life; it's only natural that the very logic of "doing it all in a common world instead of isolated little instances running on millions of different machines" would probably transpire to all forms of game genres, as it started with RPG's (or should I say MUDs in their initial scope). That's my vision, anyway.
What I take out from all this is that until MMORPG's do evolve intrinsically for the better (lots of hope in procedurally-generated and user-contributed content, but still far from being just right enough, though the modding scene is a awesome as ever these days), I will probably find myself drifting back to other genres more and more, simply for their excellence at tackling a particular game style (and indeed probably RPG's preferably to MMORPG's). If I'm right in my foresights then these other games, other genres, will progressively become more and more persistent as universes, some of them at least. I would like that.
What's clear is that at 31, I may play less and be much harder to satisfy than 10 years ago, let alone 20, but I'm no less of a gamer than I used to be. I just find better ways to make sure that I actually enjoy myself—I don't go back to WoW hoping to find something entirely new, but being aware of what's there and the latest changes, I actually can find enjoyment in even that, if I made sure before re-subbing that I was actually looking for what the game had to offer. It's actually true for most things in my life. As I grow old, I may be harder to please, but am actually more often satisfied by my choices.
With MMO's, I usually hope for "a nice time" with "boring phases" and as I like raiding as much as solo play, I usually choose games that provide satisfaction on either of these aspects. Often, it means playing for a couple of months and then just leaving, and I find myself doing it less and less these days. Sometimes, I get an incredible kick I wasn't expecting, and that's always good to savour. Sometimes, even a reasonable dream turns into a nightmare of grinding and I burn within a couple of weeks after that realisation (that was Final Fantasy XIV's endgame, my last experience in MMO).
To conclude this long post (a couple more paragraphs won't hurt anymore than it already did I suppose), Final Fantasy (FF) is actually a good exemplification of all this.
I used to be a total FF fanboy. My first FF's, back in the 90's, had changed the way I thought of gaming. They opened doors to universes and emotions so awesome, there was no question that games could deliver as much as books or movies. That's what FF did to me.
But then I grew older. I always had a positive bias for FF games, so iteration after iteration, I was still the guy defending the game and its vision, I was always trying to justify that it was good "even if…". Then XIII happened on PS3, to think I actually bought the console to play it still feels like a regrettably poor decision. Then XIV happened, first version and ARR. And after so much disappointment from the FF franchise ever since 2006 (FF XII), it became obvious to me: "my FF", the ones I like, are a thing of the past. It's not me that's changed so much, it's them, it's how Squaresoft became Square Enix and took directions that just don't fit my tastes. I would actually argue that FF fans of the 90's/early 2000's and FF fans of 2014 are two different groups with very little overlapping. I surely don't fit into both.
And it's still unnatural to me to say "FF games (as of 2010's) are just grinding games with poor story and shallow universes and philosophy".
As educated as I could become between the 90's and now, looking at these old games, it makes no doubt that they're still very good games for their era, and their story and universes are among the most fascinating in video game history, but to disconnect that from the present is hard, because "deep patterns" in my memory, because "truths of the past not being relevant today", etc. There are all these processes at work in my mind giving me a hell of hard time accepting the present reality. It just doesn't feel right and yet that's what I think about this franchise today. I'm pretty sure a lot of Star Wars or Star Trek fans had to come to the same realisation in the recent years… I think it's a very good exemplification of these processes, here being taken not as making things easier in a way, but rather harder in the opposite way (to change how we think about something).
So, yeah, I think that whereas playing more or less as we grow older has to do with inherently other things than gaming (other constrains and opportunities out there in real life), which games we play are probably the things that's most likely to change in time, because either the genres itself are better or worse, or what we seek in gaming may shift as we get more experience.
A remark: When I started writing I was thinking: "let's make a quick couple of paragraphs about this". Yeah, well… I may be 31 but it's still hard for me to stop things I enjoy doing! Sorry about the length of this post. ;-)
I'm 54. Sometimes it would be nice to see the reaction of some of the kids I kill in PvP. There is no age limit you can put on fun imho. I'm going to play till my eyes quit working (which could be tomorrow).
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Can you be too old to play MMOs. I usually play F2p games and can't help but wonder sometimes, I might be too old to play games. Other players who are probably younger wondering why is someone in their 30s playing MMOs.
What do you guys think, if you're old should you stop playing games. How many adults do you think around 30+ play MMOs.
Ehm ... I do not see any logic behing reasoning. I guess from my and others experience, when i was younger i did not care so much for finess, any button masher would do just fine .... have switched to MMO exactly because of complexity. Now I'm over 50 and just can not immagine to return to anything less then MMO. Of course I do not have in my mind some cheap Korean thing or alike.
I'm 59 this year and when I'm 90+ I'll be the guy in the corner yelling "WTF lag!!" and ganking noobs while all the other geezers are doing jigsaws and bingo.
Can you be too old to play MMOs. I usually play F2p games and can't help but wonder sometimes, I might be too old to play games. Other players who are probably younger wondering why is someone in their 30s playing MMOs.
What do you guys think, if you're old should you stop playing games. How many adults do you think around 30+ play MMOs.
Im 36 soon 37 and i don't plan on stopping playing games / mmos. Why should I stop doing something I like? In fact I have a group of friends all around my age we play once a week any kind of multiplayers game, not one of us ever said ey Im too old to play.
You can't be too old for MMORPGs, only too young...
Yep totally agree. That is the true question........At what age should you be allowed to play mmorpgs? There are never issues with older players being too old only younger players being to young.
I'll be 51 this year, and, while i will admit that im not as good at the FPS as i used to be - i don't think i'll be able to compete in Counterstrike again any time soon i still do enjoy them, although i only really play Planetside 2 in that respect, but as for other games, i don't really even think of myself as being 'that' old, a lot of the other players i know are at least within a decade of my age (either way ) so i don't exactly feel as though i'm the 'odd' one out.
My reflexes might not be that great, but experience still gives you an edge sometimes, as its not how quickly you can react to a situation so much, as being able to anticipate other player behavior, which admittedly doesnt make my K/D ratio all that great but i still manage to have a lot of fun regardless.
As for themepark MMO's tbh, you don't need nanosecond reactions in order to play them, and that suits me fine
It's not the age that matters.It's the less time that u have.I m 32 with 2 kids.I dont have much time as i used to focus in mmos.I wish to get the time back when i was young and play 15 hours per day .Now can spend and always depends the family,about 5 hours max,so in a mmo game it will make it harder to lvl up.gear up etc,always i ll be last of the players that playing more time.But in a FPS game it s better for our age.Dont have to spend much time as u have to spend in a mmorpg.Thats all and simple.
I'm 38, and I'm one of the younger ones in my usual clique. I regularly game with two 50-year-old dudes. I played Darkfall - a full loot, FFA PvP game - with a couple who was in their 60s. Game on as long as you want, folks. I will. My daughter says it's ok (she's 3) as long as I pass the gaming torch on to her.
Can you be too old to play MMOs. I usually play F2p games and can't help but wonder sometimes, I might be too old to play games. Other players who are probably younger wondering why is someone in their 30s playing MMOs.
What do you guys think, if you're old should you stop playing games. How many adults do you think around 30+ play MMOs.
You are to old when you no longer find it fun.... Or you are dead.
As with pretty much any hobby there is no set upper or lower limit for age. I know people who are 18 and enjoy knitting and people in their 50´s who enjoy raiding in WoW weekly.
Originally posted by Talemire 1st generation gamers FTW! Gamer til the Lord takes me home lol
But what to do if there are no games in heaven????
Originally posted by jdlamson75 I'm 38, and I'm one of the younger ones in my usual clique. I regularly game with two 50-year-old dudes. I played Darkfall - a full loot, FFA PvP game - with a couple who was in their 60s. Game on as long as you want, folks. I will. My daughter says it's ok (she's 3) as long as I pass the gaming torch on to her.
I just built my 6-year daughter a nice gaming rig (I've got one of my own too, of course) hoping she'll play Everquest Next (and Landmark) with me when it launches.
At least no one will come telling me I'm not interested in my daughter's hobbies!
Originally posted by Talemire 1st generation gamers FTW! Gamer til the Lord takes me home lol
But what to do if there are no games in heaven????
Hehe, I said "til" the Lord takes me home. Gonna be much better/important things to do in heaven than gaming! :-D However, to be fair, when I was a teenager I definitely used to QQ about the thought of it lol.
I just built my 6-year daughter a nice gaming rig (I've got one of my own too, of course) hoping she'll play Everquest Next (and Landmark) with me when it launches.
At least no one will come telling me I'm not interested in my daughter's hobbies!
Awesome! I regularly have my daughter on my lap, "helping" me play such games as Minecraft, Skyrim, and for the first time last night, Morrowind. She asked me what I was using to "beat up" the monsters. I said, "It's an axe!" She wanted to know what an axe was. And so it begins...perhaps in a couple of years, I, too, will be building a gaming rig for my daughter.
Originally posted by Talemire 1st generation gamers FTW! Gamer til the Lord takes me home lol
But what to do if there are no games in heaven????
Hehe, I said "til" the Lord takes me home. Gonna be much better/important things to do in heaven than gaming! :-D However, to be fair, when I was a teenager I definitely used to QQ about the thought of it lol.
I'm an agnostic myself, but I'm sort of serious here. How do you pass an eternity of time in a place with no modern entertainment?
Comments
NEVER!!!
I'll be gaming on my death bed!
Maybe I'll die with a controller in my hands, who knows.
Listen here youngen. The average age of gamers keeps getting higher every year. Why? because the vast majority of gamers are actually between 37 and 44. Again why you might ask? There were consoles out long before the Nintendo and Xbox and PlayStation. The ColecoVision comes to mind personally. Also, we were the first generation of kids to get to play games on those consoles. Growing up I had a Sear's IntelliVision (a Coleco knockoff) then a Commodore 64. I played many a game on those systems. I even played my first text based M-U-D on the Commodore 64 on a hayes 1200 baud modem. Then as we matured the PC came out and we all played games on them through High School. Even still this was before Windows 95 and the emergence of the Internet. Then a lot of us got cool jobs after High School or College. And now we could afford to by the latest computer, CPU and Video card. A lot of us played Ultima Online then EverQuest. Fast-forward to 2014 and I see no sign of slowing down.
So to answer the question: I am to old to play MMOs/Games when they finally have to pry my gaming keyboard and mouse from my cold, dead, fingers.
(as a side note: the average age of an MMO player is probably even higher since most MMOs haven't made it to the console yet.)
I think the question about age is not so much about playing itself, but about which kind of games we play. And this isn't just about gaming for that matter, psychologically there's a time for everything so to speak: on the short term (how you are going to spend your week) and on the long term as well (your year, your life), we pass through different 'stages', eminently subjective ones, and we tend to feel that we appreciate some stuff more, some other stuff less, as time goes on—and sometimes it reverts back.
I'm 31, and the kind of games, movies, music, books, series, but beyond that relationships (romantic interests and friendships, co-workers, etc.), jobs, sundays and mondays, has changed a lot since I was 20. And when I was 20, it was already quite different from when I was 10.
It would be pointless to tell what I like or dislike more or less, obviously, that's just about tastes; but a more objective take on this might come from psychology.
The human brain tends to become 'complete' around the age of 25, namely usually finishing by building prefrontal structures: these are the parts related to planning, long-term goal seeking, organising skills, etc. A number of studies show that before that age, people tend to be more "short-term oriented", less able to foresee distant consequences; and that conversely, people after this age tend to be more able to plan things, to say "ok I'll do this now because then I'll be free to do that, and that fits better in the evening anyway so let's occupy my day with something else" and so on.
There's another phenomenon related to ageing that could be described as such: the older you get, the more experience you have of life, and the more you become able to assess how things relate to you personally, subjectively: what you like, what you dislike, what's good for you (or likely to be), what's bad for you. Simply put, older people usually have more realistic expectations about life, because they kinda know how things usually unfold (so, no less dreams than younger people, just more likely to become true for them based on their previous experiences).
When you combine these two natural processes of human 'growing' or 'ageing', you end up with subjects that are typically:
If you play less today than yesterday, it's probably because your expectations are higher and more likely to be satisfied when you place them into an activity, and you found better ways today to invest your time into something that is likely to make your life essentially "better". It's not that you like gaming less, but probably you 'like' your wife, children, job, or even just another hobby, more… If you're an avid gamer who's been there, done that, then you also are more hard to please from a game-maker perspective, because the kind of "naive enjoyment" any game can provide you will be measured against nothing short of the best you ever had in life—and being older means you probably found some subjectively awesome things already.
It's good, somehow, because it will probably push you towards "new things" if you are curious (horizontal approach), or towards "better things" if you're more of a collector-expert kinda person (vertical approach). It's also probably why artistic fields can never reach perfection either, at least not in a way remotely comparable to technical achievements: the reference frame, the very scale against which we measure (or more modestly judge) things is ever-changing because human themselves are changing, short and above all long term-wise.
Which leads us to the cliché phrase "it was better when < add any past reference >". Based on what we said, it would seem natural that it is true subjectively (as we perceive it, without it being true objectively, if we could measure and compare things). Two other processes, probably not related so much to the ones above, tend to also feed the subjective truth of this perception. One is "selective memory", the other could be called "deep pattern conditioning".
Memory selection is quite commonly known, it has to do with avoiding most of us of turning into PTSD victims.
The basic idea is that as your brain processes memory from the past (literally re-arranging neural patterns into more efficient, or rather essential ways), it tends to disconnect most of it from other areas of the brain (other, new memories 'block' old memories from having a direction connection to some areas), particularly the limbic brain (inner part of your brain processing emotions). What this means is that older memories are less vivid, they produce less of an emotional response, if at all. It's essential, in a darwinian perspective, if we are to "get over things", both good and bad. For some unknown reason (as far as I know), in a process that has to do with rapid-eye movement (EMDR technique), every night while you dream, you brain disconnects primarily the "bad" experiences from their emotional response, in effect allowing us to reflect on these events after the emotional charge has waned.
Simply put, yes, we all tend to wear pink-colored glasses as we look further into our past. But if we didn't, we'd also be emotional wrecks, so there's that. Recent negative feelings will most often be more vivid, weighing, perceived as 'big', than their older counterparts of equivalent negativity. It sounds obvious, but it's good to know it's also confirmed by studies.
Deep pattern conditioning (a totally made-up name I came up with for the purpose of writing this) is a well-known characteristic of human minds, but what's less known is that it's been proved psychologically. Simply put: what you experienced during the time when your brain was forming (remember, up to 25 or so) will play a predominant role in how you analyse things during your whole life, notably in the matter of tastes: there are very few chances that the music you liked a lot when you were 15 is now totally awful to you, there are very few chances that a game genre you despised during your whole adolescence is now conversely the best to you.
It's like these first experiences were used by the brain as "reference patterns", against which most of what we'll experience later on in life will be confronted. These early reference patterns also play, evidently, a key role in conditioning us to approach various things in a way that at leasts satisfies what we learned (what's true for us, what's not) during these early experiences. It doesn't mean you won't like other things, it simply means you're not likely to stop liking these ones, "deep inside" literally, even if you don't actually listen/watch/play/read them very often. Even things that go by (think of your first love…), there's often a capacity of human beings to "love in the past", essentially feeling something that is no longer actual as of the present time, but nevertheless real in the past and still felt as such. I have a theory on that actually, but it would take us to general relativity considerations on the dimension of time and our simultaneous existence at different times, so I'll probably leave it at that! :-)
Most of what I read about people ageing and seeing their tastes and choices evolve along their life kinda fits these basic tenets, even if obviously, as with everything in matter of human psychology, principles we tend to prove by scientific method are more "general trends" than binary truths about every individual and their mother.
Personally, I totally fit into these patterns, even though I tend to fight some of them, some of these instincts, on a long-term basis.
For instance, I've always liked role-playing games and space opera; but as I aged I found that what drives me are fictional universes (what if's), and that writing was as good, if not actually better, to seek the 'fun' in imagining living in such alternate places or times. Since I make a point of trying to criticise everything objectively, even the things I like the most (indeed sometimes to admit that a given thing is utter garbage but that I like it nonetheless… haha), well I find myself more and more reluctant to play new RPG's. It's like as if I've been burned by them so much that I can now see through the mechanics too much to suspend disbelief any longer (or maybe it's a general trend in making shallow games full of time-sinks and grinding DLC… but then again even with great older games I find my ability to replay them suffering more and more).
As for MMO's specifically, I think it's obvious that this genre caters to some needs (notably social ones) that play well with older people whose work hours and daily go outs are in direct conflict, especially in dense urban areas (more time commuting, less time to see and spend time with friends). So it's always nice to play with a bunch of friends at night, and persistent worlds make the connection easier, less arbitrary to happen. That's a strong argument in favour of MMO being a good genre for "adult" people of all ages.
But the general trend, commercially-driven, to make more money out of less content (the whole logic of coding artificial time-sinks and grindings) may be burning out a lot of people. There's always a new intake of players, notably younger ones and late-bloomers, but the outtake is pretty much as big (hence the MMO market is growing globally but not so much in already "MMO-enabled" countries), whereas gaming as a whole is indeed growing, so I think this relative lack of performance has to do with the genre itself. The very nature of this shortcoming being in direct conflict with people's experience (in real life, as we talked about above, not in-game XP
), well I think it obvious that most of us will either lower our expectations enough to appreciate this or that MMO, or will simply move to other things (until, possibly, this genre breaks its codes and gets better).
As it stands, in MMORPG's, in-game experience (XP) is actually in direct conflict with real-life experience when we go through grinds and time-sinks, and I don't think it's satisfactory (both from a game making perspective and a sensible gamer perspective). At some point, this logic will make MMORPG's hit a hard market cap, and/or will considerably lower the revenue per game when production costs are going down.
Maybe, like strategy games, there's a definite public for the genre at any time (not everyone can enjoy this or that genre, some being more popular than others), and MMO won't ever grow anymore.
Maybe, and that's my contention, the MMO genre, and beyond that video games themselves, are still very much in their infancy (it's like talking about cinema around the Metropolis era, 1929), and still have to find new ways of satisfying their audiences—and that will require a lot of technical evolution in how we (can) make them, a lot of artistically evolution to coin better ways, etc.
Right now, looking at the whole MMO market, I think the genre is ripe for the next level of popularity, but not strictly as MMO-RPG's: what I foresee ever since the early 2000's are a hybridisation of pretty much all other genres, in a persistent form. It won't be for all games (fortunately), it won't be for all genres (more or less suitable depending on actual mechanics), but it can and probably will happen. Any competitive setting (car racing, sports team, fighting, etc.) can be implemented in a persistent global universe in which people can compete against other players not randomly (typical multiplayer match) but rather in long-term iterations of their team, or car, or fighter, soldier, what-have-you, much as we enjoy in MMORPG's.
If you think about it, just as "RPG" mechanics have been added to pretty much all other genres, simply because "RPG" mechanics are about representing, modelling life; it's only natural that the very logic of "doing it all in a common world instead of isolated little instances running on millions of different machines" would probably transpire to all forms of game genres, as it started with RPG's (or should I say MUDs in their initial scope). That's my vision, anyway.
What I take out from all this is that until MMORPG's do evolve intrinsically for the better (lots of hope in procedurally-generated and user-contributed content, but still far from being just right enough, though the modding scene is a awesome as ever these days), I will probably find myself drifting back to other genres more and more, simply for their excellence at tackling a particular game style (and indeed probably RPG's preferably to MMORPG's). If I'm right in my foresights then these other games, other genres, will progressively become more and more persistent as universes, some of them at least. I would like that.
What's clear is that at 31, I may play less and be much harder to satisfy than 10 years ago, let alone 20, but I'm no less of a gamer than I used to be. I just find better ways to make sure that I actually enjoy myself—I don't go back to WoW hoping to find something entirely new, but being aware of what's there and the latest changes, I actually can find enjoyment in even that, if I made sure before re-subbing that I was actually looking for what the game had to offer. It's actually true for most things in my life. As I grow old, I may be harder to please, but am actually more often satisfied by my choices.
With MMO's, I usually hope for "a nice time" with "boring phases" and as I like raiding as much as solo play, I usually choose games that provide satisfaction on either of these aspects. Often, it means playing for a couple of months and then just leaving, and I find myself doing it less and less these days. Sometimes, I get an incredible kick I wasn't expecting, and that's always good to savour. Sometimes, even a reasonable dream turns into a nightmare of grinding and I burn within a couple of weeks after that realisation (that was Final Fantasy XIV's endgame, my last experience in MMO).
To conclude this long post (a couple more paragraphs won't hurt anymore than it already did I suppose), Final Fantasy (FF) is actually a good exemplification of all this.
I used to be a total FF fanboy. My first FF's, back in the 90's, had changed the way I thought of gaming. They opened doors to universes and emotions so awesome, there was no question that games could deliver as much as books or movies. That's what FF did to me.
But then I grew older. I always had a positive bias for FF games, so iteration after iteration, I was still the guy defending the game and its vision, I was always trying to justify that it was good "even if…". Then XIII happened on PS3, to think I actually bought the console to play it still feels like a regrettably poor decision. Then XIV happened, first version and ARR. And after so much disappointment from the FF franchise ever since 2006 (FF XII), it became obvious to me: "my FF", the ones I like, are a thing of the past. It's not me that's changed so much, it's them, it's how Squaresoft became Square Enix and took directions that just don't fit my tastes. I would actually argue that FF fans of the 90's/early 2000's and FF fans of 2014 are two different groups with very little overlapping. I surely don't fit into both.
And it's still unnatural to me to say "FF games (as of 2010's) are just grinding games with poor story and shallow universes and philosophy".
As educated as I could become between the 90's and now, looking at these old games, it makes no doubt that they're still very good games for their era, and their story and universes are among the most fascinating in video game history, but to disconnect that from the present is hard, because "deep patterns" in my memory, because "truths of the past not being relevant today", etc. There are all these processes at work in my mind giving me a hell of hard time accepting the present reality. It just doesn't feel right and yet that's what I think about this franchise today. I'm pretty sure a lot of Star Wars or Star Trek fans had to come to the same realisation in the recent years…
I think it's a very good exemplification of these processes, here being taken not as making things easier in a way, but rather harder in the opposite way (to change how we think about something).
So, yeah, I think that whereas playing more or less as we grow older has to do with inherently other things than gaming (other constrains and opportunities out there in real life), which games we play are probably the things that's most likely to change in time, because either the genres itself are better or worse, or what we seek in gaming may shift as we get more experience.
A remark: When I started writing I was thinking: "let's make a quick couple of paragraphs about this". Yeah, well… I may be 31 but it's still hard for me to stop things I enjoy doing! Sorry about the length of this post. ;-)
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
You don't stop playing because you get old, you get old when you stop playing ..
My hands would be the last thing I would worry about having cut off. o.O She could cut it off, or you off.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Ehm ... I do not see any logic behing reasoning. I guess from my and others experience, when i was younger i did not care so much for finess, any button masher would do just fine .... have switched to MMO exactly because of complexity. Now I'm over 50 and just can not immagine to return to anything less then MMO. Of course I do not have in my mind some cheap Korean thing or alike.
37 here. My wife keeps asking me to "grow up" and stop playing games.
I've told her not to hold her breath while waiting for that to happen...
Perfect!
Im 36 soon 37 and i don't plan on stopping playing games / mmos. Why should I stop doing something I like? In fact I have a group of friends all around my age we play once a week any kind of multiplayers game, not one of us ever said ey Im too old to play.
Yep totally agree. That is the true question........At what age should you be allowed to play mmorpgs? There are never issues with older players being too old only younger players being to young.
I'll be 51 this year, and, while i will admit that im not as good at the FPS as i used to be - i don't think i'll be able to compete in Counterstrike again any time soon
i still do enjoy them, although i only really play Planetside 2 in that respect, but as for other games, i don't really even think of myself as being 'that' old, a lot of the other players i know are at least within a decade of my age (either way 
) so i don't exactly feel as though i'm the 'odd' one out.
My reflexes might not be that great, but experience still gives you an edge sometimes, as its not how quickly you can react to a situation so much, as being able to anticipate other player behavior, which admittedly doesnt make my K/D ratio all that great but i still manage to have a lot of fun regardless.
As for themepark MMO's tbh, you don't need nanosecond reactions in order to play them, and that suits me fine
[Boss]Nosforia
You are to old when you no longer find it fun.... Or you are dead.
As with pretty much any hobby there is no set upper or lower limit for age. I know people who are 18 and enjoy knitting and people in their 50´s who enjoy raiding in WoW weekly.
Only you can say when you are to old...
This have been a good conversation
But what to do if there are no games in heaven????
I just built my 6-year daughter a nice gaming rig (I've got one of my own too, of course) hoping she'll play Everquest Next (and Landmark) with me when it launches.
At least no one will come telling me I'm not interested in my daughter's hobbies!
Hehe, I said "til" the Lord takes me home. Gonna be much better/important things to do in heaven than gaming! :-D However, to be fair, when I was a teenager I definitely used to QQ about the thought of it lol.
Awesome! I regularly have my daughter on my lap, "helping" me play such games as Minecraft, Skyrim, and for the first time last night, Morrowind. She asked me what I was using to "beat up" the monsters. I said, "It's an axe!" She wanted to know what an axe was. And so it begins...perhaps in a couple of years, I, too, will be building a gaming rig for my daughter.
Game on!
I'm an agnostic myself, but I'm sort of serious here. How do you pass an eternity of time in a place with no modern entertainment?