Lame Gamer
It amuses me, as a man too close to 50 for comfort that my favourite hobby raises eyebrows. If I was spending a few hours a week at a driving range, and then played eighteen holes on a Sunday, my fascination with golf would be seen as normal middle-aged bloke behaviour. It'd be the same if I was into fishing. I could spend an entire afternoon drowning maggots in a pond, equipped with several hundreds to several thousands worth of kit, then come home stinking of fish guts, and those who knew of me and my hobby would, again, consider it normal middle-aged bloke stuff. But I don't play golf. I don't fish. I game, and people find that weird. Even amongst other gamers, such as those those in their thirties streaming on Twitch to the prepubescent and the angsty teens, I am someone to be derided and mocked. Shit, it's a permanent bone of contention in my own marriage, which is weird, given the hours that my wife can spend playing games on her phone.
To be clear, I'm no basement dwelling cave troll. Basketball, football and cricket as a kid and through my teen years. Modified cars in my twenties. Superbikes, dirt bikes, 4x4's, guns and golf in my thirties. Exercise, pubs, and watching football and rugby in my forties. Yet throughout it all, there have been consoles, and the occasional AMD-based gaming PC.
My first console was an 8-bit Golden China console that my parents bought for my sister and I. After that, a gaming PC. Then, consoles. Always a PS or an Xbox. These days, I have an Xbox Series X. I tried another gaming PC when the RTX 2080 was a thing, but then AM4 became AM5, the RTX 3000 series GPUs arrived, and I lost the will to live trying to keep up. Despite the platform, gaming remained a constant. I've played all of the Fallouts. The Elder Scrolls since Morrowind. I've been wreaked by every title produced by From Software. I was a pretty decent Quake player back in the day, and loved the Dust map in Counter Strike. I wrote reviews for a gaming web site in South Africa. Where I admit that things do get a little obsessive are the countless hours I have poured into the original Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Cyberpunk 2077. My latest obsessions are Forza Horizon 6 and Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced. I have Fable 5 on pre-order. To be fair, I've noticed that my reaction times have declined, that I sometimes struggle to follow basic instructions, and frequently get frustrated by the fact I've gone from being able to hit someone between the eyes from across a map to treating my aiming reticule like I'm trying to paint-by-numbers on my television screen. I'm pretty much a game tourist these days. That's okay by me, though. Difficulty sliders exist for this exact reason. My Souls runs and trying to beat games on max difficulty are over. I'm here for the story. And the sailing, as it turns out. Driving games are my last refuge for an all out challenge, which is why FH6 is my first serious foray into racing games.
I'm rambling though. To the point: why do people deride gamers my age? Simple answer: they don't game. I started working in tech in 1997. That was a world of dial up modems, 128k leased lines into our office, Pentium I computers and an AS/400 mainframe that ran our MRP platform. I still work in tech. I'll likely die at my desk troubleshooting a problem on the cloud. Or we'll circle back to running our own servers in a DC. I digress. Again. So, technology has been the foundation on top of which I have built a career, and have created a livelihood. I have built a not-so-insignificant knowledge base on materials that pertain to technology as it was, and as it is. It has not been "just a tool". It has been something that I have had to invest a lot of my most precious commodity, time, into understanding. That is an investment I continue to make today. A 47-year-old man, sitting in a room in front of a laptop connected to multiple screens, relearning on an almost daily basis how the fundamentals of thing that pays the bills works. It's fucking exhausting.
Gaming is different. It allows me to use technology as a tool to relax. I can either rip a car around a road trying to nail braking points, hitting the apex and accelerating optimally, or I can kick back and participate in something that plays like an interactive movie. None of that matters. To my friends and acquaintances alike, a 47-year-old gamer is weird. The data doesn't back them up. Almost 60% of 30-49 year olds report playing a game frequently. The average age of a gamer today is 36. That average age will increase with time. Then there's stereotyping. My brother-in-law and I rode motorbikes together, went off roading together, went shooting, worked on cars and generally behaved like normal dudes in their thirties. We played a game against each other once. It was an old version of Counter Strike that we played on laptops, between which I built a quick-n-nasty LAN. It lasted less than hour. Every time he appeared on the map, he'd die to a headshot. We added bots to his team. I'd pick off the bots, and then hunt him down with a knife. He got annoyed, rightfully, and we quit the game. Stereotypically: lame nerd man beats normal man playing a lame nerd game. Alternatively, the fact that I knew how to join two laptops together on a network in under five minutes, get the game running, and then proceed to curb stomp my awesome brother-in-law was testament to the fact that I had a diversified skill set and a mastery of a game environment that required the ability to identify him as a target, aim, and headshot him for an instant kill in less time that he had to even identify where I was in relation to him on the map. That counterpoint is, however, always ignored. As a big strong man, I should either be hitting or kicking a ball, dressing in spandex and riding a bicycle, playing a round of golf, or kicking a ball around with mates during Sunday football. Things that I did as a teenager. Games that I played as a teenager. Indeed, indulging in activities that I enjoyed as a teenager. That list of acceptable pastimes somehow omits gaming. It's not okay to tell a grown ass man or woman that riding a bicycle is something kids do before they're old enough to drive, and that golf is just a way to ruin a perfectly good walk, and that pretending to be footballer on a Sunday on the same field your kid was playing football on during the week is a bit sad. It is okay to tell me that my fascination with video games is a bit sad though.
It is via the above few sentences that we reach the crux of this ramble. I cast my own aspersions on guys in spandex riding bicycles, or those who choose to waste a perfectly good Sunday morning kicking a football about. Many of them would cast their own aspersions on me as I flip flop between simulating Max Verstappen, Edward Kenway or V. The simple fact is that stereotypes are bullshit. The world is not an easy place to live in, so regardless of whether your downtime is fetching your bike out, lacing up your football boots, grabbing your fishing rod or picking up your controller, we should all be free to do whatever the hell it is that we want to do when we want to suck some joy out of life.
Thus endeth the lesson. Over and out.