So, hear me out.
I’m a 47 year old guy and I’m not ashamed to say that I enjoy video games. I always have, from playing Head over Heels on a Speccy +2 to ESO and Valorant on my self built PC.
Due to various life circumstances, I’m also on the dating scene and to most women I meet, around my age, video games are anathema. When I say that I like them it’s usually meet with an “oh dear” or a “my son would probably love to talk to you about them, I find them really boring”
I have two boys, both teenagers, both play all the time and sometimes we all play together (although they are better as they have more time to apply to games). Their friends are amazed that I will talk about games with them, that I know someone about games and that I play games. None of their parents want to talk with them about what is effectively their main hobby that they do all the time (big sad).
So the question, there must be some sort of cut off age at which video games are no longer an acceptable pastime. Is it absolute age based (nothing after 35) or is it something to do with the progression of games into popular culture and people born after, say, 1986 will not see it as unacceptable?
I don’t have an answer, I just think it’s an interesting question. Thanks for reading, let me know what you think!
Edit to add: I’m not planning on stopping through peer pressure, just wondering about the phenomenon!
Be 80 and play FIFA, it’s fine. There’s no age where you are obliged to put down your controller for the last time. But it shouldn’t be your first answer while you’re dating, and definitely not your only one.
Being a gamer, as an identity, has a lot of baggage.
Having gaming be your only interest or hobby is associated with being an unambitious self-interested person who intends to do as a little as possible, as long as possible. The recognisable games are marketed towards kids/teens with time to burn.
Imagine your date’s interest was “moderating Reddit”, “watching TikTok”, or “reading Instagram”. That’s what ‘gaming’ sounds like: your hobby is media consumption.
There’s no age where you aren’t allowed to consume media; but it’s worrying if that consumption is your identity, if consumption makes up your routine.
So it’s not actually about age - it’s about maturity and goal-setting.
When we’re younger, most of us live moment-by-moment. Media consumption offers no future, but it has a pleasurable present.
But as people age, people develop goals and interests that require more investment and focus, and they’re looking for people that are doing the same. A cutthroat economy demands people develop goals for financial stability, even if they still otherwise like games.
As we age, we stop looking for somebody to hang out with, but to build a life with.
So once the people you’re talking to have interests for the future, “I enjoy my present doing my own thing” doesn’t offer them anything. If they don’t play games, they don’t even know what games are capable of. Maybe one day they’d enjoy playing Ultimate Chicken Horse with you.
But right now, they just see the recognisable titles that want to monopolise children’s time, and assume you’re doing that. They picture you spending 20+ hours a week playing Fortnite. And there is an age cut-off where it’s no longer socially-acceptable to be a child.
It’s not that video games are bad, but they’re a non-answer. They want to know what you do that’s good, and a non-answer implies you don’t have a good answer at all, and that makes video games ‘bad’.
It’s really weird that people who have “reading books” as their main hobby are not as stigmatized as their digital media counterparts. Is it the digital aspect that turns the hobby into weirdness?
Maybe - certainly generations always assume anything that younger people do is somehow worse than what they did, and the digital landscape is a part of that. When writing slates became accessible, the old guard complained it was ‘lazy’ because they didn’t have to remember it anymore. Any music popular among teenagers (especially teenage girls) is mocked as foolish, cringe, etc.
But I suspect like most hobbies, it’s mostly the following that determine our assumptions:
You’re right, reading is not somehow more or less moral than video games. Many modern games have powerful narrative structure that is more impactful for being an interactive medium. Spec Ops: The Line embraces the players actions as the fundamentals of its message. Gamers are hugely diverse; more than half the US population actually plays games at this point, and platforms are rapidly approaching an almost even gender split. (Women may choose to play less or different games, and hide their identity online, but they still own ~40% of consoles.)
Games as a medium is also extremely broad. I don’t think you could compare games to ‘watching anime’ for example, so much as ‘the concept of watching moving pictures’, because they can range from puzzles on your phone, to narrative epics, to grand strategies, to interactive narratives.
So a better comparison for video games isn’t ‘reading books’ so much as reading in general, and are you reading Reddit, the news, fiction, or classic lit? What does your choice of reading mean?
So for your suggested hobby of ‘reading books’, one might assume any (or all) of the following:
Assuming everybody who reads is ‘smart’ is as much an assumption as assuming everybody who games is ‘lazy’, and the assumptions you make about the hobby are really assumptions you make about the typical person who chooses it. It may not be a guarantee, but its a common enough pattern.
TLDR: Ultimately? I think books have inflated status because it’s seen as a hobby for thinkers; people picture you reading Agatha Christie (but you could be reading Chuck Tingle, or comic books). Games have deflated status because it’s seen as a hobby for people who consume mindlessly - the people who know what games are capable of are the ones playing them, too.