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!

  • hydrospanner@vlemmy.netEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I don’t think there’s an age cutoff, or even a strict limit of social acceptability, but I do feel like the older you get, the less time people your age will devote, on average, to gaming…or at least the less focus they’ll give gaming.

    It’s not necessarily a bad thing to still be super into video games in your 40s or 50s, but since there will be fewer people your age as invested as you, this will stand out, and one should reasonably expect this to have an impact on how some age-peers view and interact with you, for better or for worse.

    The fact that a focus on gaming is more prevalent in kids than adults may carry the connotation that someone has failed to grow up in other ways as well, since they never moved past their gaming phase. It’s not always accurate or always negative, but subjective opinion might be both of those things.