The Ageing Gamer

Written By: David Rider

What was your first console gaming experience? Modern Warfare 2? Fortnite? They seem to be touchstones for a lot of gamers, but for me, my first gaming experience was Pong. I’ve been around for a while.

My first home gaming experience was when my Dad appeared with an Atari VCS one day. A tech nut, he’d somehow wangled a work trip to London from Edinburgh and managed to swing by Tottenham Court Road before heading home.  

We were among the first people in Scotland to get a taste of home gaming. The bug bit me, hard. Such was my addiction that I ended up becoming a freelance games journalist in the early '90s as the 16-bit era was in full swing. I was actively feeding my addiction daily.  

I’m old by gaming standards. Heck, I’m old by any standard, really. I still remember meeting my Editor in Chief at Electronic Gaming Monthly, who was in his early 50s at the time, and thinking, “This guy plays games? Really? He’s so old.” I was in my 20s at the time. Now here I am, aged 54, still playing video games and wondering how my younger self would react.  

In those days, gaming with friends meant sitting around the same console, playing two-player titles. Then GoldenEye hit the Nintendo N64 in 1997 and changed everything. A few years later, Microsoft introduced Xbox Live to console players, and our worlds expanded massively. New friendships were made online, and developers pounced on the opportunity to offer new gaming experiences.  

I was relatively late to online multiplayer, thanks to my internet connection at the time. When I was finally able to join the masses, it was initially in a racing game, and then Activision sent me a copy of CoD4 to review. I was instantly hooked on the multiplayer aspect and spent hours playing.

I made new friends online, even joining a clan of older players called, naturally enough, Old Shooters. We took pleasure in the death comms on Xbox Live and delighted in telling anyone that they just got pwned by someone old enough to be their Dad. They were fun times, and annual iterations of popular FPS titles kept us going for years.  

So, a lifelong love of gaming remains undiminished...to an extent. As with all aspects of ageing, growing older can impact your gaming. It really wasn’t something I’d ever worried about, until I started experiencing it. What makes it worse is that it really sneaks up on you.  

It starts with something small like 'time.' You’re working. You’re pursuing a career. Perhaps you're growing a family. Gaming has to take a back seat when the real world knocks hard enough on the door. These were the things I’d expected. What I hadn’t really considered was the ways my own body could let me down, beginning with my eyes. 

I’ve worn glasses for years, and they’ve never been a problem. However, now that I’m in my 50s, I really need bifocals. Or varifocals. I refuse to because I don’t want it to affect my gaming. I have a big TV, after all, which should be enough, and it is, for now. I find myself peering into the screen harder now, trying to spot the glint of a sniper scope, or that one pixel out of place that marks an enemy’s head.

There are times when I swear someone invisible just killed me, simply because I didn’t spot them until it was far too late. Obviously, some games can exacerbate that, particularly FPS titles where outfits blend into mud or background textures (I’m looking at you, Battlefield). 

As if peering at my TV isn’t bad enough, my knackered old body doesn’t enjoy sitting in the same position for as long as it used to. Things cramp. Things ache. I’ve found myself having to stand up, mid-game, and pace around the room when my foot cramps (as far as my headset cable allows). This didn’t happen when I was 25. 

The biggest fear I have is arthritis. I already experience a little in my fingers. If anything puts paid to my gaming, it’ll be an inability to operate a controller.  Not ideal for a fan of twitch shooters that rely on quick reflexes. This is another reason I choose to play them; I genuinely believe that my reaction times are improved by playing things like CoD, and that my hand-eye coordination has remained better as a result.  

The release of Modern Warfare in 2019 brought a lot of older players back to gaming. Like me, they cut their teeth on CoD4 and are delighted that the boots on the ground, twitch shooter has gone back to basics. Our nostalgia has been fed, and we’re hungry for more. 

Are we older gamers a forgotten aspect of an industry that thrives on innovation and youth? Possibly. Equally, we’re an aspect of it that may soon require more attention. Can the industry position itself to include older gamers in a better way than simply offering a steady stream of brain-training games? 

I hope so. There will come a time when third-party peripheral manufacturers have to look at their ranges and ask themselves whether they’re missing out on market share by not offering controllers which take possible hand issues like arthritis into account. We can’t all switch to a mouse and keyboard, nor would most of us want to. Adaptable, modular controllers, which can be altered to suit the user's physical capabilities, may just be a personal pipedream, but for older and less able-bodied players, they could make a real difference.  

Older gamers aren’t going to go away. If anything, our ranks will continue to swell. How the games industry deals with that will be interesting to see. 

David was a journalist for Electronic Gaming Monthly during the heyday of print media. With a long career in video games, he's excited to be writing about them again.

*Originally published on playwatchrecord.com