memes @lemmy.world

6mo ago

Where are the old (30s) granpa gamers?

240 comments

30’s?? That’s rookie numbers, I’m nearing my 50’s.
- Same. And I still game. Who the fuck quits when they pwnd everyone and still have tea bags to spare?
  
  The tea bags are a bit saggier, but they're still good!
- You youngsters can eat my shorts, I’ll be gunning for you (in game f course). Excuse me, I need to yell at those damn kids to GET OFF MY LAWN
- Godspeed you magnificent bastard
- Nearing? I'm already there and I'm the young 'un in my group of gaming buddies. The eldest is in his 60s and we're all playing most evenings.

Listen here you little shit.

Everyone I know turned 30 and immediately turned to dust from their advanced age. So sad. Also, really messy.
- Their poor grandchildren
- Was this from the Night of the Comet movie?

61 in about 3 weeks. I'm older than Pong, and I game every day.
- I'm 50 and pong was my first video game. I had to play it on amateur with the bigger paddles because the small ones were insanely small.
  
  Alright, we have enough to run a tournament. Who’s streaming!
- Dude, that was my first game too! I kind of wish I still had it (and a screen it would play on).
  
  I was 9 or 10 3 first time I saw a Pong arcade machine in a hotel in San Diego.
- My dad is a couple of years older than you and he's the one who introduced me to gaming on his Atari back in the 80s. We play Battle for Wesnoth semi-regularly together.
  There was a space of about a decade where we didn't and honestly I regret that. We don't live close to each other but it's how we stay in touch.
  Honestly, that and grilling (and eventually motorcycles, but I was already on my way out of rural nowhere when that happened) are the only things we bonded over. I have always had hobbies that kept me at arms length from "normal" people and my dad is the guy you'd think of if you thought of a regular dude born in the 60s. I'm still pretty weird (and happy about it), but it's nice that I can be close to him through gaming.
  
  My oldest and (he's 31 today) have copies of this on our office walls https://kagi.com/proxy/2434767_orig.png?c=Ux_Oi49zwrz_XQu8syTDi7pdjUAc4KO_wcuIYxcLBYVVdaF_ts2tNMrrB1335mt_48KAUH2poQelymJ7a7PDGRjG4y4c-aoE0yr1F9vp67s7qwBYQtyX4UprxCe0g5r5
  My best gaming time ever is when my sons and I make up a 4-man fire team in any game.
- 55 here, and I got to play lunar lander on my dad's lab PDP-8 even before my grandparents got Pong.
  Currently working my way through Fallout London.

I've got unplayed games older than you!

Nearly 60 and a grandma.
- Grandma is over 60 and I recently had to upgrade her to a 4060 instead of my old 480 just to play Guild Wars 2 lol.
  
  You are good grandchild, and I hope she knows it!

Yall GOTTA stop pretending 30 is old
ive only been an adult on my own for like 5 years, relax
- Same. I'm 35 and I've only been independent for 5 years as well. This is the new norm. Adulting is expensive. 30 isn't old; you're just starting your life.
  
  exactly
  i got married last year
  im literally a level 1 husband.
  Im a level 32 human but only a level 6 Adult, really. I moved out at 22 but spent the first 3 years partying and barely making rent
  I think 25 was the year i started actually trying to do a good job at life, so im still pretty new at it
- As I said in another thread, I'm 37, I'm not old, I'm lower middle age. I make noise sitting down but I don't make noise putting my feet up yet.
  
  Damn! Ease off on the aging there, gramps. I'm 50 and I can still touch my toes without groaning! The only "old person noises" I make are exclusively of the "get off my lawn you whippersnapper" type. ;-P
  (And I've been gaming since Pong)
  
  I'll be 37 soon, I was doing well untill my motorcycle accident. Even in full gear a lot of stuff broke that shit aged me fast. That being said my best friend is 22 and I can still beat his ass at most games.
- I'm 38 and I'm extremely anxious about what to expect from adulthood in two years.

30s are rookie numbers. I'm 52 and still game regularly. I started out playing pong clones in about 1975 hooked up to my tv. I played a lot of zx spectrum games in the 80s, failed my degree in the early 90s because I spent far far far too long playing civ1 on my Amiga. Etc etc.
- Fellow Amiga civ veteran, eh?
  I blew most of my youth, and a chunk of my degree, on football manager too.
  I regret nothing.
  
  The 512KB or the 1MB version of Civ 1?
  
  Need to get on over to !amiga@sopuli.xyz
- Remember when Lemmings finally made it to PC and all us people who had Amigas were like, "I know, right?"

41 here. PC master race gamer 4 lyf.
- I'm 46 and a PC gamer, but I don't give a shit what platform anyone plays on. This "PC master race" stuff is infantile bullshit and needs to disappear.
  
  Technically, the members of the subreddit claim the name is ironic, but you'd be hard-pressed to tell by the way they often act.
  
  I know that some people take it ridiculously seriously, but for me, it's just a preference.
  I have a Wii that I don't use anymore and a PS4 that I only use for playing Rock Band rarely, so it's not like I'm a real purist or otherwise extremist about it 🤷
  
  PC master race is about knowing it's the best gaming platform, not about owning one. "it's not about the hardware on your rig, it's the software in your heart."
- Same on both counts! Awkward fist bump? 🤜
  
  Bold of you to assume I'm capable of a fistbump that isn't awkward. Emoticon goes here, I can't be arsed figuring out how.

posting this on lemmy of all places is hilarious, i have a hunch that half of the userbase is 40+
- Yeah probably - I mean I just turned 50 and moved over to Lenny due to the likeness to the old internet forums and BB’s of the 90’s and early 00’s before the normies discovered the internet via social media…..
  
  In those days you'd keep an onion on your monitor, which was the style at the time.

I know an 84 year old man that has played WoW since vanilla.
Im 60 and been gaming since Wolfenstein 3D.
- I am pushing 40 now and I doubt I'll ever stop gaming. I introduced my mom to Ragnarok online 2 decades ago. She introduced her dad to the game and they played together. My grandpa played that game until the day he died and he loved it. My mom still plays it too with the same group of people. This idea that gaming is a young person's thing.. is so weird. My mom is in her late 50ies and she and my dad started with playing Pong. Both my parents and my brother and I grew up with computers, consoles and games. We all love it. That's not something age will suddenly change. In about 20 years those same people will be typing posts like these themselves. ;)

30s? My steam account is about to turn 20! My first computer was a C64 and my first console was an Atari 2600... I remember the video game crash... hell, I still have my copy of ET!
- There's a bunch of young whippersnappers in here. I'm around your age.
  You little shits today know nothing about gaming.
  This is a Star Wars game:
  
  It even had audio from the movie.
  
  I remember playing the original Lemmings and SimCity without a mouse.
- C64 crew represent!
  We had the disk drive and it put out so much heat that I'd leave my food on top of it to keep it warm.
  
  Heck yeah!
  I still remember ruining our first copy of Impossible Mission by accidentally overwriting it! God was I in deep shit...
- Ooh, look at Mr Showoff with his games in colour!
- You get a sweet badge when it turns 20.

The artist: https://www.instagram.com/psychosuzanne

Even most people in the 50-64 years range play videogames: https://www.techopedia.com/video-game-statistics

Look, it's a cheaper hobby than drinking, or outfitting my vehicle. I don't have the time to retreat to a fishing hole and there's no hunting nearby.
Yes I play video game, geez.
- Turning 50 this year. Still balling. Love a drink when I play. The combo remains cheaper than going to dinner
  
  People act like video games are some niche hobby, while it's a bigger industry than movies and music combined. And it's not even close.

Lol people can be so weird.
I have 70 year old family/coworkers who are like "hey 70 isn't old!"
And then there's Lemmy "hey 18 year olds, what's it like to be minutes from death?"

Passed a Linux exam by installing Doom and getting it running with audio.
- LOL, the formatting is making you say that you're one.
  
  that might be a bug with your client. mine says they're 54.

56 here , started with pong , atari 2600 and still play PC games daily.
- 57 and same.

I think I find more people in the 28-45 age range that are gamers, than I do people younger that consider themselves such.
- indeed, gaming is becoming more of an "older" people hobby mostly because kids nowadays get bombarded with micro transactions and pay to win mechanics that don't really engage them as a target audience.
  Once I attended a reto game convention and meet a kid who was like 14 or 15 who was really into retro games, mostly because those games didn't nag them with live services and bullshit as such. It really shifted my perspective about modern AAA gaming.
  PS: by retro he meant the PS2 era

Man we sure are suckers for this Facebook level interaction bait.

The fuck with this question. My youngest is barely 31. I guess I'm dust and fading memories. I will watch my anime and horror movies and shout at the clouds with an onion tied to my belt, fuck you very much
- An onion? At what time was that the style?
  
  The ancient 80s

48 year old here. Now I feel old.
- My mom recently retired from tanking in wow. She was 74.
  
  Did she switch to DEEPS?
- It's ok, our Gen X nursing home LAN party is going to be awesome!

Late 40s here... Gaming since 1986 on Amiga
- Hello fellow late 40s, are you me? What's your favourite genre or game now and what was your favourite on Amiga?
  These days: Factory games (Satisfactory) and Total War Amiga: XCom, Syndicate, Civ
  
  i played on PC but my dad's friends had an amiga so i played on it sometimes when i was about 5... I found PP Hammer a lot of fun and Altered Beast simply looked incredible.
  
  Favourite Amiga games: Secret of Monkey Island 1&2, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Rick Dangerous 1&2, Pirates!, Flashback, Lemmings, Eye of the Beholder....just off the top of my head
  Favourite now: The Witness, Braid, Portal, Obra Dinn, Papers Please, Fez, Talos Principle, BoTW, The Last Door...etc.
  
  Satisfactory, Counter Strike, Fallout 4 (heavily modded), Assassin's Creed (still love Black Flag), Portal 1÷2 and of course every game of the Witcher series. This is a small fraction of the games I played in the last years but all I can remember for now 😅
- No idea what our first computer was, but it was BIG. The first thing I did was play games. This would've been somewhere around 87-89.

Original video gamers are like 75. It’s weird to assume that most won’t at least occasionally play.
I’m 48 and play daily. Husband is 43 and has like 2k hours in Baldurs Gate.

My literal grandparents play video games. They were in their 70s. In fact, they were the ones who taught ME how to play, and my mother (who is not a gamer) remembers them always having the latest console when they were growing up.

44 and I have clocked about 40 hours in Final Fantasy XIV this week. When I get home from work, it's game time.
- Over 30. New Path of Exile league this weekend-- 12 hours Sat/Sun because I can't do all day gaming anymore, what with being ancient and all.

Turning 40 in two months! Where my going grey bush gamers at? I got over 600 games in Steam alone and play like 10 of them! Who else?
- Haha bundles will be the death of me
- Mah untouched steam library growns like my back!

50+. Play every chance I get. Don’t know why it would be surprising, other than Lemmy being an echo chamber of tech-minded younger people who forget my generation started out gaming with Atari and the like.
- It really feels like everyone is 8-12 in here sometimes...

Look, honestly, I'm more disgusted by the amount of people who don't play videogames.
Some people just hate fun I guess
- Oh no, I do something that keeps my mind active. I should stop and doomscroll or get into drugs to relax.
- My brother in-law built a kickass theater setup in his basement. All he plays down there is Madden.

everywhere. thinking mostly kids play videogames is some boomer-ass take. SNES was 35 years ago... do you think people who grew up playing videogames in the 90s just quit one day? about three quarters of people who play videogames today are adults, and 40% are 35+.
- How dare you not growing up like a boomer and not getting accustomed to linear television as your only source of joy, therapy and emotion avoidance? /s
- Growing up with games that had no save options and no walk-throughs, we're the OG gamers.
  
  I had walkthroughs, but you had to buy gaming magazines to get them.

I believe games were originally marketed to adults until Nintendo decided to buck the trend?

60 seems like a better cutoff. Now get out of my yard
- When I retire, my Factorio factory production will accelerate exponentially.
  
  RIP your GPU/CPU
  
  40 years old and currently working on getting the achievements on Steam before the update comes out in October.
- Seriously. I'd consider over sixty an anomaly right now, but it won't be in the future.
  If you grew up with games, they're too imbedded in your entertainment routine to give up.
  
  My wife wishes I went out drinking rather than playing Apex or Sea of Thieves with my old bros.

I'm 35 and my dad turns 68 this year. He had a stroke about 13 years ago that narrowly missed killing him and paralyzed half of his body (he recovered some use of his leg, but his right hand just hangs out).
He had to give up a lot of things, but I made sure gaming wasn't one of them. He plays with a foot pedal and a mouse, and still loves it.
He plays all of the fallout games on a loop, has a thousand hours on the Bioshock franchise, and we play Co-op shooters together sometimes. He has a bunch of other games, but he's super picky lol.
Old-ass gamers unite!

It's such a fucking kid move to not have enough imagination to understand adults needs recreation too.
Do you think you'll stop gaming in, like 20 years when you're 30?
- It's somewhat based in reality, isn't it? I'm still gaming in my late 30s and most people I get to play with are on average 10-15 years younger than me. People leave the hobby with time, en masse, and almost no one my age seems to be joining. There are some games that let you ignore that more (single player, matchmaking. Although even in single player, what's the point of gaming, if you don't get to discuss it with most of your friends), but some are really difficult to continue playing (coop :().
  
  Although even in single player, what's the point of gaming, if you don't get to discuss it with most of your friends
  ... The point is to... play... the game? I have exactly two current games that I play or talk about with friends. The others are all single player games that I play solely for the enjoyment of playing the damn game. Like, what do you mean, what's the point? This view is utterly baffling, just play it?
  
  Yeah, most of the playerbase is young, as young people spend more time playing videogames.
  I think the amount and maybe type of game change a bit, but that's about it. Ofc some people just stop, because there's always some people, but I don't think our generation (I'm roughly the same age) will leave out gaming as much as the previous one did. And I still know plenty of people from gen x who still game avidly. Relatively avidly, at least.
  Gaming was more of a "kids thing" when we were young. Like a lot more. Now it's a viable career. Not a common or easy one, but probably more viable than say "racing-car driver" in the 80's.
- No, it's not. Some adults wake up and trade video games for board games.
  It's like having friends you can spend time with, for real, instead of just being a joke and without real social engagement. Regardless of how many subscriptions to a gorram MMORPG.
  
  being a fucking joke and without real social engagement.
  Aww, guess remote work isn't real work either, huh?
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
  It's not like we're interacting now, because this is just text so ofc it isn't real engagement. What about split-screen party games? Those not "real engagement" either? So... where's the line? Because for instance for TTRPGS, especially for D&D, people definitely use tablets and phones while playing to keep notes / character sheets. What's the difference between an online session of D&D and an IRL one? Sharing a bathroom?
  All of your rhetoric sort of strongly implies you can't be have "real social engagement" with friends who aren't in your immediate vicinity. To say that in this era of technology is a pretty strong tell you don't have any friends outside your small town, I guess.
  Have you ever tried telling a partner that texting and phone calls (or even video calls) aren't "real engagement" and "it's a fucking joke" to think it is?
  "My preferred choice of recreation has more pieces and doesn't use electricity, so it's clearly more mature."
  Honestly, grow up.
  
  It's possible to like both board games and video games. Don't be a dick.

"Where are the old gamers?" Yo! "The thirty year old gamers?" Never mind.

I mean this purely as an observation, but: almost certainly literal child detected
I'm in my mid 30s, and the people in my extended social circle around my age that don't fire up a game at least once or twice a week are few and far between, even including the harried, busy, regular not-yet-grand parents, haha
Quick edit: imo, the ones not playing video games at my age (again, in my area) are generally the ones who seem the least like they have their shit together. It's weird but it's a thing I've noticed
- I mean, if they are 30 and haven't adapted to how society is yet, its not surprising they havent got their shit together. We grew up alongside modern tech growing up, if you've been avoiding technology till now, its exceedingly hard to function in our current society

So, how many more generations before people finally escape Nintendo's crafted stereotype that games are for young boys? Never? Fantastic. I'll try not to think about how I'll magically be too old for games in 7 months.
- I've been playing video games since they existed and I'm in my 50s. There are plenty of people older than me who can say the same.
  
  The reason kids have the games they have is because we were playing games in the 80s on Atari 800s that you had to type into basic from Compute magazine
  
  I had a friend online who was a gamer grandma until she passed. She was the sweetest person and such fun to play with, may she rest in peace.
- I'm too old for movies.

39 here and still playing. The worst part is STILL having a huge backlog of steam games to work through.

My choice of a retirement home will be dictated by which one offers high-speed internet service.
- I have a plan to develop a standalone wow pserver that's all set up with directions on how to do everything so my wife, kids, whoever can plop my dimentiated self in azeroth where I can't get lost.

I know people in their 50s who still game lmao calling 30 old
- 52 and currently playing Empyiron
  
  That game looks awesome, I should check it out some time.

34 here, reporting for duty
- Same... If you switch the digits.

I grew up playing video games in the 80’s - of course I still play video games even though I turned 50 this year.
I swear the younger generations forget gaming has been around for a LONG time long before they were born, also that people don’t change what they enjoy doing just because they get older…..
- in the '80s*

30... That's funny. I'm 50+ and clap asses hard in Tarkov PvP.

I don't know anyone my cohort who doesn't.

I'm 38 and never plan to stop. Of course, I met my wife through World of Warcraft, and we game together most nights. My parents still play games in their mid 60s, too. I remember a kid mocking my dad for gaming at 40 when I was a kid. I imagine that guy is doing the same thing now.

I got a Deck cuz I'm in my 30s. Best thing ever to relax with.

I'm 28 and I'm a young-un in my Elder Scrolls Online guild lol
- Living the dream. I gave up on finding guilds in online games because it’s always a bunch of kids I just can’t relate to.
  
  It's so good lol, no drama, just people enjoying a game they love. It's hard to get people in for things consistently sometimes because life and family happens but I guess that's the price you pay.
  
  If you like world of warcraft give it a go. It's full of guilds with people older than 30

48, just been gaming with my 15 year old. Love it, wouldn't be without it!

Lets sit down and discuss what constitutes a rogue-like
- Not the story on how beating Radahn was your own personal Vietnam War again, grandpa! We definitely all believe you beat him on your 3rd try. Now go back to bed.
  
  I did sonny jim. Beat Radahn pre patch in less than 5 tries.
  I even did it on foot because I thought torrent would steal my souls
  Your generation knows nothing of mine's struggle
- Larn

if 30s is grandpa then what the fuck am I.
My back and knees hurt just thinking about this.
- Worm food?
  Can confirm, am 44 and worm food. Lower back but no knee trouble, yet. Some ankle trouble from an injury at 33, my grandpa years.
- for some reason people around 30 years old always call themselves old lol

I'm creeping up on 50. I finished Elden Ring a little while back.
- Congrats! Have you tried the DLC yet?
  
  Nope. Gotta wait for a sale. It's hard though. Great game!

Late 60's here and my first game was technically Pong. First one I played on my own PC was hunt the wumpus
- I don't remember that one, but Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards was a favorite on my PC with EGA graphics.

You can have my game controller when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. And I'm not alone. We are many. We are legion.
You've heard of dementia villages that mimic old city neighborhoods? Gen-X is gonna need that to look like a mall. A video arcade would make sure over half of them never try to leave¹. We're not done gaming, not by a longshot.
¹ - The rest are going to tend to cluster up in the food court or Tower Records.

I'm also developing them, with the first one hopefully (somewhat) finished by September

Turning 40 this year.

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