Sooner or later everyone notices the signs of age. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because aging brings many positive twists – also when it comes to games.
How does our favorite hobby change as we get older? In this article we bring you closer to five aspects that, at least for us, are different he changed as a player over the course of his growth have.
less time to play
The memory of being a student is wonderful. Although homework, friends, and a pubescent mind take up a lot of space, there is still enough time for hours of gaming per day. Students or trainees have to make bigger cuts in virtual worlds. As professionals, however, we lose a strict prioritization of time not help you, especially when a relationship, children, sports, and other hobbies are added to the work.
As a result, we can afford to complete a game at 100 percent less often if we want to complete more than two games a year. Fortunately, one’s ego is usually more grounded and measured. digital status symbols like collectibles, trophies or rankings have less value It provides some balance.
Analogous to time, our tolerance for frustration is also decreasing. Hours of trial and error on a point and click adventure? The hundredth attempt at a Soulslike? For that, the game has to be extraordinarily exciting; on the other hand, Google is consulted after a very short timeto advance.
Online games with friends don’t work so spontaneously anymore. “Hey, do you fancy a round of betting?” – “You’re welcome, how about Tuesday of next week from 8 pm to 10 pm?” The valuable game time you would like with busy schedules well planned and coordinated will be. This may seem daunting at first, but it also has a good thing: it makes video games even more valuable!
Selective selection of games
At some point we will stop lying to ourselves: No, we can never get over our pile of shame. And that’s fine too. We don’t have to have played it all. We pick the raisins for that, because We don’t have time for mid-range games..
That’s why we’re happy with the shorter games. While a game length of 10-20 hours would have put us off before, we prefer more compact experiences today. Completing several short games can be much more satisfying than the next 100-hour open world game that could turn into a tedious year-long project.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a new game. Nostalgia becomes an increasingly valuable treasure with age, so we focus more on retro games. When we play our favorite childhood games, we simply know that we are going to be entertained and what emotions await us.
Competitive online games with strangers, on the other hand, lose their appeal because not keeping up with the younger Nonstop players can, especially not in the mobile area with smartphone control, which probably only the new generation mastered perfectly. We prefer a story-driven single player game that we can enjoy comfortably at our own pace.
perceive stories differently
With the increase in life experience, our view of video game stories changes. start with us empathize better with mature characters while we identify less with the teenage protagonists than before.
This is accompanied by a growing demand for the plausibility of an action. Instead of cool sayings and stereotypes, we are interested in them. deep variety of feelings and circumstancesthat make a character behave, simply because we have experienced them and/or learned to understand them ourselves.
With a great experience, we take subtle details different and discover new messages even in well-known games that either remained hidden from us as teenagers or simply didn’t interest us.
“I can’t do anything with this new trick.” It’s probably in our nature to be put off by attitudes like these when we’re young, but as we get older we find ourselves thinking the same thing more often.
Influencers, live broadcasts and let’s play are part of this in some way. While television is losing relevance, influencers (gaming) have become the new entertainment program and also role models for younger generations settled down. Celebrity crushes have always been a part of teen pop culture, but today fans can get significantly closer to their idols through Twitch, YouTube, and social media.
The more we grow, the less we depend on such figures of identification. The same applies to all kinds of gaming communities that can offer younger gamers the exchange and support that older gamers tend to seek in their own environment.
that leads to that more and more trends happen to us and sometimes we are amazed that we can only understand the “youth of today” in a limited way, although until recently we counted ourselves among them. This can be a disconcerting experience but also quite liberating. Young people, get ready!
Early and late adopters
An extremely positive aspect of growing up is one’s income, at least compared to the young, destitute self. Gone are the days when we had to wait until Christmas to get an object of desire as a gift.
More and more, we can afford to to give joy directly to liberation itself. When it comes to hardware, professionals are often among the early adopters, which is often accompanied by a childlike curiosity.
On the other hand, patience is a virtue that grows with age. this is how we have to not immediately the next generation of consoles in the closet because there are enough other priorities in our lives (whether we like them or not). This has the advantage that we can comfortably wait until the second iteration of the hardware, which experience has shown to be less flawed than the first.
As you can see, games don’t get worse with age, they just get a bit different due to our internal and external transformation. However, what is never lost are the innocent moments of excitement and joy that video games can bring us in abundance.