[Rant] Have Your Gaming Attitudes Changed With Age?

Wow, a new topic on the video game section forum. Who would of ever guessed.

This is a topic I've had on my mind for quite a while especially when I turned 30 last year. A lot of us gamers that have been on the forum for quite a long period of time right now probably are the age of anywhere between their mid-20's to their early 30's. One thing I've always wondered is how have your gaming tastes or even your attitudes toward gaming evolved as you've gotten older.

I guess for me I've noticed a big change toward my gaming tastes even attitudes toward gaming in general. The biggest thing I've noticed in recent years is that I literally have no desire to keep up with whats new in gaming. We're already half-way into 2011 and I've only played one game that has been released this year. It's just I have no interest with whats new and great in gaming. I'm not excited at all concerning anything at E3, even with talk of the next generation of systems. Especially in recent years I've just been more focused on playing the older games that I've always wanted to play as a kid to a young adult than to play the next greatest thing in gaming. I understand that I'm falling behind and you know what I'm actually perfectly content in that.

I'm even seriously considering giving up gaming after this generation because there are a lot of things that are even appealing to me about gaming nowadays. The only games I'm excited about this year are two DLC titles for the X-Box 360 and pretty much nothing else. I'll probably be playing games till the day I die, and you know what eventually I may buy the newest console just to keep up with my favorite video game series such as final fantasy and a few other select titles.

I just have no interest in online gaming, playing games on a IOS or android device. I don't think my attitudes toward gaming make me any better than every other gamer but its something that I've come to realize as I've gotten older. It makes me a little bit of a gaming dinosaur but keeping up with what everybody is playing was favorable to me as a kid to my early 20's but it really has no appeal to me anymore.

I've played games long enough that I know exactly what I like and anybody that has known me on the forum knows I am and will always be a big fan of the anime game genre regardless if its a j-rpg, fighting game, side-scroller or platformer (insert jokeful comments here). Strangely enough Skills is one of the few people that can actually recommend a game to me that I absolutely like that is outside of the genre that I play the most.

So with E3 coming, I couldn't care less about what some of the biggest news in gaming will be next week. I'm just perfectly okay with playing the games that I love and collecting the games I've always wanted to own. So while I may be left in dust by other gamers to play the next biggest game, I will always get more enjoyment or equal enjoyment playing something I've always wanted to play that's old instead of playing something new.

To the fellow GFF gamers, how has your attitude toward gaming and your individual gaming tastes evolved as you've gotten older?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I think overwhelmingly what has changed in my approach to gaming is I no longer have any hope. It used to be when a game was advertised as huge, expansive storytelling I'd get excited and couldn't wait to play it. Now, when Rockstar or Square say the same thing, I sigh and wonder what new and wonderful way they'll find to completely fuck up the experience this time. I find a huge amount of the sense of wonder is gone out of games for me now. Fewer titles I really enjoy with every new console.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I don't give a shit either. Fewer games now catch my interest. Hell, even big titles such as Gears 3 and Modern Warfare 3 don't interest me that much anymore (though I'll still play them).

Frankly, my interest is slightly waning.

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I have (slightly) less free time and much much more games to play, so I tend to gravitate more towards the shorter games I can complete in one or two sittings and then move to the next one.

I can't say my attitude has changed that much. I still get excited for interesting games, I think it's just there are more games now that are not made "for me". For instance, about 90% of the PS3's biggest current or upcoming exclusives don't appeal to me whatsoever.

But it's not like there aren't games to look forward to, even now I have a good 8 titles preordered that I'm completely psyched for. I mean holy hell, Dark Souls! Guild Wars 2! Child of Eden! How can you not be pumped for this stuff <3

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I haven't finished the last few games that I got, so I'd have to say similarly that my interest is waning. Gaming takes too much of a time investment anymore.

I was speaking idiomatically.

On the flipside... my interest in gaming has been expanded greatly over the few years (thanks to backloggery) into finishing a lot more games than I ever had done before and needed to.

I personally always had a narrow-sighted approach towards gaming, I'd tend to stick with genres I know and came to love. This definitely helps with my current backlogs while I'm also trying out the other new types of genres (LEGO <3) thanks to my sweetie. Kinda like with movies, I always would find something in every game I've played to appreciate in its flaws and its awesomeness. My appetite could never wane in wanting something new or something fresh on the screen.

IE I've played enough rpgs to know that some games tend to get stale when its rehashing the same plotline over and over, I'd tend to look forward for something else besides it. Character development? Battle system? Music? Extra content? Etc. Kinda like my staple horror movie genre, it gives me my lows while I'd look forward the highs in few others. I'd say its worth it.

And for the record, most of the games we own are often SD's picks and 3/4th of them are sold without me touching them. I just approach games with a smaller mindset and know what I'd definitely play and love. If I'm missing out on some, great, I'll have time for the ones I definitely want to play and love. No biggie!

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I've noticed within the last few years (coinciding with having more responsibilities and less free time, who'da thunk it) that when I get a new game, I will normally sit down and play the shit out of it for a couple of days and then I'll lose interest and play it sparingly afterwards. When it comes to single-player games (current examples: Mass Effect 2, Assassin's Creed 2, Super Mario Galaxy, Kirby's Epic Yarn) it can mean a great tragedy that I got this game, I played it a lot and liked it, but the time I have has become precious and investing it in playing games is no longer seen as appropriate.

This contrasts heavily from when I was younger and I'd play a game and I wouldn't stop playing it until I beat it. More and more games nowadays are making it easier to just pick up, play it real quick, and drop it so the NEED for me to continue playing and beat a game quickly is not nearly as prevalent as it had been.

The most recent single-player game I've beaten was Portal 2. Anyone else who's played and beaten it knows that it's a short game, but I found it to be challenging enough that the shortness was at the very least cancelled out by the difficulty of some of the levels. I won't get into the discussion about how much a game that short should cost (or who would be dumb enough to BUY superficial loot for your co-op robot), but I certainly appreciate the length-to-challenge ratio when I have only a handful of hours a week to spend playing games.

I am, however, always interested in what's new and ahead in the gaming world. Maybe I won't be in five, ten-plus years, but it never fails to thrill me when a new generation of consoles is looming (like it is now).

FELIPE NO

The last three games to REALLY capture my attention have been Final Fantasy XII, Mass Effect 2 and Team Fortress 2. There are more titles that I have enjoyed, but I'm definitely feeling burnt out. It feels like a struggle to get myself to put in an Xbox game or download a PC game.

I'd probably be more into multiplayer games if I had more people to come over to my place and play with, but everyone likes rehashed shit like Call of Duty: Modern Money-Grab and Halo: Another Fucking Spin-off which I can only tolerate for so long. We should organize weekly multiplayer stuff on Steam or Live again, that thread died out =\

The Backloggery has slowed down, or delayed the feeling of burnout to a degree, but it hasn't stopped it. I wish I had Philia's excitement and energy towards pursing the rest of my collection.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

The Simple 2000 series died so I pretty much stopped caring about video games and life in general.

I guess I'm more of a casual grandma kiddy gimmick GAMER these days. The thought of putting four million hours into something to go anywhere makes me want to think of something else instead.

How ya doing, buddy?

I've always had a short attention span when it comes to gaming, and I was never one to play more than an hour or two at a time on any one game. I suppose I'm more likely to play easy/casual stuff to kill time than engage in something lengthy, but at the same time, I've put in 75 hours (and rising) on Tactics Ogre PSP. The problem is, more and more I sit down on the couch and veg out on TV instead of playing a game. I'm turning into my dad.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I don't know that my gaming habits have changed all that much due to age, but the advent of Backloggery has made me a lot more focused. I've always had a tendency to put a game down when the end drew near, sometimes for years. Now I push through that feeling and finish a lot more games than I used to. As a result, I also have more unstarted games laying around which can get a bit depressing. I've developed a bad habit of starting games and then never getting back to them again too. Not sure why, since a lot of the time I really enjoy those games and I blow through them all at once when I do eventually come back to them.

Originally Posted by Negro Mountain

The problem is, more and more I sit down on the couch and veg out on TV instead of playing a game.

I do that too, but unless I'm watching something that I'm actually interested in I generally have either my DS, PSP, or iPod going at the same time. I have such a tremendous backlog on my DS games alone that it's easy to find something to grind while watching TV. Hell, that's where 90% of my Picross 3D progress came from, and don't get me started on the 230+ hours of Dragon Quest IX.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I'd say my attitude and my preference for games has shifted rather progressively from when I was a kid into adulthood. The more time goes by, the more I tend to look for strategy games and the less I tend to go for JRPGs. Real RPGs have crept more and more into my gaming pattern as well, and it's now to the point that I basically don't play the JRPGs at all any more. The last one I played was FFXIII, and while I did get to the end of it out of pure boredom at that moment in my life and not having anything else to play. I really didn't enjoy the experience as much as I thought I would. Maybe the amount of JRPGs I play has declined because I don't have either of the main handheld systems, which seem to have the lion's share of those games nowadays, at least compared to the PS3.

I also play a lot more multiplayer games than I did before, but that's probably just because my brother has moved to Montreal and so we can have gaming sessions whenever we both have a bit of time. Before he moved here, the occasions I had to do that where pretty few and far between, mostly because the friends I have in Montreal are for the most part not the kind of people who enjoy playing games more than for a short bit.

As far as the amount of time I put into gaming, I'd say it's been pretty constant, with a slight decline as time goes by, if only because real world considerations just keep mounting as I get older. I figure that's the same for pretty much everyone though. I still enjoy gaming as much as I did before, so it really is just a question of not having as much time in general for it.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Oddly enough, I've been playing more games than when I was younger.

One major reason is that when I was doing my tertiary studies, I shifted my priorities to, well studying. It was largely because I didn't do as well as I expected during my first semester in university. I would, there after, avoid games for almost the entire semester until my exams were over.

Another big reason is that ever since I started working, I've had more spending power to buy games, including old ones I missed out on or couldn't afford to buy as a kid. In fact, I've turned into something of a small time game collector.

But in recent years, I've had to pull very long hours at work so during weekdays, and even some weekends, I have very little time to myself. So finding the time, and sometimes energy, to game has become more challenging. I think I'm playing less games than I did a few years ago before work took more control over my life. But it's still far more than when I was a teen.

Of late, I've also noticed that I prefer to play games with a short turn-around time. It's probably because I've less time to game now. I do have a very, very long to-play list, with some games dating as far back as the 1980s. I've also become more open to playing indie games too, in part because they tend to be short.

Nevertheless, I still look forward to playing a good number of games with a high time investment and many old titles. At the expense of sounding really nerdy and weird, life just wouldn't seem quite as complete without experiencing those games.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I'm with Q, for the most part. My free time has lessened in the last few years (minus the last 4 weeks since I graduated and began a job hunt in proper) but my purchasing habits or playing habits have only really gravitated towards specific genres instead of shorter stuff. I play less JRPGs than I used to, and focus on more shmups now than I did 2 or 3 years ago. But that could just be because the market doesn't have that many non-portable JRPGs worth a shit in the last little bit.

I still knock off a fair amount of games in a year, though. Backloggery and my own spreadsheets say I've done 14 so far this year and 46 last year, and then 39 in '09. So maybe it's not really changing at all, I don't know. I know this year so far I've put in some really long hours on some titles like Tactics Ogre (well over 100, now), so.

I'll agree with the growing level of disgust at some of the industry's tactics though, and it has affected some of the titles I choose not to buy. Project 10 dollar just recently made me not support Dirt 3, for example. Can't wait till the same thing happens with the single player portion of console games, that'll be fun.

If we go as far as back as when I was a kid, all I can say is that I have a lower tolerance for crap. But everyone's tastes in everything get more refined as they get older, so that's not really surprising.

Originally Posted by Negro Mountain

The problem is, more and more I sit down on the couch and veg out on TV instead of playing a game. I'm turning into my dad.

I find this exceptionally hard to do. I can sit through maybe a TNG episode or something if it's on a re-run or Sanctuary or Dr. Who if I can catch it, but I think I watch maybe 4 hours of non-hockey TV a week. I vidya instead.

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I read far more about gaming than I actually play. I'm pretty sure I used to be pretty good at games back in the day too. Or at least a whole lot better than I am now. But I still play the odd game now and again. Besides my two mediocre 3DS launch titles and Minecraft I've played Portal 2, Amnesia, and Ghost Trick as of late. I have too many games that I can play that I choose not to instead out of laziness. The streams I do also take up a fair amount of time and the only time I can really do my let's play streams is on the weekend really late at night. I like having a long good adventure as much as the rest of you but I feel I'm liking shorter higher quality games when I can have them these days. The last beefy game I think I played was Okami on the Wii and that was like I dunno 2 years or so ago. I simply need to play more.

FELIPE NO

I know have virtually no free time in summer but I do get a lot of free time in winter and although I had thought my interest in gaming was dying off, I actually played a ton of games last winter and though I have a load on the shelf yet to play, I reckon I'll get through them. I never really buy games on release these days (The exception being LA Noire as my girlfriend is going to be away for a couple of weeks and Space Marine that I've ordered in anticipation of it getting released just when my busy season ends) and tend to buy games that everyone raved about, once they've dropped in price.

I play a lot less online now but only because I rarely buy games people are currently playing online.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

I have almost no patience for new games, and when I say new, I mean new to me. Anything I haven't played before where I really need to concentrate and figure it out is lost on me. I can feel that excitement at the thought of playing Fallout, but in reality I won't play it because I'm too damn lazy.

I think it's because I'm old enough to go out and am independent. When I was a kid I was confined by my age and by the fact that I was grounded all the time. The only thing I have patience for now is Magic the Gathering because I go out and spend one-on-one time with my pals over a drink or two. I guess I've shifted from digital to the physical mediums of gaming.

I still won't play D&D, however. No time! No time!

How ya doing, buddy?

Yeah, I'm pretty much a nostalgia fag. I have to admit. THE DAYS OF GLORY ARE FOREVER GONE.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I used to waste a lot of money on games I'd never finish, now I pick one competitive multiplayer game and squeeze 6 months to a year out of it. I'm doing a lot of stuff I've never done before, I compete in tournaments, I write guides now, and I'm a more skilled gamer than I've ever been.

I mean, the last year has been League of Legends, and now Mortal Kombat, that's been my two games. The plan is to stick with Mortal Kombat until the scene completely dies out, I want to be the very best (like no one ever waaaaaas). I'm liking this monomaniacal approach to gaming a lot better than blowing tons of money on stuff I only kind of cared about.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.