Something occurred to me recently. In about thirty more years, the video game generation, which I rigorously define as “people about my age,” is going to be retiring, freeing up time for golden years full of gaming time completely uninterrupted except for pudding and sponge baths. You thought Azeroth was full of single-minded obsessives now, wait until Miami is invaded by geriatric gamers.
10:49 pm, January 21, 2007 -- 13 comments
Dude, I’ve been planning my Old Age Home for Gamers since I was in high school :)
I was at the Chatterbox yesterday; it’s a Twin Cities restaurant that sells fancy sandwiches and rents out NES, Atari, and Sega games for playing at your table. And I realized that our generation had reached the point where we could fully appreciate both Super Mario Bros. and a good Pinot Noir.
I’ve often considered spending my retirement on all the games and systems I’ve only tangentially encountered up to this point and just soaking of years and years of gaming. Seems good to me. Far better than golf and cruises. I hadn’t ever considered, really, the implications of an entire generation of us behaving in this manner. However, I think it will somehow be a good day for video gaming when the first of us, as geezer, puts out a shoulder playing Wii.
Years ago–say, 1999–when I was designing an online card game (it never got published), I read a good market survey which showed that a high percentage of online gamers were elderly, for whom online gaming was their primary social avenue. They mostly played traditional games (Bridge, Backgammon, etc.), not proprietary games, but I imagine that will change.
I can imagine the day where anyone under sixty is a n00b.
I fully expect to break a hip playing DDR.
The future is here. NPR did a thing about elder gamers a while back:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6589941
I find the stat about 25% of gamers being over 50 hard to believe. Though I guess *someone* must be buying all those Mah-Jongg titles.
[feeble geezer voice]
“Thanks to extra-strength Depends for Gamers, I can level up for ten hours at a stretch without a break!”
[/feeble geezer voice]
Raising the question: what will the kids be doing by then?
I don’t know if I see us spending our declining years necessarily playing Dig-Dug, or Quake, or Dance Dance Revolution, even if they come up with a wheelchair/walker interface for the latter (though I do like the image of a bunch of geezers blasting away at each other in Quake III Arena over the retirement home LAN).
We’re a generation of early adopters, accustomed to dealing with Moore’s Law, and I think we’ll be playing whatever’s current as long as our vision, hearing and manual dexterity are equal to the task.
On the other hand, by 2033, when I reach retirement age, every PC and platform game ever created up through the Playstation 12 will probably fit on a single, lowly 50,000 Terabyte data crystal (you know, the kind you pick up for $5 on the way to take a holo-vid of your kid’s piano recital, because you forgot to put the more expensive 250,000 TB chip back in the camera after you backed up the contents to your 5 Billion TB home media storage crystal) with room to spare, and they’ll probably give them away free with Happy Meals. So if we want to go retro, we’ll have the option.
I’mma have to side with Rudy Rucker on this question.
By that time, I’m assuming our current forms of virtual entertainment will be replaced with a tube inserted directly into the USB port in the back of your head that simulates the hand cramps, poor hygene, and feelings of self loathing you get after you realize that you’ve basically just been clicking on kobolds for the last 8 hours.
That USB port will be useful for other things too. Just remember to back up your wonderful personality regularly so as not commit the terrible faux pas of forgetting the details of your guild’s latest raid just because your meatspace body got run over by a bus – after which you will have much more time to spend on Azeroth.
Oh, and they’ll fix self loathing in Digital Human version 2.1 :-)
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