There are pros and cons for either demographic: whilst being older may be ideal since not only you bypass age restrictions, you also have the capability on purchasing it with your own money without having to ask parents for that given that you have employment and recurring income. Gaming as a kid gives more time without having to dwell much on responsibilities that adults have to worry about but at the same time are held by school.
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Personally, right now, as an adult I find myself playing games that are so much more enjoyable than the CoD type games I used to play a lot more growing up. Games I really think kid me would like. So, I’d say in that regard, definitely better. Also better in that I have soft modded consoles that allow me to play backups without needing the gane disc.
But I definitely feel my ability to play them for longer, extended periods of time is slowly slipping away. So not as good in that regard. Used to be able to spend hours in some games whereas now in similar games I’d not be able to do that today.
So, definitely mixed both ways.
Your teen to young adult years are the sweet spot for maximum enjoyment
It’s an odd and mixed experience for me: I definitely enjoy it more now because I’m definitely a lot more aware of the genres I enjoy and the genres I typically don’t; however, the uncontrollable excitement of playing through Streets of Rage 2 for the first time is not as palpable as it used to be back then.
I’d say in terms of quantity (frequency) I am having more fun now. In terms of quality, fun felt fresher and deeper back then.
When your a kid, you have time but no money.
When you’re an adult, you have money but no time.
So adults should buy games for kids - and kids should let adults play more.
Honestly the thing I feel that kids have in their corner that is really great is a lack of experience.
The kind of awe that I felt when I started up Starcraft or Diablo for the first time just isn’t there now, I have too many reference points from earlier games to get that “new and awesome”-feeling from most games anymore.“fresh meat” and then just getting insta killed. It still sends shivers down my spine. Such a sweet childhood memory.
brace yourself
christmas noobs are coming
I remember Cyberpunk 2077 sucking me into its world, I sometimes walked slowly through the streets taking in sights and sounds.
I had that all the time as a kid, Monkey Island, Betrayal at Krondor, you name it. For children, like you said, everything is new and a fantastic experience, give it enough years and it becomes not stale, but normal.
Now, many years later it has become rare. But when it happens it’s awesome again.
That’s also my reason for not being excited over GTA 6. It will never live up to feeling of 3, Vice City or San Andreas, even 4. Those times are over for me. 5 was fun, but nothing special anymore.
I decided to have high moral standards, and now I’m constantly burned out by checking if the publisher or development team’s owner is fucking over some people, either by enforcing patch updates (small hill but I’ll die defending my right to glitch out of playable areas), employee overworking, prioritising shareholder profit over fun factor, gatekeeping based on identity or political influence etc. As a kid I had no worries and could play games built by EA, Epic or Bohemia Interactive without thinking about how they profit off American wars.
I hadn’t felt that feeling in many years, until I played Elden Ring’s DLC. It was the first time since being a kid that I felt a true sense of awe and wonder. I wish I could relive that feeling again.
Personally, gaming was a much bigger deal to me as a kid. I still play as an adult, but they just don’t evoke the same feels as they did when I was young. Probably doesn’t help that I am stressed, tired, and have a million obligations distracting me, but that’s adulthood for you. A lot of the time, I find something like a hike or bike ride more rewarding than games these days.
I have much less screen time now as an adult. But games have grown in every way and are now a legitimate art form. It’s hard to say if I had more fun playing jet set willy on my 48k Sinclair spectrum, or playing cyberpunk on my steam deck. Both were great, in different ways.
I think it’s just as good, just in different ways. As a kid you don’t understand a lot (especially if English isn’t your first language) and if you are old, like me, and didn’t have the internet to help you. It wasn’t so much about completing the games or being good at them, you just had fun and did whatever you felt like. Spent so many hours just fucking around and trying things.
As and adult it’s still as much fun but more about experiencing the stories, fully completing the games etc. there’s also so many more games to choose from and stuff like mods, emulation, remakes etc. I play a lot of indie games too.
Currently playing the Twilight Princess decomp (dusklight), my first time playing the game, and having a blast. I’ve also dabbled in game making, 3d modeling, pixel art, map making etc. and creating my own mods and stuff like texture packs. Also got several IRL friends who are indie game devs (Dennaton (hotline miami), YCJY (keep driving, sea salt, post void) and more) so it’s something I talk a lot about and see part of in my daily life.
Way different experience. As a kid for me i loved the sense of discovery and getting lost in a world.
As an adult, I love games that make me think and plan.
Both great for different reasons
Time to game!
Grabs scratch paper, pencil, and calculator
Opens Satisfactory
Haha definitely. Or factorio, or civ, or chess
The pros of gaming as an adult is that you now have the money to go buy all the games you wanted to play as a kid. The cons are that you no longer have the time.
I have to say that the lack of responsibility and abundance of time makes gaming as a kid better.
As an adult I finish more games. I have more patience and there’s a lot of things that are better today than when I was a kid (level scaling/difficulty scaling is definitely one, and so is the art).
But I miss storytelling. I miss game mechanics that worked really well but we’re based on the limitations of the hardware and software available at the time. I miss having to explore because there were no walkthroughs or guides or anything.
So I think perhaps gaming has gotten better, but my experience with gaming isn’t as good now as it was when I was a kid because I have something to compare it to and it can’t beat my nostalgia.
I think most people will say that as adults they get to play less games, but I have very much the opposite experience. Not to say I’m playing games 24/7, but rather I wasn’t allowed to play much as a kid. 15 minutes a day, and then when I was in high school I got 30 minutes on weekends. I can get that kind of gaming in if I just play on my phone on my transit lmao
I think gaming as an adult is better honestly. But that’s thanks to all the experience and understanding built up from gaming as a kid. I would not have had the patience or understanding to play and complete some games as a kid that I was able to do now.
If you’re asking us adults, most of us wouldn’t know. Most of us dont have time for it anymore.
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Yeah, because the priority is not becoming destitute, not being a deadbeat parent, etc.
Exactly, thank you. Of course I could prioritize gaming over nearly anything, but no reasonable person would for important things. I guess I have more things I feel are important going on than this guy and some others find believable. I assure you, I am not making up a story to earn fake Internet points that could not have less meaning.
As someone who once worked 3 jobs and went to college full time while also being a parent, that poster came off as a wildly ignorant asshole. Possibly a clueless child or a troll? IDK, but damn.
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Me being a shit parent? Fuck off. You know nothing about me and your response reeks of being an entitled asshat.
Do you even have kids or a career or do you just live in mommy’s basement? Are you a nepo baby maybe? Clearly you don’t understand what you’re talking about and have never had to really struggle.
Anyone can be a parent. Being a good parent, however, takes sacrifice. There are only so many hours in the day. And sure, I could game once they’re asleep but that means the laundry,dishes, lunches, etc. can’t get done which is a direct impact on their lives and your own. Most young parents will have to deprioritize gaming for years to make everything work. Imo good parenting comes with selflessness. Once your kids are properly automated you can slowly regain leisure time.
This heavily depends on how many hours you need to work each day. Two parents working 20h/week can have a lot of free time and may be able to afford a decent life in many places
You’re not wrong except I’ve never been met with such a dream situation.
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Maybe you should collect your shitty, entitled, poorly informed take and just fuck all the way off? Again, you clearly have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about. You’re either a troll or an entitled moron.
Speaking of time management, this concludes our conversation. Goodbye.
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Maybe you should take a long walk off a short cliff.
Ackshually, we don’t. If we prioritized gaming, we would not have any money for the games and hardware or the place to hook it up and use it.
“Prioritize” doesn’t mean putting it above everything else.
How do you think most gamers have money for games?
I am using that word as follows:
Prioritize: to adjust the priority ranking of something to a higher level than it was previously.
not
Prioritze: to assign something the highest priority.
Maybe I am using the word wrong, but I believe both definitions to be valid. Sorry for the confusion.
What I meant was that I do not have anything on my docket that I think a reasonable person would demote in priority to make room for gaming. That day may come, but it has not for many years now. You may be surprised how wildly varied people’s level of responsibility is and how busy that makes them.
Yeah, and you said…
If we prioritized gaming, we would not have any money for the games and hardware or the place to hook it up and use it.
Plenty of people find space in their schedules for gaming. And based on your more recent comment, you probably do have other hobbies or optional activities that you find more fulfilling than gaming…which is great!
Some people game with their families. Some people find time for gaming instead of consuming other media like TV, movies, books, or social media.
If you prioritize other hobbies beyond gaming, that’s great if it makes you happy.
I wish it were true. For me and I’m sure others, leisure activity must be planned, scheduled in advance, and coordinated with several people. Even then, it is not uncommon for it to be interrupted.
I find it strange how many people find it unbelievable that there are people much busier than themselves that do not have time for impromptu leisure activity. I feel like I’m being punked.
I’ve done full-time work and part-time college and still had time for leisure activities. My work weeks were about 60 hours, before getting into errands and such.
I’m not a parent myself, but my friends who are parents have hobbies and we have social interactions and meetups. Sometimes with their kids present, sometimes without.
I can’t speak to your situation. Maybe you are incredibly busy. Either way everyone on Earth gets the same 24 hours per day. And while I was lucky enough to be born in North America, I wasn’t born into any sort of extravagance.
Plenty of people have to plan and schedule leisure activity, including gaming. And there are plenty of options if you only have time for quick bursts here or there. Puzzle games and turn-based games are great for that.
It’s okay to prioritize family or whatever instead of gaming. But I know plenty of older gamers that don’t struggle or use “don’t have time” as an excuse to not play games.
I know older gamers too, and can tell you firsthand that the amount of “busy” in a person’s life varies wildly. I am the second busiest person I have ever met, and the busiest person does not have children and I do, for example.
If I were to carve out more time for leisure, something else would absolutely have to suffer. Sure, that is a choice I could make, but I dont think any reasonable person evaluating the trade-offs in good faith would consider that choice to be on the table, hence why I used the “ackshually”. It is technically a choice to a pedant, but not really a choice to anyone acting sane.
Am adult, have a full time job, raised a kid, and never had a point in time where I couldn’t game for without needing to make it a priority. Time spent watching shows and movies went down because I enjoyed games more, but if one has some down time they can choose to play games as an adult.
Gaming as a kid was fun because it was new, it is still fun as an adult because I can pick and choose what to play and when to play it.
I dont think its at all productive for us to compare responsibilities and measure. I invite you to consider that the level of responsibility in one’s life varies a great deal from one person to the next, even within the same demographic group.
In your own post you stated that you never had a time where you couldn’t game without prioritizing it, and in my post I stated nearly the opposite. Either one of us is lying, we have a very different baseline level of “priority” for gaming, or we lead different lives in which mine is busier than yours.
People often are dismissive of people’s responsibilities they have no way of knowing and offer the empty platitude, “You have to make time for what’s important to you,” but it is just that, a platitude. Everyone experiences a finite amount of time, and it absolutely can all get used up on critical things before leisure things can be considered. I know I personally have many important things I’d very much love to stop leaving idle, but there are, quite literally, not enough hours in the day. As I’ve aged I’ve gone from needing 4 hours of sleep to at least 6, for example. That’s 2 hours per day that are simply deleted from my calendar. Once you get to 24 hours, there’s no more hours.
That whole line of thinking seems to me to be in the same family of thought as blaming poor people for not working more or harder-- it ignores a mountain of circumstances that make that impossible or irrelevant.
I was disagreeing with your statement that most adults don’t have time and gave a counter example. Never said that zero adults didn’t have time.
TV is the biggest waste of time. I enjoy some shows, but I can acknowledge that a lot of it really is just something to fill time rather than “art.” I’ve cut back my TV and YouTube consumption a lot, and it enables me to do a lot more non-passive hobbies. Worst case scenario I read or game, which I consider a much better use of my time.
Agreed, but I already watch maybe 1 hour of TV per week, and wouldn’t even have one if I didn’t have kids. Trust me, I’ve already looked for low-hanging fruit; I do not love being this busy.
raised a kid
I remember the Wii U being the greatest thing with a newborn because of the second screen. Holding a sleeping baby and playing Breath of the Wild was cool :D
For me personally the steam deck was a game changer, now I have a little pc I can carry around with me. I no longer needed to worry about those long ass quests or lack of save points because I can just put it to sleep and pick it up later when I have a moment.
It’s still not as great as being able to sit down and just get lost in a game but it’s better than not having time at all.
That’s a good tip, thank you!
It’s a tough question to answer, since we can’t go forward in time and game as a kid with the games we have now. And playing games now that we had when we were kids is different, since you already know all about them. I think I have to answer “as a kid,” though.
As a kid, we had a sense of wonder about all the new things we were unlocking. But how much of that was just being a kid and how much was the still-evolving game industry finding new ways to be exciting? Playing games now feels insane to me, because I grew up being astonished by Galaga and Pac-Man. Comparing those to Elden Ring, which is graphically and difficulty-wise and story-wise light years ahead, just doesn’t make sense. At the same time, I don’t know that I could have gained much from playing Elden Ring as a kid. For one, I would have been destroyed by the first enemy and turned away crying… not that different as an adult if I’m honest. But I probably played as much Super Mario Bros as I did Elden Ring.
I’m lucky that I have time to game as an adult. Sure, it’s only about 3 to 5 hours per week, but that’s better than a lot of adults. Some weekends I’ll get 10 or 15 hours to game. As a kid I could play for hours a day. I could have friends over most days after school to game with. They could spend the night on weekends to play late. I could borrow their games, and they could borrow mine, so I usually had a new game to try even if I didn’t have my own money.
