A gamer at 40 (or "a gamer grows up")

WHY!? WHY HAS THIS HAPPENED TO ME!? I WAS SO BEAUTIFUL, SO VIBRANT, SO YOUNG!!! NOW I'M OLD, WASHED UP, USED UP AND FED UP!

Sorry, I should be more professional, but you see last month I turned 40 — four friggin' decades old. They say life begins at 40, but you try telling that to Paul Walker or Chris Benoit! Ooh, sorry. Anyway, being 40 in 2015 means that I was born just before the start of the golden age of arcade gaming, I grew up through the 8-bit and 16-bit eras and I came of age just as the internet connected PC gamers from all around the world for unprecedented levels of virtual mayhem and carnage. I was still young enough to thoroughly enjoy the online console explosion and the Xbox 360 ranks as one of my all time favourite game consoles. For the past five years I've been prattling on about my favourite arcade games and occasionally I've talked about modern games, but those articles are now few and far between. I've defined myself as a gamer since before that was even a term and I've spent more time gaming than almost any other leisure activity. Unfortunately, a couple of years ago things started to change. As work and family life took up more and more of my time, I found myself almost resenting the time required to indulge in certain hobbies and I have to confess, gaming was one of them. The reason for this was simple: few hobbies require as much of a time commitment as gaming. Just take the recently released The Witcher 3, for example; the developers, CD Projekt RED, have said there are around 200 hours of gameplay in it. 200 hours? That would get you about a third of the way to learning French or Spanish and that's just one game.

It's because of this time commitment that I gave up playing online after Gears of War 2, but even single-player gaming needs more time than I have spare and it all started to feel a little pointless. I may have played over 200 hours of Skyrim back in 2012, but since then I've only completed two games: Mass Effect 3 and Diablo III. In my various game libraries I have a lot of great games waiting to be played, including Dark Souls, Bioshock Infinite, Borderlands 2, The Witcher (1), Kingdoms of Amalur, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Dragon Quest IX, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Super Mario 3D World, L.A. Noire, Metroid Prime Trilogy, Legend of Grimrock, Legend of Zelda: Spirits Tracks, Brutal Legend, Trine 2, New Super Mario Bros Wii, Mark of the Ninja and both Mario Galaxy games. And I have countless more downloadable games going stale on the hard-drives of my Xbox 360 and PC. There is no way I will finish even half of them.

But despite all this, I still like video games and I still feel they have a lot more to offer than people give them credit for. So what is a 40 year-old gamer to do? About a year ago I thought I'd jack it in altogether, but in recent months I've had a change of heart and there are two reasons for that:

1. I got out of a job that was killing me with overtime.
2. My kids are now both old enough to play and they love gaming. 

My son is nearly 9, has been playing since he was about 4 and loves his racing games, pouring hours and hours into Burnout Paradise (surely one of the greatest games of the last generation), Blur and Sonic & Sega All-Star Racing; my daughter is 5½ and she started about two years ago with Kinect games, but got really good at gaming thanks to Minecraft and Mario Kart 7. To my kids gaming and the Internet are just part every day life, and because of games like Minecraft, Terraria, Super Mario, Skylanders, Disney Infinite and of course, the Lego games, they are now both big gamers. I didn't even push games on them, I merely responded to their interest by showing them other games.

At Christmas, my kids got their first console (as opposed to hijacking mine), a Wii U and we all love it. Nintendo has put out some fantastic stuff and I've already played it far more than I ever played on the Wii, despite owning one for nearly 8 years (SteamWorld Dig is my current jam). The half-tablet/half-joypad controller is great for keeping the kids quiet when the wife or I want the TV (even if we just want the TV off). And despite the fact it is already facing its twilight years, with games like Splatoon, Xenoblade Chronicles X and the new Zelda still on the horizon, I reckon we'll be enjoying it for some time to come.

Is Splatoon a genuine, family-friendly
alternative to the big military shooters?

For me it's a bit like coming home to my gaming roots, because it has loads of games that are like the kind of games I played growing up and they have no pretensions of being Hollywood block busters or grand artistic statements. They're game-ass games. And for a man who is, in truth, a little too old to still be playing games, the feeling of reliving my youth with my kids, rather than extending it, seems an acceptable compromise. And besides, they say the family that plays together, stays together, so when all four of us are whizzing around Rainbow Road on Mario Kart 8 or kicking seven shades of shit out of Jigglepluff on Super Smash Bros, our family is no danger of falling apart.

I know there are some gamers out there who will mock the direction my gaming has taken and say that I'm out of touch, that not a real gamer. But listen, I really have down the rabbit hole with this hobby for most of my life.

Homeworld was great on these

As a kid, I marked myself out as a nerd by playing on my computer or console, rather than hanging around the local park, and my favourite holidays were the ones that gave me access to an arcade. I spent my entire summer between 5th year and 6th form playing nothing but 4D Sports Driving (and gained about a stone in weight as a result). As an adult, I got even deeper into gaming. I played the original Quake online using QuakeWorld and custom character models that I'd designed. I spent a decade building gaming PCs, doing dumb things like over-clocking my Intel Celeron 300A to at 466MHz in pursuit of more frames per second. I had crazy peripherals like 3Dfx Voodoo graphics accelerator cards, almost every controller in Microsoft's Sidewinder series (including the ForceFeedback steering wheel and Dual Strike FPS gamepad) and even ELSA 3D Revelator glasses (they were great, especially on Homeworld). I used to lug my giant tower case and a 17" Iiyama CRT to my friends' flats and houses, so we could all play Half-Life or Age of Empires or TOCA Touring Car Racing against each other. I was even in a Half-Life clan at one point, called Full Metal Y-Fronts, who took part in an online tournament hosted by WirePlay (we completely failed to get anywhere in the competition, but never mind that). By the 2000s I had added a Dreamcast, a PlayStation, an N64, a GameBoy Color and a NeoGeo Pocket Color to my hardware collection. In the mid-noughties, my girlfriend and I were as deep into World of Warcraft as you can go, sacrificing sleep, food, sunlight, and even sometimes hygiene in the quest for epic loot. I can remember lost weekends were we would be up until 3 or 4 in the morning doing raids, only to get up again by 7 AM so we could stick all our unwanted drops in the Auction House. And in 2008, I even pursued my hobby into professional life and got my name of the credits of a handful of already forgotten games.

So, I have been what people would now call a "hardcore gamer", but that time has passed for me, like going clubbing or owning a hot hatch. And I say what people now call hardcore gamer, because back then we were just known as gamers. Back then, there was us and them, the non-gamers, and that's it. Now, people who play games can be split up in to all sorts of groups. There's a divide between casual and hardcore, a divide between console and PC gamers, a divide between online and single-player gamers, a divide between simulation and arcade gamers, a divide between retro and modern gamers, a divide between indie and AAA gamers, a divide between games played by enthusiasts and those played by people who don't even think of themselves as gamers and a divide between people who love artsy games and pretty much everyone else. If you talk to people from any one of these categories you will find some who think people on the opposite side of the divide are downright crazy. Take single-player and online (multi-player) games. Even in games that offer both, such as the Halo series, you will find people who never explore and experience one half of the game.

Dear Esther is a strong argument for games as art and has no gameplay whatsoever

But what does all this mean? Well, at the beginning of this post, I talked about turning 40 and how I've grown up with games, but the fact is, video games are closer to 60 years old (if you take William Higinbotham and Robert Dvoraks oscilloscope-based Tennis For Two into consideration). Games have grown up too. We've all heard the reports of World of Warcraft having 11 million active players, Minecraft selling over 60 million copies, AAA games having $100 million budgets and Grand Theft Auto V earning more money than any movie or album, but those facts are not the biggest evidence of gaming's growth and maturity as an entertainment medium. It is the fact games can be divided into so many different categories and serve such a broad audience that really speaks to the maturity of the medium. You can compare it with the success of Marvel's blockbuster super hero movies, which appeal to everyone from comic book guys, to movie geeks, to families and to women who just like Chris Hemsworth's pecs.

Marvel has mastered mass appeal

I've learnt to accept that I am now a gamer dad, I play games with my kids and I love it. Seeing my daughter giggling with excitement because she's just taken out her mummy's kart out with a red shell is as much of a gaming high as I could wish for. You might be a die hard retro gamer, eschewing polygonal graphics and 32-bit processors as "modern rubbish". You might be a sharp shooting Battlefield nut, who could head shot me from the far side of Paracel Storm before I'd even worked out where the beach was. Maybe you only play FIFA and would never consider yourself a gamer, despite buying a PS4 just to play the next game in the series. Maybe you love Kingdom Rush on your phone, but only play it every now and then. Maybe you have a mock F1 car in your living room, with a three-screen display, an authentic F1 force feedback steering wheel and hydraulic seat. Maybe you want your games to ask deeply psychological questions, such as Lucas Pope's immigration officer game, Papers Please. All of that is fine, because no matter what type of game you like, the industry has something for you. This is the evolution of any industry or art form, it is not a sign of selling out, dumbing down or pandering to stock holders. Fear not, the kind of games you want are still being made, whatever they might be, they just now have to take their place with the games everyone else wants.

What I'm getting at is this: what we, as gamers, need to do is show our maturity, especially those of us who are part of the old guard. We need to accept that there are difficult types of gamer, without making a big deal about it, in the same way most of use will happily watch Max Max: Fury Road, Avengers: Age of Ultron and the Minions movie without putting ourselves in a particular movie goer pigeon hole or verbally abusing someone who isn't in the same pigeon hole. Because there is no us and them when it comes to most other entertainment mediums, because with time and greater diversity comes mainstream acceptance. And I don't know about you, but I think games and the people who make them, deserve to be considered normal and worthwhile, not just niche and nerdy. Games are brilliant and game developers and some of the smartest, most talented and hardest working people you'll find in any industry. They and their work deserve better from society and it starts with us.

MTW