So, hear me out.
I’m a 47 year old guy and I’m not ashamed to say that I enjoy video games. I always have, from playing Head over Heels on a Speccy +2 to ESO and Valorant on my self built PC.
Due to various life circumstances, I’m also on the dating scene and to most women I meet, around my age, video games are anathema. When I say that I like them it’s usually meet with an “oh dear” or a “my son would probably love to talk to you about them, I find them really boring”
I have two boys, both teenagers, both play all the time and sometimes we all play together (although they are better as they have more time to apply to games). Their friends are amazed that I will talk about games with them, that I know someone about games and that I play games. None of their parents want to talk with them about what is effectively their main hobby that they do all the time (big sad).
So the question, there must be some sort of cut off age at which video games are no longer an acceptable pastime. Is it absolute age based (nothing after 35) or is it something to do with the progression of games into popular culture and people born after, say, 1986 will not see it as unacceptable?
I don’t have an answer, I just think it’s an interesting question. Thanks for reading, let me know what you think!
Edit to add: I’m not planning on stopping through peer pressure, just wondering about the phenomenon!
Many comments seem to be misinterpreting the question, I understood it as not a personal cutoff, but how society sees it.
It certainly is very culture dependent, I agree that as people who grew up with videogames, not necessarily playing them, are more accepting of them and the elderly didn’t have those experiences, seeing as hobby their children have and is a children thing to do.
Make sense actually, but I have seen younger folks with the same mentality. Around 2015 when I was in high school, many of the guys I spoke to were surprised I still played videogames, meanwhile they had grown out of them around 8th grade or freshman year of high school. Of course, they could be influenced by older family members, but a lot of them seemed to play games to kill time rather than because they got the same enjoyment out of it. Or they never moved on to more challenging games and eventually lost interest. Either way more screen time for meeeeeeeeeeeee