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!
I’m over 40 and still game with my husband and kids. It’s a normal part of our lives, and it’s fairly limited when our kids (all 10 and under) are awake.
However, I have seen many, many posts over the years in various mom spaces about husbands and fathers putting gaming before their families. Coming home from work and going straight to the console 5 days a week. Using their paid time off to no life AAA releases while their wives had to use theirs on sick kids. Spending “his” money upgrading the gaming rig while putting the stay at home spouse or lower earner on a such a strict budget she couldn’t afford clothes or haircuts. Exploding at their kids for being interrupted during online game sessions in the middle of the afternoon. These are extreme examples, but I’ve seen them all more than once. If that’s the lived experience of the women you are meeting, I can see why you’d get an unenthusiastic response to the hobby.
All of those examples seem less about gaming and more about the guy being an asshole. You could replace gaming with any other hobby or activity. Gaming just happens to be a very common hobby.
Yeah you can just replace gaming in those scenarios with any other hobby: cars, sports, woodworking, doesn’t matter. Assholes will be assholes no matter the entertainment medium they consume