Younger vs Older Gaming

Ares

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Anyone else find gaming to be a very different hobby/pastime/time-waster as an adult as opposed to as a kid or teenager?

I remember when I was a teenager, especially in high school I gamed like 5-6 hours a day so I was constantly waiting on new titles to come out.

Now, as an adult.... work and commute take so much of my time that I have a near constant backlog of stuff I want to play but don't have time to play.

I have at least 3 titles on Xbox 360 I have but have not played yet and I own 2 things on Steam for PC which I bought cause they were on a weekend deal but have yet to play at all, those are Far Cry 3 and Bioshock Infinite.

I have been considering taking gaming PTO from work since I have some extra PTO to spare lol.
 

Scoot26

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Anyone else find gaming to be a very different hobby/pastime/time-waster as an adult as opposed to as a kid or teenager?

I remember when I was a teenager, especially in high school I gamed like 5-6 hours a day so I was constantly waiting on new titles to come out.

Now, as an adult.... work and commute take so much of my time that I have a near constant backlog of stuff I want to play but don't have time to play.

I have at least 3 titles on Xbox 360 I have but have not played yet and I own 2 things on Steam for PC which I bought cause they were on a weekend deal but have yet to play at all, those are Far Cry 3 and Bioshock Infinite.

I have been considering taking gaming PTO from work since I have some extra PTO to spare lol.

I go through phases. Right now I have little interest in playing anything. A couple of months from now I could be deep into some game. Who knows. Its weird. In general though from 8th- some point in college I played video games all the time...after college, even despite not having a full time job I still went through those phases.
 

Ares

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I go through phases. Right now I have little interest in playing anything. A couple of months from now I could be deep into some game. Who knows. Its weird. In general though from 8th- some point in college I played video games all the time...after college, even despite not having a full time job I still went through those phases.

Are your phases due to work and whatnot causing you to not have the free time to play anything or you have the free time and just don't desire to play any games.

Scoot you should start playing Rome 2 or Sins of a Solar Empire so we can do online campaigns together.... maybe rope in Crys or Clonetrooper :D
 

Scoot26

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Are your phases due to work and whatnot causing you to not have the free time to play anything or you have the free time and just don't desire to play any games.

Scoot you should start playing Rome 2 or Sins of a Solar Empire so we can do online campaigns together.... maybe rope in Crys or Clonetrooper :D

Usually desire. Also money is an issue for me..I pretty much cut out video games from the budget.
 

Ares

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Usually desire. Also money is an issue for me..I pretty much cut out video games from the budget.

I know what you mean with the budget.... mine is fucked right now and I didn't do great on taxes even with the purchase of a home.

Thats why I keep an eye on the Steam deals.... got Bioshock Infinite for like 7$ over the weekend when it is normally 30$.

I will usually only buy when deals like that come up.
 

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Phases as well.

I'll go through 13 months of no games, then a month of gaming every day. What makes a lot of gaming different for older crowds, is that we appreciate gameplay a lot more than younger players. So when a game comes out that is maybe a 0.1% improvement over a game that came out two years ago, and that game gets boasted as a GOTY candidate, we jump in and are like... uh, been there done that, what's next? And the issue is nothing new really comes out all that often.

One thing I have stopped is playing sports games. They simply don't improve enough to make it worthwhile. First off, sports games have shelf lives that are as good as that season, and when they are new, they cost the same price as a ground-up brand new game. It gets old after 20 years of using your imagination to build your team and scenarios. I say 20 years, because that's about as long as create-a-player, roster management, trading, and statistics have been the norm. But ooooooh, pretty graphics, and use of thumbsticks. Really not worth $50 for me anymore. Enjoy it while it lasts, and I admit, it was enjoyable when it did last(not a hater, just a critic of the EA sports style business model that all sports game makers have adopted).

Another thing I like, that has been fairly anemic in the last 5 years are the single player/co-op title's gameplay quality. Multiplayer is okay, but if the game sucks in single player, then why do I want to play multiplayer? Not a lot of replay value IMO for someone who doesn't have a lot of time. Mainly because you wind up buying a game that a casual gamer can only enjoy for a short period here and there, and by the time they get the feel and like for the game, the multiplayer servers are either down, or a ghost town with nothing but super-obsessed masters of the game to play with. I also miss quality co-ops, where you play with someone in the same room on the same system, aka: 2-player. Single player games that are of high quality either suffer from what I mentioned above, or they have become this fixed 3d world story mode, where you spend more time doing quicktime events and watching cutscenes, than actual game-play. So I'm supposed to love a game, simply because the story romanticizes the relationship between two characters and their struggle? Yes, this is the common theme in GOTY candidates now and has little to do with gameplay(hint, that cutscene content takes up so much disc space, that actual game actions are incredibly repetitive to the same kill and loot strategy, thus the cutscene story needs to carry the game). Tomb Raider 2013, Last of Us, are great, but it's more 80% movie, 20% game. If you can fall in love with a game that uses little or no dialog, then that is something amazing.

Lastly, I'm not into FPS games. I burned myself out of FPS because I was a day-1 FPS player. The last FPS that I truly enjoyed(enjoyed is the key word, I still try new games and hope they work out, because after all, I payed for them) was in the era of SiN, Half-Life 1/2, Unreal 99, Q3A, MAYBE some CSS. After going to war, being infantry, being a ranger, doing all that full battle stuff in real life, the war FPS games just suck. Even the most accurate combat FPS is incredibly inaccurate and far from the real deal. It's pathetic to even claim they are accurate. So I have to judge these games based on just being a game and nothing more, and then it's still not all that fun to me anymore. FPS games lose their fun factor as a player gets more tolerant to the same old-same old, much like a junkie needs to do a ton more smack to get the same level of enjoyment. Wow, headshot, that was fun... for the millionth time. Slow motion bullets... oooh, pretty(the first few times). Look, I threw a grenade, FRAAG.


So TL;DR

You're not going to be 13 years old forever.
geoffrey.jpg
 

Scoot26

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I know what you mean with the budget.... mine is fucked right now and I didn't do great on taxes even with the purchase of a home.

Thats why I keep an eye on the Steam deals.... got Bioshock Infinite for like 7$ over the weekend when it is normally 30$.

I will usually only buy when deals like that come up.

I got screwed by the State of Illinois on taxes...My down payment all came from selling investments..while most of those were taxed at the 15% federal rate, and I figured I might owe some, the amount I owe the Federal government was surprisingly low..The state though vastly higher and they are making me pay a penalty for not withholding enough money (Guess I needed to make an estimated payment to the state from selling investments...). That's Illinois for you though.
 

JosMin

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I was talking about this with my fiancee just the other night -- part of it for me is that I just don't feel like there's nearly as much originality in gaming anymore. On top of that, with working 50 hours a week and going to the gym five nights a week, it's hard to find time to keep up with new titles in development so I can anticipate when they come out.

Now a days, I generally stick with what I know -- I've always been a huge fan of the GTA series. I still play it several times a week online for maybe 3 or 4 hours total. I've also gotten back into Diablo III, with the new loot system. Definitely more enjoyable. Still enjoy most of the first-party Nintendo games, but investing all that money on a new console just to play a handful of games just doesn't fit into my budget when I have plans to upgrade my house and have some modifications I want to do to my Mercedes.

I also really love RTS games and turn-based RPGs, but the truly awesome ones are few and far between. And if they're not, I'm just not looking in the right spot.

Meh, growing up sucks. I still game, it's just no longer a priority.
 

Ares

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Another thing I like, that has been fairly anemic in the last 5 years are the single player/co-op title's gameplay quality. Multiplayer is okay, but if the game sucks in single player, then why do I want to play multiplayer? Not a lot of replay value IMO for someone who doesn't have a lot of time. Mainly because you wind up buying a game that a casual gamer can only enjoy for a short period here and there, and by the time they get the feel and like for the game, the multiplayer servers are either down, or a ghost town with nothing but super-obsessed masters of the game to play with. I also miss quality co-ops, where you play with someone in the same room on the same system, aka: 2-player.

I agree with you on the lack of good co-op games, though I will say me and my former college roommate have played all 3 of the Army of Two games together and found it pretty enjoyable, though the 3rd one left something to be desired.

I admit I like when a game has too much story rather than not enough story.... Mass Effect was fun to me because not only was there a lot of story but you got to participate in the story, while the gameplay was certainly a bit vanilla after a while.

As for FPS.... I was a bit later to the FPS stuff than you.... Medal of Honor Allied Assault or MOHAA as we called it, was my FPS addiction for like 4 or 5 years.

I grew tired of the FPS scene because it really does become too much of a game of split second killing and glitches.... If you know what walls you can shoot through or how to glitch unlimited grenades, well den you git to pwn da noooobz lol.

Where I enjoy FPS is zombie stuff (Left 4 Dead or Dead Island) and singleplayer where the combat and story are worth playing it.... which for me recently was Bioshock and Far Cry 2.... which is why I bought the sequels to those games. Crys you should give Left 4 Dead a try.... its like 5$ on Steam now and its always 4 player coop with AI filling in for any of the 4 slots not used by a real person. Its much more fun when you get 3 buddies to play with you but it can be fun to break in to the game with 3 AI Aimbots following you around. That game gets intense and IMO its more fun because you and the other players are desperately trying to survive together rather than just running around glitch-killing eachother every 5 seconds.

As I got older I turned more and more to Turn based and RTS games as I have talked about before.... for mod/replay value I seriously recommend any of the Total War games or Mount and Blade Warband or their new one whenever they release it.... Mount and Blade is unlike any game I have ever encountered on PC and its got amazing mods which the devs made super easy to load and unload from the vanilla game. Love it when gaming devs intend for their stuff to be modded and help make it easy.
 

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Between work, wife, and kids, I barely have time to play video games anymore. But I stupidly get suckered into buying games during Steam sales. I probably have 70+ games in my Steam library that I haven't played yet. Yes, I know that sounds ridiculous, but I'm not exaggerating. I stated this in another thread, but I now try to avoid games that require a massive time sink and instead stick to indie games that I can play 30 minutes at a time. And surprisingly, a lot of indie games are more fun and have a lot more creativity than your typical big budget title.
 

Ares

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Anyone still sink time/money in to any of the MMORPG games like WoW?

I used to play it a ton when I was in high school, started botting when I got bored and got banned.

I considered getting back in to it a few times in college but stayed away from any of the MMORPGs thus far in my adult life.
 

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Phases for me as well. It's usually several months between my gaming and non-gaming phases. I'm currently in a long non-gaming phase. If I do play a game it's either Minecraft or some mobile game on my phone, like Sudoku or some other time waster.

A predicament I'm in is that I don't have any desire to try anything outside of my comfort zone. I've just drilled so much Elder Scrolls, Assassins Creed, Fallout, Mass Effect, Uncharted and Metal Gear Solid into my brain that I don't really want to leave those universes for very long. I don't want to get invested into another set of lore. Kind of like the feeling people get when they finish a TV series from start to finish- "Do I really want to watch a new show and get invested in something again?" The answer for me is usually no nowadays. I've found my main game series and I'm happy with them. I know I'm missing out on some great games, but I just prefer to stick to what I know.
 

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I still pllay most days but now it's not as long as it use to be. But that's normal. When I was younger I played how long I wanted to. Now, i'm married and work 12 hour shifts. I'm lucky if I can get half an hour everyday before I have to go to bed.
 

ShiftyDevil

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For the biggest change between playing as a kid and an adult is that my friends and I use online gaming to keep in touch.

It's a great way to still "hang out" with buddies from high school and college. Plus comparatively it's a cheap hobby/pass time.

Well, sorta cheap, I game on PC and I just dropped over a grand on a mother board, processor, RAM and a new case. Granted, my current PC runs laps around the newest generations of consoles, and I often get games cheaper. PC gaming is the way to go imo.
 

Ares

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For the biggest change between playing as a kid and an adult is that my friends and I use online gaming to keep in touch.

It's a great way to still "hang out" with buddies from high school and college. Plus comparatively it's a cheap hobby/pass time.

Well, sorta cheap, I game on PC and I just dropped over a grand on a mother board, processor, RAM and a new case. Granted, my current PC runs laps around the newest generations of consoles, and I often get games cheaper. PC gaming is the way to go imo.

A bit OT, but I find PC gaming to be something you need to be able to commit 1 good sized investment every 4-6 years.

When I built my first machine I just didnt have a ton of money to put into it.... I was like 13 and all i had was 8th grade graduation money and some birthday money, maybe like 600 or 700$ and so I had to go cheap on everything. Within a year I am trying to add RAM and a new HD.... another 6 months and I am trying to swap out CPU for a better one..... a year after that I am changing graphics cards and adding water cooling to make up for the fact that my case is a godamned oven with terrible ventilation.

Whether you build a desktop for gaming or buy a laptop to do it (yeah my gaming laptop is a beast, stfu).... you are really best off buying big when you buy so you don't have to tinker with the build (except for adding more HDs maybe) throughout the gaming life of the machine.

Last desktop build for me was back in like 2008 or 2009 when I was in college, I gamed on that for ~4 years and now its just a secondary machine I use for storage and some tasks I would rather not burden my laptop with.... and its still operational if I wanted to have another person over playing L4D2 or anything from a year ago or further back. One day when I have a tax return not slated for paying off debt I will build a new beastly desktop.
 

ShiftyDevil

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A bit OT, but I find PC gaming to be something you need to be able to commit 1 good sized investment every 4-6 years.

When I built my first machine I just didnt have a ton of money to put into it.... I was like 13 and all i had was 8th grade graduation money and some birthday money, maybe like 600 or 700$ and so I had to go cheap on everything. Within a year I am trying to add RAM and a new HD.... another 6 months and I am trying to swap out CPU for a better one..... a year after that I am changing graphics cards and adding water cooling to make up for the fact that my case is a godamned oven with terrible ventilation.

Whether you build a desktop for gaming or buy a laptop to do it (yeah my gaming laptop is a beast, stfu).... you are really best off buying big when you buy so you don't have to tinker with the build (except for adding more HDs maybe) throughout the gaming life of the machine.

Last desktop build for me was back in like 2008 or 2009 when I was in college, I gamed on that for ~4 years and now its just a secondary machine I use for storage and some tasks I would rather not burden my laptop with.... and its still operational if I wanted to have another person over playing L4D2 or anything from a year ago or further back. One day when I have a tax return not slated for paying off debt I will build a new beastly desktop.

The past few builds the only things I've really needed to upgrade is RAM, Processor, Video Card and Mobo. You can keep you upgrade costs down by buying a case and power supply you'll have for years (I had my case/power supply for 8-10 years or so). I rarely have to upgrade my HDDs as well.

Unless you go nuts like I did you can get a good complete build (sans monitors) for under a grand.
 

DewsSox79

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yeah its different now. The gaming world is very adult orientated now as before it was a "kids" thing.
 

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This thread is old, but I feel cool that I was mentioned in it :elephant:
 

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