That’s the great thing about being retired, my job now is waking up, eat breakfast and play video games. I have nowhere to be, and no real responsibility anymore; except gaming.
For a long time i found this to be very true, but now i'm older and my body starts to get weak.. sadly this quote no longer is fitting/ good. You'll see.
Totally feel this, do I play a possibly very exciting new game and broaden my gaming horizons, or do I settle in to a comfort game and get some real chill time with a classic?
64 here and have been gaming since video games were created. I play some 2-6 hours a day. No longer work and can play all I want. I have experienced every single thing mentioned but let me add a new one that only old players know. I often finish an awesome game and hear that a sequel is in the works, BUT realization sets in that I might not live long enough to see it.
O😮ooh, thanks for pointing that out,Rob writes these things so incredibly interestingly, that I am sure I am , often missing out on lots of brilliant intricacies,in each episode I view. Folks like you help.
43 and still gaming. Challenges : Being to tired to game. Possible future decline in hearing and vision. Possible future health issues. Prefences change with age and no new games that meet your taste. Other life responsibilities. Time running out so whether to spend gaming or engaging real life.
Preference change really sneaks up on you. I must have beat DMC 3 like 20 times in 2005-6, but still haven't played DMC5 (and really have no interest). It scares me a bit because I wonder whether this is what finally makes you stop gaming.
I keep telling myself I'll go back on my OMAD Carnivore diet to help stave off the aging/try to recover my body some amount. I just love pizza so much, though.
43 too. Got the same issues with the preference change and the feeling of time running out and where to spend it on. Although, not really change of preference, but rather that other genres got popular, so your genre doesn't get made that often (by bigger studios). And because there is so much unnecessary stuff added to games, that it isn't a 'pick up & game' mentality anymore (while yet they do too much handholding in games). And although I have been unemployed for years now (because of reasons out of my hands), you would think I have all the time in the world to game. But there is where that 'being productive' kreeps in. I just can't enjoy gaming anymore, because I constantly feel guilty I should be doing something else. I used to have so much energy. I could really fill those 24 hours in a day to the brink and still find time to game, still have enough time to rest. Now I wake up and it already feels like half the day has gone.
In my late 30s now I often experience serious cases of "The mind is willing, but the flesh is weak" when I have time to play, but I just can't be bothered to get up, walk over to my PS5, sit down and play. What happens instead is that I just watch random RU-vid videos that are recommanded to me until it's too late or not even the mind is willing anymore.
I’m 72 My grandkids don’t come around as much. And I understand. Didn’t play a video game until I was 47. This generation don’t understand how good they have it.✌️✌️
52 here and have gamed all my life. It was Fallout 4 that kinda got me thinking, when I was playing for about an hour with the build stuff, and it made me think, "should be doing this for real", Lolol. Kinda put me off a bit... Lolol Fallout 3 was an atmospheric work of art, very few games ever capture. Flashback in the 90s and Another World captured that, "mystique", that makes a great game, a legendary game.
As a kid you have no money for games but plenty of time. Now, I have the money and no time. I've still got PS3 games in my backlog that "I'll totally get to one day."
I did this for a few weeks when Horizon and Tears of the Kingdom came out since the release dates were so close together. I’d wait for my boyfriend to go to work around 10pm (he hates when I game for hours, doesn’t understand how I can “waste time” like that), then I’d play until about 5am, sleep for two hours, be up around 7am to get to work for my 9-5. I realized I had a problem when new games come out because there’s so much to do and I get caught up in it. “Just one more main mission/side quests”.
What works for me is to tell myself to start winding down at 9pm. My watch reminds me at 10pm to go to sleep. That results in me getting into pajamas around 10pm and playing a game until around 11pm or so. Reading would be a better way to wind down. I did that before I built a new gaming rig. Time to revisit reading !
My solution (and it has worked for years now) is to always have a gaming plan for the next few months. Currently i've started replaying the Dragon Age trilogy in preparation for The Veilguard (because i need to live in that world for maximum immersion :), and i'm looking forward to Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition (my favorite - i think i will be playing this one in VR this time). By my projections i will be ready to play Veilguard by Christmas, and that way give it some time for bug squishing and price reductions as well.
I used to have +10 hours gaming sessions when I was younger and really loved a game, but now I get exhausted after a measly 3-4 hour session in my 30s, no matter how much I love the game.
For sure, I'm 33 too, sometimes the kids fall asleep reasonably quick in the evening so I get a bit cocky and think I can push past the tiredness...only to wake up at 3-4am, stiff all over, back annihilated, controller still in hand, bathed in the harsh glow of the "controller disconnected" screen, followed by the clumsy stealth stumble to bed, cos if you wake everyone up, you gotta get em back to sleep.
Right. It seems like a choir. Even animal crossing seems like a choir. You got to go to the shop before they close, collect all the items and animals before the season is over, etc. Too much work.
I'm 40 this year and doing well for myself, while many of my peers are ruining their lives financially and otherwise, having children and complaining almost non-stop about them and the choices they have made. Not to mention the ones who don't know how to have healthy relationships. I'm SO glad I'm not them!
A few of these problems are made worse by a lot of people not considering gaming a hobby. I just don't understand why catching up with Eastenders is acceptable use of free time, but running a Mass Effect mission isn't.
This! So many people that criticize gaming will happily sit and watch sitcoms or game shows for a couple hours every night. I just prefer interactive entertainment instead.
@@desertsax4839I had this same conversation with a colleague just the other night, wasn't gaming though, it was WWE smackdown, she was going on saying "how can you watch this, it's fake", my reply was "how can you watch EastEnders, Hollyoaks and love island". I closed off the discussion by saying "did I ask you to watch it 😊", 10 points for logical discussion finishers, see playing MMOs taught me to always have a proper finisher in your rotation 😂😂
46 here. I also can confirm everything is true. Some of us have almost NO free time on weekdays or even during the weekends because the family wants to do family stuff, there are plenty of chores, the occasional social event etc. Free time comes after 11pm when everyone's asleep, which means staying up until 1am+ if you want to have a decent gaming session which in turn means you are dead tired the next morning. If you don't do at least that every couple of days, you feel like you didn't do anything fun and start to feel bad about it. So the choice is to be either physically or mentally exhausted... Edit: Yes, this is #7 from that previous Friday Feature :)
This video is hurtfuly true. This is actually a real problem that leads to real-life stress. Especially the point about wasting the whole weekend thinking about gaming instead of just gaming...
I’m 43 and I felt all these. I would add trying to do online sessions with your mates and having to fight the urge to sleep. “But Dude, it’s only 9 pm! Why do you have to go to sleep now?”
this video is so relatable, even the yelling from someone (most likely your significant other) to do something "important" while you're just trying to enjoy playing video games on a weekend....they will never understand
This happens to me too,it doesn't matter if you do the so called productive thing you Will still feel that you should not play video games because according to society it's bad. You should just do what you want without putting so much thought into it
My wife and I had a good laugh about that, except ours is less yelling and more "babe? what doing? Babe? Were you on the toilet? Babe?Look at this? Babe? are you ok? babe? What do you think about this? Babe? I need help? Babe?" It's good to be loved 😮💨😁
Oddly enough I CAN find the time to watch an endless stream of video’s about peers not being able to find the time for playing videogames🤯 You had me laughing out loud btw, so I subscribed!
I was above average at COD. Had a group we had at one point a 200 win streak going on one of them. Then I hit like 33 and noticed a drop in reflexes and didn't have the desire to rage anymore. I have stopped playing all online games since then.
The solution is VR. Even better: you can play almost all (and in near future, all) flat games in VR with the help of tools like VorpX, SuperDepth3D, UEVR, and mods/ports from Team Beef, Praydog and Luke Ross.
My friend and I are in our mid-thirties, but he has kids. Whenever I manage to get him online, he goes to pieces when he realises that he has to do a tutorial before we can even begin. Then he falls asleep after an hour.
I'm a 39 year old woman who is single and doesn't have kids so can't relate to most of these. However it means most of my friends don't game and conversations about what you were up to at the weekend can be a bit awkward 😄
I'm 46 years old, woman, single, no kids and yes downtime talk around friends become very very very interesting. I was at comic con and just being around the gaming section with fellow gamers was so much fun. I could talk bloody non stop 😂🤣 but around my friends I mostly listen and avoid speaking about gaming
I’m a 58, married, with kids, and I’m the main gamer. I have no other adult gaming friends because I’ve never found any other gamers in our town, especially females. I dragged my family to a gaming con last year. So yeah. Everyone imagines a man when they think gamer, including developers obviously. But we older/female gamers have money and passion.
I'm a 44 yr old single female and I am grateful to have found a kindred spirit 20 something who works at the local butcher. Most conversations start with "3lbs of bacon and how is Helldivers treating you?"
I'm 39f married with kids and I guarantee that if I ask you what you did this weekend it's to get the vicarious thrill of hearing about how much gaming you got done. 😂
i really needed to hear number 1 comment. i constantly feel guilty when i play when i just want to enjoy playing. even though i keep up with work and daily chores. hate the feeling
These are spot on! Also, that desire to want to play a game you've already played, but time is so precious that you can't waste it on replays. As a kid you'd play the same games over and over.
But replaying a game is a known quantity/quality, you get exactly what you need/expect. Playing some new unknown game is a big risk if your time is precious. I tend to replay older games 80-90% of my time - still playing Unreal Gold and Quake regularly. :)
just hit 60, and my wife is finally trained to the point that after coming home, kissing her, rubbing the pups head, and spending five minutes listening to how her day went she inevitably says “go ahead and play your game”…. … Life is Good!!!
What your wife would say: I finally have hubby (I assume) trained enough that when he comes home he spends a few minutes listening to how my day went and then buggers off so I can enjoy the rest of my evening in peace.
I’m blessed with the same type of wife. One reason I never wanted to get married haha. I figured I’d have to wake up in the middle of the night and sneak a few minutes of a huge game. Just to get a text asking where I am. But no, life is good. She scrolls through mindless shorts and memes, sitting beside me, while I do my thing. Only problem is not being able to get as fully immersed. But oh well.
Being 40 this speaks to me. The thinking about playing instead of actually playing is absolutely real. The saving grace is Actually laundry. While the clothes are washing, my gaming set up is not too far away. So while i'm waiting for the wash, I play the game, then put it in the dryer and wait for that.And that's me, gaming for the day or that time😅
For like a year, a playthrough of Stardew Valley made my laundry done more efficiently. I could time how many farm days is needed for the dryer to finish.
The amount of time I've wasted trying to figure out what game I want to play and flickering around the menu is probably enough time to have actually finished The Witcher 3.
The older you get, the more you realize that money and owning stuff is less important, and enjoying your TIME however you choose to bring you a few moments of pure joy is priceless and cannot be replaced with anything material anyway.
At 36 I have two kids and a wife. Most of my weekly free time is playing games with the kids or watching movies with the wife. Friday night's are set in stone, games usually start around 11pm and me and a few buddies get on discord and play until 4-5am. And it's awesome.
That's the thing isn't it!? You finally get free time and then feel like there's no point anymore because it's late. This gets worse when you actually had the whole day to play, but spent the time either deciding what to play, or on distractions like youtube.
I'm aged 28 and almost experiencing everything the list has mentioned. Also love your videos. I have uninstalled RU-vid from my mobile due to productivity reasons and due to that, I enjoy your videos on a big TV screen. Thanks for making these!
I'm 32, I've been watching RU-vid since the ripe old age of 16 and let me tell you I have NEVER related to a video as much as I have with this one. I feel seen, Rob. Thank you
I'm 29 right now and I know exactly what you mean. Between cooking, watching dishes, trying to stay in shape, looking after my aging parents and supporting my siblings all the while I barely have time to play games anymore. Those blessed moments when I do are so much appreciated.😊
One problem that I've found about being a gamer and also being 43 years old: I've paid the bills, bought the kids' school supplies, bought groceries for the week, paid for the oil change in the car, put money into the savings for the vacation next summer, bought the curtains that the wife was in dire need of... and now I have enough money to buy a shovelware game that's on sale.
You forgot, we don't have time to play long games anymore. I actually get excited when a game is 20hrs or less and on rails because I will be able to finish it!
I think two that could be added. 1) You go through your game list to a game you played only for a few hours and do not remember why you stopped playing the game 2) You have an ever growing list of game you have bought but have not played yet and in some cases have not even downloaded because you don't have the time to complete a game before a sale pops up and you have bought the next game
I mean, don't argue. I get it, got into a disagreement with some idiot whining about a tutorial bit being too easy. When he called it 'bad game design', i just thought, you're not worth talking about this with'.
Rob might be getting worse at videogames, but he just can't stop getting better and better as a writer. He should have a side hustle indeed: his own channel!
I'm knocking on the door of 50 and gaming since the 90's. My hands hurt if i play for too long these days, and I love my racing games and my trigger fingers and wrists pay the price for it.
I'm 42 and I envy the kids how passionate people are about games, somewhere during the process of getting older the games somehow lost their substance for me. However seeing that spark in my kids do make me smile 😊
I'm loving this new round of Friday features. Not that I didn't love the earlier one but the fact that content for and about older gamers is being made is absolutely amazing. Gaming for partners, parents and now this! Rob gets me. Period.
One of my favourite thing about this community is how a lot of us are older and have kids or jobs or other responsibilities that prevent us from playing games 100% of the time
Mid-40s old gamer here and I've been gaming since I was 7. The biggest thing I've noticed is that my reaction/response time has increased. Meaning, I HAVE SLOWED DOWN 😃. I remember a time when parrying attacks or getting in those awesome combos were almost instant. These days, though I do get a lot of it right, I also fumble many times and I know it'll only get worse. But that's ok. That's life 🙂. Enjoy while you still can people. Happy gaming!
All of these plus the "all my friends no longer game so I just play single player games" or the classic "i dont have room for a new game because my 8yo's games take up all the space" 😅
53 and retired here. This is the first of your videos I've seen, and I thought it was fantastic. I was engaged and amused the whole way through. I actually put down my paint brush (painting toy soldiers is my other time suck) and paid attention! So much of what you said was spot on. The "didn't remember this cave or this armor (or these controls)" bit hit especially close to home, but that could easily be down to the vodka and beer. I used to crush games like Doom Eternal. Now I struggle to go two minutes without getting killed. These days things like Minecraft and Midnigt Suns (turn based!) are more my speed. It's not that I don't want to whip out the plasma blaster, speed potions, and jump packs, it's just that they are hard to use now without blowing myself up. Lol! Anyway, thanks for this video!
The one about going back to a game you haven't played in a while only to forget the controls, where you are, what you're doing, etc... yeah, i felt that one.
Oh that final entry just hurts! My friends and I have basically taken to emailing each other our weekly schedules, subject to change, in order to program online gaming sessions and only for a 2hr gaming session at that.
As a 55-year-old, I feel every single one of these. You reach a point where you just look forward to being able to retire so that you can then take all of that retirement free time and spend it well pretty much doing the same seven things.
exactly what i feel..i have those moment where you just stop in a middle of a game like ghost breakpoint and just appreciate the open world beauty that you wish you are inside the game for a moment.
The choice paralysis is so real. 😭 Especially as disposable income increases, but time to play games decreases. I have literally close to a 100 games in my backlog across PS4, PS5, Switch and PC.
I'm 44 years young. To avoid this issues i try to finish the games before start another. I don't keep too much games installed and this way i don't have too many options to choose from. I rarely play online only games because my time is finite and this games are a waste of time. Sometimes i have the issue of forgetting how to play a game that i stopped playing for sometime.
Just want say say thanks to Rob and the crew for the Friday features. You kept me laughing and motivated through platinuming DS I,II, soon to be III, and plat'ing Bloodborne. You're all awesome! P.S. I can't wait to get into armored core!
These got more painfully relatable as they went on. Having to start a game again because you’ve totally forgotten the controls is why it took me more than 5 years to complete Red Dead Redemption 2.
Right? I don't have time to spend 2 hours on a game to feel like I've made 0 progress. I don't have time to get frustrated doing something that I'm supposed to be enjoing.
There was another video I was watching a few weeks ago that kinda addressed this issue. A lot of times, we spend much of our day on our phone just looking at social media to pass the time at work. This eats so much of our time when we're off work and we constantly wonder why we don't get to play as much as we used to. We trained ourselves to default to our phones. It really takes mental commitment to say, "Im playing games instead of scrolling social media and youtube." One thing I thought about was using social media to build excitement for when I get off work to play games by joining different groups that talk about what I play.
Great video Rob and the team, having just turned 40 and still gaming obsessed with 2 kid's, every point just hit right at home haha. Top class!! I would add 1 more thing, not having the time to play something myself and gaming vicariously through you guy's live stream vods and let's plays a half an hour at a time at 11pm or 10 minutes sitting in the fortress of solitude, the bathroom! 😁
Experiencing all of this since I got 25-27 years old, I’m 29 now. I have definitely noticed that my reflexes aren’t as sharp as they were when I was 18-20 years old… on top of that I’m a game developer, working in the industry for the last 6 years, all that illusion of virtual worlds is gone, because I know how the games are created, I know the rules of a game, I know that if I can’t unlock the door, then there is nothing behind that door, just void, I know that there are invincible trigger volumes that trigger specific events in video games and etc.… that immersion I had before I started developing video games is gone..
These lists have been so accurate to my life these past few months. Great work as always team. The choice paralysis one in particular I'm awful for. Even when I've chosen something I find myself not fully enjoying it because I'm thinking "... what if I'd be having more fun with that other game"
Oh boy did you miss a problem! Exercising! Each time I am playing for 2 hours straight, I experience body issues, so I need to stop and strech, go for a walk etc.
This actually really helps in some ways. I'm that annoying person in their 30s that still goes out and does things. Certain people want to be invited, but also never bother showing up. Now I video game, but it's later at night. I've completely given up on gaming with others online as again it's just too hard to sync up! Great video!
Yes. Very relatable. I'm in my mid 50's and been gaming since the days of the Speccy. Nowadays trying to get some me time to spend a bit of time escaping into a game for a bit is difficult as there is always something else to do. Not planning of getting rid of my PS5 as I want to see what GTA6 is like.
As someone who is turning 35, I feel this in my soul. At least I have always been of the opinion that playing a game is doing something productive, but my choice of games has certainly changed.
Hi Mr.Pearson (Dad?) , I wanted to formally say that this is my favourite episode of Friday features I've ever seen, and I'm pretty close to having seen them all, and considering the fact that I am 45 years young, have very little "free" time, as well. I laughed and I considered thinking about crying,all in a matter of 13 and a half minutes time, I'd say that emotionally Rob, that is a very good use of said,so called "free" time. Thanks for this little bit of yours and keep on making me consider crying,in the future of this magnificently written (Rob) series.
26 year old here, working a very intensive job with long hours and the biggest problem I encounter is just being mentally exhausted. Yesterday for example, after a long 12 hour shift of hearing patients coming in with their ailments and problems, I got home at around 8:30 in the evening ate, did some others bits and bobs and then when it was time to finally enjoy myself at 9:30, I just sat there, mentally exhausted and fed up with nothing but another day of work to look forward to the next day.
The last one hits too hard for me lol. Been cancelling various multiplayer subscriptions, Xbox, ps plus etc because I just don't use them. Everyone's got kids, or dogs, or jobs. Might get one person free but 3 or 4 is a miracle
