Today Show hosts think gamers over 30 are "weird"

http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2011/07/today_show_gamers_over_30_are_.php

by seagaia • 15 years ago

23 36 15 years ago

seagaia• 15 years ago

I for one think this kind of mindset is ridiculous, only led by stereotypes of gamers and a general ignorance towards the video gaming community.

First of all, the question being posed is sexist, it only asks about "men over 30", which tells me there must be a stereotype about "girls not being able to game" or something ridiculous.

Their laughs disgust me, and I'm a bit scared at how many people their opinions influence per day.

stcredzero• 15 years ago

...this kind of mindset is ridiculous, only led by stereotypes of [] and a general ignorance towards the [] community.

Fill in the blank and welcome to the mainstream US mindset, where Taco Bell resembles Mexican food, Dick van Dyke can sound like someone from England, and all folk dancers stick out their elbows and move like Popeye.

systemtrigger• 15 years ago

I bet they judge men who watch television more favorably.

bct• 15 years ago

Anyone who thinks of "TV-watcher" as a significant part of their identity is a bit weird, too.

Symmetry2• 15 years ago

The things we do that are considered weird by other have a way of forming part of our identity, whether they otherwise would have or not. Nobody thinks its weird to watch a lot of TV, so even those people who spend way too much time watching TV consider themselves "TV-watchers".

mechanical_fish2• 15 years ago

The headline refers to celebrities on the Today show, not "people".

It is sometimes hard to wrap one's head around the fact that generational change happens at the speed of... generations. One year per year, on average. Tune in ten years from now, when the average age of gamers may well be 47, yet gamers over 40 will be considered "weird" by people significantly older than 40.

ericd4• 15 years ago

Interesting point - maybe they're just saying that early adopters are weird.

atomicdog2• 15 years ago

I think it's more of a "you should have kids/be spending all your time with your kids in your thirties!" thing more than a "you shouldn't be playing games in your thirties" thing. So if, ten years from now, the average age for childbirth has not increased, we may still be seeing this kind of prejudice.

mechanical_fish2• 15 years ago

Good point. Time does march on, and human activity is not age-invariant, especially after age 120.

This is also a better hypothesis because it has better explanatory power: The Today show is predominantly watched by people who are not scrambling to get to work in the morning, and that group is going to contain a high percentage of people with kids, and such people think like... people with kids.

Alex39173• 15 years ago

I think there is good reason to be skeptical of hardcore gamers who are above a certain age. These games all use the same basic tricks to trigger to pleasure mechanisms of the brain. As such, anyone who is sufficiently intelligent should be able to figure out that they're all basically the same, and thus to be avoided after a certain point if one wants to keep growing as a person.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy playing genuinely novel games when they come out like Katamari Damacy or Braid, but that's still not more than a few hours a year. And I appreciate that gaming can have other ancillary social or parenting benefits.

But at it's root most serious games today are designed to exploit the mechanisms of addiction. I don't think this is entirely a bad thing, it may even be beneficial to a limited extent. But if you eventually want to make your own art and contribute to the world in a meaningful way then this requires becoming fully self-actualized. And this is very difficult when you start spending several hours per day deriving pleasure from the baser parts of the brain.

That being said I'm not a neuroscientist, but this is sort of the vague feeling I get after reading some of the basic literature on both addiction and extrinsic motivation.

txxxxd• 15 years ago

Would you be skeptical of a chess player above a certain age as well?

pessimizer• 15 years ago

Not the other poster, but I wouldn't be. In my semi-baseless opinion, chess playing pleasure is more like the pleasure you get from reading or doing math. Video game pleasure is more like television or cocaine.

Symmetry2• 15 years ago

And what about people who watch low-brow movies and/or television?

Alex39173• 15 years ago

I'm skeptical of chess players of all ages.

I feel roughly the same about chess players as I feel about drunk drivers. That is, humanity clearly benefits from people willing to go out and drive while completely shitfaced, at least in the sense that when people are altruistic enough to kill themselves while driving drunk, the rest of us benefit by being able to look at their deaths statistically to create best-practices for the rest of us.[1]

In all seriousness though, if chess is your art then so be it, I certainly won't be the one to judge. On a personal level I think there are better mediums for self-expression. But clearly humanity as a whole gets stronger from diversity and randomness, and who knows what benefits us in the long run. And I agree with pessimizer that chess is ultimately more like math or music than cocaine or whatever.

[1] Pretty curve! http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/alcoholhighway/2...

Splines• 15 years ago

Do I need to be thinking "How am I going to change the world" every moment of every day? Sometimes I want to go have fun and laugh at something. I might watch a movie, read a book, browse the internet, or play a game. Is that so bad?

rhygar• 15 years ago

I think there is good reason to be skeptical of hardcore sports fans who are above a certain age. Sports all use the same basic tricks to trigger to pleasure mechanisms of the brain. As such, anyone who is sufficiently intelligent should be able to figure out that they're all basically the same, and thus to be avoided after a certain point if one wants to keep growing as a person.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy watching genuinely novel sports when they come out like Foosball or Ultimate Frisbee, but that's still not more than a few hours a year. And I appreciate that sports can have other ancillary social or parenting benefits.

But at it's root most serious sports today are designed to exploit the mechanisms of addiction. I don't think this is entirely a bad thing, it may even be beneficial to a limited extent. But if you eventually want to make your own art and contribute to the world in a meaningful way then this requires becoming fully self-actualized. And this is very difficult when you start spending several hours per day deriving pleasure from the baser parts of the brain.

That being said I'm not a neuroscientist, but this is sort of the vague feeling I get after reading some of the basic literature on both addiction and extrinsic motivation.

esrauch• 15 years ago

I think your comment is actually a convincing argument that we should be skeptical of hardcore sports fans rather than a convincing argument that we shouldn't be skeptical of hardcore gamers.

klipt2• 15 years ago

Playing sports has the side benefit of making you fit. While physical activity may indeed be a "repetitive basic need", fulfilling that basic need regularly will still make you a happier, healthier person.

ericd4• 15 years ago

You're painting with awfully broad strokes. Hardcore games are actually extremely varied, much more so than casual games. The variance has decreased among the AAA titles in recent years, but even there it's a good bit more than you imply. Perhaps you're thinking of the twitch genres like FPS's and platformers and generalizing from there? Have you taken a look at the Total War series? X-Com? Monkey Island?

It's sort of like saying that all movies and TV use the same tricks to trigger the pleasure mechanisms of the brain.

Alex39173• 15 years ago

That's fair enough, it definitely was a sweeping generalization. I guess what I meant is that if you've already played Ultima Online when you're 12, Everquest when you're 14, etc., do you really need to still be raiding in World of Warcraft when you're 30? I don't think so.

Goronmon2• 15 years ago

Couldn't anyone use this exact same logic against anything they don't believe contributes to the world in a meaningful way?

Reading, outdoor activities, sports, television, movies, even religion I would argue could be described using the same logic.

noblethrasher• 15 years ago

I think his basic premise (which may need more argument) is that games rob you of agency.

The transition from childhood to adulthood is characterized by ever increasing agency, hardcore gaming, he argues, arrest that development.

Thus, anything that diminishes age-appropriate agency is bad.

ilamont• 15 years ago

I think many people in the Today show's late morning audience, were they to be mapped to the technology adoption curve, would be classified as late mainstream or even "laggards". Calling adult gamers "weird" plays into preconceived or outdated notions of gaming that many of them have.

haldean• 15 years ago

For what it's worth, I think people who watch the Today Show are weird, independent of age.

Cyranix• 15 years ago

I am a gamer, and I will be a gamer in a couple years when I'm over 30. But one mistake that I've seen a lot of gamers make when getting riled up over this issue of perception, including the author of the linked article, is making a faulty jump in logic -- from "The average gamer is over 30 years old [according to a variety of sources]" to "People over 30 years old are more likely to be gamers than not". I have yet to see a credible source come out and directly say this. Take a look at the ESA stats in the article comments from Lea Hill -- they're given in a way that tries to imply it.

In this regard and many others, the rhetoric around social acceptance, identity (including age, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, political belief, and ethnicity or nationality), and maturity is really twisted. Most people are defending opinions instead of examining realities... I've been a lot happier since I stopped following the discussion in any serious way.

krschultz• 15 years ago

I'd also like to see a median age rather than an average. It's one of those times when one direction of the average has a limit (how young you can be and still be a gamer) while the other side of the average (maximum age) is far less limited. Lets say the average starting age for a gamer is 7, that means they can only be 23 years younger than the 'average' game, while someone who is 70 years old is 40 years older than the 'average' gamer. I bet the median is lower than 30.

Not to mention if you time weight it. When I was 15 I spent a heck of a lot more hours playing games than I do now. I'm probably still a 'gamer' because I have Starcraft 2 installed on my PC, but I havent played it in 5 weeks. When Starcraft 1 came out, I was lucky if I saw the sun in 5 weeks because I was playing Starcraft.

kleiba• 15 years ago

Who cares?

walru• 15 years ago

“Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.” -John Lennon

gamble• 15 years ago

I believe the inflection point when video games became mainstream was the release of the original Playstation in 1995. Prior to that point, at least in my experience, video games were strictly a pass-time for nerds. The Playstation was very successful at marketing video games to a wider, if not older audience.

People who were in their early teens when they got their Playstation are just now reaching their thirties. Anyone older than that is likely to have acquired a contempt for video games before they became mainstream, and hasn't seen fit to update their opinions in the intervening decades.

Today Show hosts think gamers over 30 are "weird"

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