How Has Growing Up Impacted Your Gaming?

[Jimmu]

As we grow up and get older a variety of things change in our lives from our friends, to our living spaces, cities, jobs, schools, and even hobbies. So how has gaming shifted for you throughout the journey that is your life?

For me, I started gaming quite young when my uncle purchased a SNES with a copy of Super Mario World for me. Throughout my childhood I would spend many hours obsessing over the games I came into contact with and pouring countless hours into them. Upon reaching my final years of high school my gaming time shrank pretty dramatically and I shifted to a much more casual gamer than I had been before. Since leaving high school I've been moving around and studying/working a lot but still have a huge interest in gaming, particularly certain series'. However I struggle to find the greatest deal of time still to sink into them. I find myself playing far less games with long campaigns and more casual ones I can quickly pick up and put away easily.

As for particular games/genres, I've shifted away from the Mario series fairly dramatically since I haven't played any new main series Mario games for a few years now. I never had any interest in games involving shooting at all when I was growing and now while I still have no interest in FPS games in the style of COD or Battlefield, I really get a good kick out of playing Overwatch which I probably wouldn't have even thought about playing a few years before it came out.

Going forward I do hope to get more time to play games when my life settles back down and I have a steady routine, at the moment sometimes it feels to me as though I spend more time talking about games than I do actually playing them. One thing that keeps me connected to gaming despite my shift away from playing games so much is easily the community of people it has introduced to me. I've met some really awesome people through a shared interest in gaming and those are connections I don't want to give up anytime soon.

 

[Spirit]

As I've grown up ive become more of a gamer. I was big into video games already but eothout income i could only play what i asked for as presents for birthdays and christmas.

With my own income ive been able to buy what i've wanted and what i've missed when entering independant adulthood and have been able to play more in general.

My tastes have changed but i've remained a fan of the genres I've always liked.

The IPs i'm a fan of now will likely be with me for the rest of my life unless something catastrophic like Other M happens to the likes of Zelda and Mario.

 

[Spiritual Mask Salesman]

I feel like I used to be more of a gamer when I was younger. I'd play anything, and when I started getting allowence money and picking up odd jobs, I'd buy a bunch of games. Then I'd binge those games and I never worried about not completing them because I knew I had the time to invest towards them. Now that I'm older I don't have the time to put towards gaming that I used to. If I'm lucky I'll get an hours worth of gameplay into a game each night. I find I'll still buy games, but I already have a backlog that I'm only adding to, so it's like I buy a new game but I don't keep at it because I have so many other games I need to complete as well.

 

[Dizzi]

I think I play a bit more cuz of the portable-ness and multi screens....

 

[BlumKram]

I'd like to play more now as an adult, unfortunately, the lack of time will not give me such an option, but anyway I still play PS4 and PC in my spare time.

 

[Sheikah_Witch]

I was hard out of gaming when I turned 13 and went into a big teenage emo rebel phase, I ditched everything gaming, considered it was for kids and started hanging out with metal boys, partying a lot, got myself a bass guitar and affiliated myself with some really shady people.

I don't really know what happened, maybe it was a slow process. I remember I was still hard out on games in 2011 to the point I barely even played SS, and then the next year I saw footage from New super Mario bros u, and it was something with the first HD Mario game that elicited childhood memories in me. Then gradually it was like I grew up for real and found my childhood self. I started back-cataloging the PS3 era like crazy and the next year came GTA V, The Last of us, not to mention WWHD and ALBW and like that, gaming was my life again, and I think it will be so for the rest of my life, I feel like I have gone full circle, in a way.

(That being said, I'm still emo)

 

[VikzeLink]

Just that I have less time for it... And that I'm less "wowed" by new games. Call it nostalgia, but I still feel like the games that came out when I was younger was better. For example: Super Mario Sunshine is my favorite Mario-game. Super Mario Odessey was great, but just not as great... Same with Zelda-games. While I tend to like them all, I'm very fond of the N64-era there, since I grew up with them, and I don't think anything will ever top them for me. That sense of wonder has just gone and only still lives in my old favorites.
Other than that I'm pretty much the same.

 

[Vanessa28]

In my case it was different because I grew up with old consoles. And I wasn't a gamer. I still am not a fanatic gamer but the years I game things haven't changed much for me. The only thing is me being more determined and fanatic at the gameplay itself

 

[mαrkαsscoρ]

I've never stopped playing games, but a notable time for me when it comes to games was middle school and most of high school; that time I only had a wii but I was heavily addicted to Super Smash Bros Brawl, I mean it, I played that game almost daily for that initial 4 years of when I got it, and the only reason I stopped is b/c my wii kicked the bucket one night, I would still play other games on the wii here and there but I always went back to Brawl, the rate that I got games also slowed in this time, I didn't get back into the PlayStation side until late in the PS3's life

nowadays I have a mix of playing my backlog and whatever somewhat recent release I'm interested, all whenever I have the time of course, my backlog also didn't start until very shortly after high school

 

[Dio]

I have quite a lot of spare time being someone that has his own business and I don't have to work loads of hours every day.

I game a bit less than when I was younger. I used to game often for a solid 4 hours a day when I was in school and at university. When I left I started work at a place which consumed most of my time and I would get the chance to game maybe 1 hour every other day if that. Bad times indeed...

I could indeed game 4 hours a day again if I wanted now and sometimes if I have a really exciting new title I play about 3 or 4 hours a day until it is done but I tend to watch more films or work on projects currently. At the moment I have been gaming roughly two hours per day.

 

[Azure Sage]

Working all day only leaves me with about a collective hour to play games a day during the week. Definitely not as much as I would like. Saturday is the only day I really get to myself to relax and dive into a game.

On the other hand, growing up and working has provided me my own money and being able to drive to the store to get games myself without relying on my parents, who don't understand video games or care about the hobby of mine. It has its positives and negatives.

 

[Shroom]

I definitely don't have as much time for it, but I am able to get more games that I want due to having my own income and mode of transportation. On a side note, but also, since I've grown up, games have more ways to access them with widely available services like e-shops and mail rentals, so that's nice too.

Otherwise, now I can straight beat your older brother at Smash who works at Nintendo and knows how to get Mew under the truck, and I also dunk on all those little dum-dum baby kids

 

[Quin]

Never stopped playing, if anything, I play even more.
Probably because I never got a social life.

 

[Princess Niki]

I suck at platformers cuz I barely got to play them as a kid, and my backlog is terrifying due to not being allowed to own consoles either.

 

[Laurentus]

My parents did not have money for me to engage in as expensive a hobby as gaming when I was growing up, but my first PC (an OG pentium with a 1gb hard drive ) could at least run an SNES and SEGA Genesis Emulator, so the first game I got really invested in was Streets of Rage 2, and then I later fell in love with Phantasy Star 4.

I later got a laptop as a gift from one of my friends, and it could play things like GTA San Andreas and Morrowind, which was absolutely grand, and when I could do my first summer job at the age of 16, I saved up for a PS3, and immediately got lost in Assassin's Creed 2 and Red Dead Redemption when that came out. It was also around this time that I got the original Samsung Galaxy S, and downloaded a Nintendo 64 emulator for it, on which the first game I installed was Ocarina of TIme.

Ever since I graduated high school, though, I find that I just do not often have the time for open-world games anymore. This was true back in university, and is doubly true since I graduated university and started doing a full-time job. These days, the only thing I can consistently fit into my schedule is Overwatch.