Gaming Greybeards
Slate has a discussion between two thirtysomethings as they take on XBox Live. They pinpoint something that really rings true regarding the transient agegroup for gaming:
I’m right at the fulcrum point of gaming popularity. Almost everyone five years older than me doesn’t really “get” video games and has little interest in playing them. Almost everyone five years younger than me can’t imagine life without an Xbox (or PS2 or whatever).
I can definitely relate to this. Almost all of my friends my age who are not computer geeks think of video games as being only for nerds. In fact, to some extent, I used to be in this category. My slightly younger friends don’t view video games this way at all. Somewhere along the way, I realized that there is no reason to think of games as a somehow invalid form of entertainment. Compared to watching television, for example, they’re almost certainly better as a game is an active experience whereas film and television are passive experiences.
Anyway, the article is hilarious. They primarily played Halo 2:
I liked when I got in the driver’s seat of the “Warthog” assault vehicle and one of our remote Xbox Live teammates quickly hopped onboard and manned the turret gun, as though he expected me to drive us somewhere useful. I instead drove off a cliff and killed us both. Boy, was he surprised!
and
All these little tweenie twerps, with their squeaky voices, kept calling me “dumb ass” as they were killing me. I’d chosen the screen name “sethdawg4000″ because I thought it was archly funny in its utter screen-name-ness. After I got addressed as “homo-dawg” several times I came to regret the decision.