Video games are only for young people with too much time on their hands

A reader argues that video games are targeting the wrong people, and that adult gamers need shorter games and younger players the opposite.

I don’t really consider myself to be that old. I’m 42, which means I have no interest in TikTok or eSports, but otherwise I wouldn’t say I was a fossil and there have been a least a couple of occasions when my kids haven’t been completely embarrassed to be in my presence. But according to a recent Reader’s Feature traditional video games are only for old people. And yet if that’s true, I don’t know how they find the time.

The Reader’s Feature the other week was very good and argued that because publishers are now obsessed with live service games, and think that kids aren’t interested in consoles, traditional titles are now only really for adults, even though they’re not really the target audience.

It was all very well reasoned, although I’m sure I wasn’t the only one that has plenty of proof that kids are perfectly interested in consoles. Especially when I’m trying to wrestle back use of the TV. But my main point of contention – and this is with the publisher logic not the writer of the feature – is that adults just don’t have the time or energy for modern games, because they’re just too damn long.

The writer envisioned a halcyon era to come, where certain games were aimed at kids and others, what we think of as traditional single-player games, are aimed at adults. I can think of lots of reasons this would never happen, but the number one reason is that we simply don’t have time to be playing endless 60+ hour epics.

Maybe I’m alone in this, but I severely doubt it. I love video games and I miss being able to play them like I did when I was younger, but between work and my family there just isn’t the opportunity. And even when I do sit down to something, some games are so overwhelming and intimidating I don’t even know where to start.

I sat down to play Baldur’s Gate 3 the other day and it took so long for me to work out how to control anything that the thought of 100 hours more of it put me off immediately and I haven’t tried it again. I wouldn’t say I play video games to relax exactly but I certainly don’t play them to make me feel like I’m sitting an exam.

The irony is I think a lot of older players would be a lot happier with short attention span games, of the sort that we imagine kids like. Fortnite and mobile games and things like that. The problem is they’re not aimed at adults and so there’s not actually much for us to play that fits the amount of time we have available to us.

Likewise, kids have all the time in the world but all the games that are aimed at them are very superficial and uncomplicated, so the only way to get longevity out of them is to just keep playing them again and again and making them into a social thing, that isn’t sold on its gameplay or story at all.

Basically, the video games industry is backwards. Games for kids need to be longer and more complicated, because they’re the only ones that have time for them. And games for adults need to be shorter and more straightforward. Well, maybe not straightforward but at least more focused.

The one thing we’ve learnt from the last few months is that no one in charge of gaming seems to have much of an idea of what’s going on but I’d say they’re getting more wrong than they realise.

By reader Futterman