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Plights of the Middle-Aged Gamer
Something rather tragic happens when you reach about 40 years old. Everyone stops caring about you.
There is a magic demographic number out there — and the exact numbers are a bit sketchy. But if you’re paying attention — once you hit that age group you no longer matter.
As a consumer — you are irrelevant.
We could make this article a “grumpy old man” story (about how nobody loves you when you’re 40) but we can talk about how film, television and the media don’t care about the older citizen in another article.
Video games to people of my age group (I’m 49 years old, by the way; firmly planted in Generation X) are like television to the early Baby Boomers; a mainstay fixture of our childhood.
For those considerably younger, let me give you a quick overview of the video game timeline as it applies to me.
As a pre-teen, I caught the tail end of the pinball craze and was dumping quarters into Space Invaders and Pac-Man like everyone else in the late 70s/early 80s. I saw the Atari VCS (aka Atari 2600) come to market. I watched ColecoVision and Intellivision duke it out for the best “next-gen” console. I lived through the video game crash and joined the computer revolution with the Commodore 64.
