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Breaking virtual records and topping the scoreboards may be bigger goals for a teenager, but for a young professional in their early thirties, something with a concrete output-think cooking, painting, gardening, or bodybuilding-may appear to be much more rewarding. The repetition of an activity that doesn’t produce a visible benefit can decrease the feeling of novelty, and that’s when boredom may strike. There is a general lack of reward when it comes to gaming-at least in terms of how adults interpret the concept of reward. And when you have plenty of other things to do, it’s easy to avoid activities that appear to be either too easy and thus boring, or too difficult and thus frustrating.īeyond a simple matter of time, gaming doesn’t necessarily provide a sense of accomplishment, either. While this could be due solely to a decline in enthusiasm for some, an alternative explanation is that many older gamers-especially when they have longterm partners, become parents, or ascend into highly demanding professional positions-simply have different priorities and less time for gameplay. Generally, QF found that the older a gamer gets, the less eager they become in terms of gaming- respondents were less likely to label gaming as “very important/enjoyable,” and their preferences shifted toward specific gaming experiences (less social and more solo gaming, for instance) not as popular among younger gamers. It’s not that we wake up one morning thinking video games are boring all of sudden, but instead everything happens slowly throughout a lengthy process that most of us don’t even realize. The research suggests that many things occur as we age, all pushing people a bit further away from gaming. Collecting information from a staggering 239,000 gamers in recent years, market research company Quantic Foundry has been closely examining how gaming motivations and preferences change with age via its Gamer Motivation Profile. One in particular seemed to answer all my initial questions. I’m far from the only former gamer thinking about this reality-there have been several good scientific studies on the matter within the last decade, in fact. Quantic Foundry A normal (gamer) aging process As technology enabled things I wouldn’t have dreamed were possible as a kid, it created entirely new platforms for gaming. But could there be something more to it than that? Games themselves were also changing. The more responsibilities, problems, and stress in life, the more we lose our appetite for things that used to entertain us, gaming included. My 41-year-old cousin had dealt with the same thing years before me, and he had a simple explanation: “Now it’s you who has to worry about rent and bills, not your dad.” Deep inside I knew he was right. I figured it was just a matter of time before I found the right game to stimulate my interest again, but time continued to go by and nothing changed. I couldn’t help but notice all the repeating tropes and similarities in game design between franchises. Some of my favorite games soon gave me the impression of being terribly long.
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Then all of a sudden, after thousands of hours spent playing across genres and platforms, boredom hit me hard for the very first time in my early thirties. Further Reading Ars Technica’s best games of 2018