Do Your Gaming Tastes Change With Age?

There’s a question I’ve seen posed on social media a few times recently: Have your gaming tastes changed as you’ve gotten older? This is usually aimed at gamers in their 30s, and as one of those myself, I thought it would be fun to write about.

I don’t think my overall tastes have changed much with age. Rather, I think I have a better grasp of what I actually like than I did when I was younger. There was a period of time from my late teens to somewhere in my 20s when I bought lots of video games I wasn’t actually that interested in out of a sense of social obligation. My friends were going to play and discuss these games, and tons of people online would too. So, I bought them to not miss out on the big new thing, and they ended up not being my cup of tea. I think it was a combination of having more disposable income for the first time in my life while still being young enough to be easily swayed by social pressure that caused this. Nowadays, I know what genres I like and don’t like, and am content with making purchases accordingly. If my friends love a game that I don’t care for, I can still discuss it with them.

As long as they keep making puzzle games, I’ll keep playing them.

Plus, there are so many games being released each year that I don’t think any of us could play everything coming out if we even wanted to. Being in our 30s, none of us have the same amount of free time we once did. Careers, families and other responsibilities make it easy to narrow down your gaming purchases to things you really want to play. To illustrate how much your gaming habits can change in adulthood, a friend of mine played many different video games during high school, but now has a very busy job and children. Over the past few years, I know of two games that he’s played. Both are open-world games he knew he could take his time with, play at his own pace, and have lots of things to see and do within their worlds. On the other hand, I tend to prefer shorter games with incentives to replay like bonus modes and unlockables. I think these are different approaches to the same problem. We both want to get the most out of our games with limited free time, we just take different paths to get there.

Something like Mario Tennis is great for short gaming sessions.

One common refrain when discussing this topic with friends and family is a reduced interest in multiplayer over time. When your leisure time is limited, you don’t want to spend it getting annoyed at your teammates in a competitive game. Playing any multiplayer game with random teammates feels like a gamble, and I think one’s patience for it diminishes with age. My husband and I play plenty of co-op games and have fun, but he’s expressed a lack of desire to play these kinds of games unless he already has someone to play with.

I do find myself replaying more retro games at this point in my life than I used to. This isn’t because I’ve entered my old woman yelling at cloud phase and am about to launch into a rant about how all new games are bad, or anything like that. It’s just fun to revisit things I liked in my youth and see how they hold up. Sometimes, I find that I don’t like an old favorite as much as I remembered. More often, thankfully, I’m reminded of why a particular game was so special to me in the first place. Replaying Final Fantasy VII reminded me of how much I loved the story and characters. Replaying Tomb Raider 2 gave me a greater appreciation for how clever the level design was for a game that was notoriously rushed. Replaying Super Mario Sunshine convinced me that graphics actually peaked with the GameCube, because boy, do those visuals still look great. There are many examples like these that make it fun to revisit both classics and those obscure old games I loved back in the day.

Jumping Flash is still fun after all these years.

So, do your gaming tastes change with age? I suppose it depends on the person. I don’t think my tastes have actually changed so much as I just have a better grasp of what I like now. On the other hand, I know people whose tastes have shifted drastically to different genres and types of experiences. Individual circumstances like job commitments and social life will affect different people’s approaches to their free time in different ways, and I think it’s interesting to look at how that plays out in our gaming habits.