14 k of g in a f p d

Begun, This Paleoblog Has…

OK, so what is a Paleogamer and what prompted me to start this. Well, let’s start with the second item first.

I recently replaced my aging system, which had reached the point where it couldn’t even run games fished from the bottom of the discount bin anymore, and I had traveled to my local Best Fry’s Circuit Buy City to look over the games section and see what I could find to play on my shiny new quad-core machine. I was looking over Dragon Age 2 when one of the sales drones buzzed up to me to offer his assistance. It quickly became apparent that he had assumed that I was buying a game for someone else and was somewhat surprised to learn that I was looking for a game for myself. He was more surprised when I was able to rattle off my system specs for him.

“That’s good.” he said. “Most of our older customers…” he caught himself and stopped.

“Don’t know their system specs?” I finished for him. “I’m a programmer so I have to keep track of those things. Besides, I’ve been gaming for over 30 years. I know what my system is.”

“Oh. OK. Cool.” he said. “Well, if you need any help…”

And he buzzed off again before I could tell him that 50 isn’t old. And I’m not that much over 50. Yet.

But it is true that when the average person thinks of a gamer they are probably thinking about the teenager down the street, not the guy next door with the house, family and job.

The perception goes both ways too. One night in World of Warcraft one of our guild leaders got quite flustered when he suddenly realized that I was almost three times his age. (I had to tell him to stop calling me “sir” on Ventrillo after that.) He pointed me to a guild that was for “adult” players and I checked it out but found that the age range there really wasn’t that much different; their minimum age was 18 but most of the players in it were college students with no middle-aged gamers in sight.

I came across an article recently which said that around 30 seems to be the “inflection point” for gamers; people younger than 30 seem to accept gaming as a normal thing while those older than 30 barely know or understand what it is. I know that I get more than my share of strange looks when I mention games at work or wherever.

There are older gamers out there. The group I played with in Star Wars: Galaxies included a 68 year old grandmother who started playing with her grandson. Actually, there were a good number of older players in SW:G; I suppose all of us who remembered the first movie when it came out leaped at the chance to visit the universe ourselves. (Too bad they managed to turn it into such an awful game.) But where there were a greater number of older players there, we were still the exception instead of the rule.

Which is odd, really, when you consider that it was us who in a sense created the gaming world as it exists today.

Our family played a lot of board games while I was growing up and I accumulated a large number of them over the years. (I have even given them their own web site.) As I got older I started playing “wargames” put out by companies like SPI and Avalon Hill. By the time I entered college I was playing Dungeons and Dragons, back in the day when it was just three small, brown books in a white box. So it was only natural that I followed when games started moving to the console and computer platforms.

I remember when Pong appeared in the arcade next to the pinball machines. Hell, I played Computer Space. I played the original Adventure when it first appeared on our local campus computer back in 1977 or 1978 and compared notes with other players on the bulletin board system on the campus mainframe. I had my first home computer, an Atari 800, in 1980 and played games like Zork and Rescue at Rigel that were loaded from cassette tape. I eventually moved on to Macs, PCs, Nintendos, Playstations and on to that day last week when I stood in the store looking at that copy of Fallout 3.

So I’ve always been a gamer, long enough in fact that one of my friends started referring to me as a “cave gamer”, someone who has been gaming since the beginning. I thought this sounded more like someone who gamed in a cave so I adopted the term “paleogamer” instead. And so I had a title.

And that brings us to this. The Paleogamer here is nothing but the random musings of a middle-aged gamer. Most gaming sites and blogs seem more geared to the hard-core gamers and not to those of us with jobs, families and other hobbies and responsibilities, especially those of us outside of the 25 and under demographic. While I certainly do not claim to be any kind of expert I hope to give at least a different perspective on the field.

And so it begins. And now, if you will excuse me, there’s a copy of Dragon Age 2 calling my name back here.