There are pros and cons for either demographic: whilst being older may be ideal since not only you bypass age restrictions, you also have the capability on purchasing it with your own money without having to ask parents for that given that you have employment and recurring income. Gaming as a kid gives more time without having to dwell much on responsibilities that adults have to worry about but at the same time are held by school.
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It’s an odd and mixed experience for me: I definitely enjoy it more now because I’m definitely a lot more aware of the genres I enjoy and the genres I typically don’t; however, the uncontrollable excitement of playing through Streets of Rage 2 for the first time is not as palpable as it used to be back then.
I’d say in terms of quantity (frequency) I am having more fun now. In terms of quality, fun felt fresher and deeper back then.
Your teen to young adult years are the sweet spot for maximum enjoyment
When your a kid, you have time but no money.
When you’re an adult, you have money but no time.
So adults should buy games for kids - and kids should let adults play more.
I have much less screen time now as an adult. But games have grown in every way and are now a legitimate art form. It’s hard to say if I had more fun playing jet set willy on my 48k Sinclair spectrum, or playing cyberpunk on my steam deck. Both were great, in different ways.
Honestly the thing I feel that kids have in their corner that is really great is a lack of experience.
The kind of awe that I felt when I started up Starcraft or Diablo for the first time just isn’t there now, I have too many reference points from earlier games to get that “new and awesome”-feeling from most games anymore.“fresh meat” and then just getting insta killed. It still sends shivers down my spine. Such a sweet childhood memory.
brace yourself
christmas noobs are coming
I decided to have high moral standards, and now I’m constantly burned out by checking if the publisher or development team’s owner is fucking over some people, either by enforcing patch updates (small hill but I’ll die defending my right to glitch out of playable areas), employee overworking, prioritising shareholder profit over fun factor, gatekeeping based on identity or political influence etc. As a kid I had no worries and could play games built by EA, Epic or Bohemia Interactive without thinking about how they profit off American wars.
I remember Cyberpunk 2077 sucking me into its world, I sometimes walked slowly through the streets taking in sights and sounds.
I had that all the time as a kid, Monkey Island, Betrayal at Krondor, you name it. For children, like you said, everything is new and a fantastic experience, give it enough years and it becomes not stale, but normal.
Now, many years later it has become rare. But when it happens it’s awesome again.
That’s also my reason for not being excited over GTA 6. It will never live up to feeling of 3, Vice City or San Andreas, even 4. Those times are over for me. 5 was fun, but nothing special anymore.
I hadn’t felt that feeling in many years, until I played Elden Ring’s DLC. It was the first time since being a kid that I felt a true sense of awe and wonder. I wish I could relive that feeling again.
Way different experience. As a kid for me i loved the sense of discovery and getting lost in a world.
As an adult, I love games that make me think and plan.
Both great for different reasons
Time to game!
Grabs scratch paper, pencil, and calculator
Opens Satisfactory
Haha definitely. Or factorio, or civ, or chess
I think it’s just as good, just in different ways. As a kid you don’t understand a lot (especially if English isn’t your first language) and if you are old, like me, and didn’t have the internet to help you. It wasn’t so much about completing the games or being good at them, you just had fun and did whatever you felt like. Spent so many hours just fucking around and trying things.
As and adult it’s still as much fun but more about experiencing the stories, fully completing the games etc. there’s also so many more games to choose from and stuff like mods, emulation, remakes etc. I play a lot of indie games too.
Currently playing the Twilight Princess decomp (dusklight), my first time playing the game, and having a blast. I’ve also dabbled in game making, 3d modeling, pixel art, map making etc. and creating my own mods and stuff like texture packs. Also got several IRL friends who are indie game devs (Dennaton (hotline miami), YCJY (keep driving, sea salt, post void) and more) so it’s something I talk a lot about and see part of in my daily life.
Personally, gaming was a much bigger deal to me as a kid. I still play as an adult, but they just don’t evoke the same feels as they did when I was young. Probably doesn’t help that I am stressed, tired, and have a million obligations distracting me, but that’s adulthood for you. A lot of the time, I find something like a hike or bike ride more rewarding than games these days.
I think most people will say that as adults they get to play less games, but I have very much the opposite experience. Not to say I’m playing games 24/7, but rather I wasn’t allowed to play much as a kid. 15 minutes a day, and then when I was in high school I got 30 minutes on weekends. I can get that kind of gaming in if I just play on my phone on my transit lmao
As an adult I finish more games. I have more patience and there’s a lot of things that are better today than when I was a kid (level scaling/difficulty scaling is definitely one, and so is the art).
But I miss storytelling. I miss game mechanics that worked really well but we’re based on the limitations of the hardware and software available at the time. I miss having to explore because there were no walkthroughs or guides or anything.
So I think perhaps gaming has gotten better, but my experience with gaming isn’t as good now as it was when I was a kid because I have something to compare it to and it can’t beat my nostalgia.
The pros of gaming as an adult is that you now have the money to go buy all the games you wanted to play as a kid. The cons are that you no longer have the time.
I have to say that the lack of responsibility and abundance of time makes gaming as a kid better.
It’s a tough question to answer, since we can’t go forward in time and game as a kid with the games we have now. And playing games now that we had when we were kids is different, since you already know all about them. I think I have to answer “as a kid,” though.
As a kid, we had a sense of wonder about all the new things we were unlocking. But how much of that was just being a kid and how much was the still-evolving game industry finding new ways to be exciting? Playing games now feels insane to me, because I grew up being astonished by Galaga and Pac-Man. Comparing those to Elden Ring, which is graphically and difficulty-wise and story-wise light years ahead, just doesn’t make sense. At the same time, I don’t know that I could have gained much from playing Elden Ring as a kid. For one, I would have been destroyed by the first enemy and turned away crying… not that different as an adult if I’m honest. But I probably played as much Super Mario Bros as I did Elden Ring.
I’m lucky that I have time to game as an adult. Sure, it’s only about 3 to 5 hours per week, but that’s better than a lot of adults. Some weekends I’ll get 10 or 15 hours to game. As a kid I could play for hours a day. I could have friends over most days after school to game with. They could spend the night on weekends to play late. I could borrow their games, and they could borrow mine, so I usually had a new game to try even if I didn’t have my own money.
I think gaming as an adult is better honestly. But that’s thanks to all the experience and understanding built up from gaming as a kid. I would not have had the patience or understanding to play and complete some games as a kid that I was able to do now.
That’s hard for me to answer. I have more fun now than I did as a kid, but the games are different.
When I was a kid, Simcity 2000 with 256 color VGA graphics was the cutting edge.
Now in this future space year of 2026, there are factory games, RPG’s with full voice acting and character animations, games where you can work on cars or farm crops or check paperwork. There are point and click games that work like Monkey Island, only they’re pornographic. Instead of monsters in Doom falling in a sprite of chunks, I can see them chainsawed apart or curb stomped. I can build rockets whether they work or not. I can be a robot driving a boat, powering up old infrastructure and scrapping junk to build machines, when I’m not dodging sharks with freakin’ lasers on their heads.
Tl;Dr: Its hard for me to tell if I am having more fun gaming as an adult, or the games are just better now.
As a kid I had time play games but no money to buy games. As an adult I have money to buy games but time to play games …
