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I can dimly remember a time before videogames were household fixtures, but only just. I was born in 1980, and the Nintendo Entertainment System showed up in the US about six years later \u2013 which is right around the time my dad brought home my family\u2019s first personal computer. So while I recall a time before games were commonplace, I\u2019ll be one of the last people around who does \u2013 games have been fixtures in all our lives since then, and it stands to reason that they\u2019ll figure into our lives when we\u2019re older. The question is, what games, and how?<\/p>\n

It becomes a rather complex thought experiment. In thirty or forty or fifty years, will I want to be playing the games I love now, or the ones I loved in the \u201990s when I was a teenager and games were hitting their first real golden era? That would make sense: lots of people enjoy listening to the music they heard as teenagers, the music that shaped their ideas of what music was and created a sense of identity and culture. Maybe the same will be true for games \u2013 the RPG games and shooters of the 1990s certainly take me back to a certain time in my life, and it\u2019s likely they always will.<\/p>\n

Games are more popular now than ever before, and every day, countless young people are playing the first game they fall in love with. Somewhere, a kid is playing Elden Ring for the first time, perhaps reshaping their understanding of what a role-playing game can be. Someone is playing their first round of Apex Legends or Call of Duty: Warzone or Warhammer 40k: Darktide with some friends and instantly realising that co-op games have a powerful, electric magic all their own.<\/p>\n

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In a recent game of Call of Duty: Warzone\u2019s new DMZ mode, my squad and I clambered aboard one of the last choppers out of Al Mazra as the city filled with radioactive gas. We had commandeered an armoured truck up at a heavily fortified compound on a nearby mountain after my brother managed to revive my friend and I after an intense firefight left us downed, and we had blasted down the hillside to the exfil site with our pockets full of hard drives and propane tanks. This is it, I thought to myself. This is how I want to play Call of Duty forever \u2013 instantly realising that this will be impossible.<\/p>\n

What concerns me is that many of the modern classic\u00a0old games won\u2019t be available indefinitely, or even for very long. In an ideal world, we\u2019d be working harder to preserve games so that they remain playable for future generations, but even if that were the case, today\u2019s online multiplayer games, like DMZ, are ephemeral by nature \u2013 even the most wildly popular among them are phenomena that will eventually fade out and disappear. We\u2019ll play them for a while, and gradually wander away until the publisher finally decides there isn\u2019t a large enough player base to justify the cost of keeping the servers on \u2013 Blizzard\u2019s Heroes of the Storm quietly fading away is a perfect example of this in action.<\/p>\n

Some multiplayer games have lived on through peer-to-peer matchmaking systems and private servers, but that won\u2019t work for everything. Even games that aren\u2019t primarily focused on multiplayer, notably the Dark Souls series, aren\u2019t complete without server connectivity. Should the Elden Ring or Dark Souls III servers go dark permanently, will we ever really be able to recapture the experience their designers intended? I think it\u2019s unlikely.<\/p>\n

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Even games we\u2019re playing now aren\u2019t the same as they were at launch. There\u2019s currently no way to play the Red War story campaign in Destiny 2, and the vaulting system that rolled out in 2020 means whole patrol zones and countless quests in them are simply not present in any version of Destiny 2 you can play right now. If Fortnite is still with us in 30 years, it won\u2019t be the same game it is now.<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s safe to say that my retirement years won\u2019t be filled up with any of today\u2019s live-service games. It seems inevitable that these will stay with us in the decades to come in one form or another, but all of them have baked-in lifespans. I\u2019ll have to play whatever\u2019s new and popular if I want to continue playing battle royale games in my dotage.<\/p>\n

For me, the lustre of keeping up with the latest technological advances is already fading quickly, and I strongly doubt that by the time I\u2019m 70 I\u2019ll care much about whether a new graphics card can render the individual basal cells covering the Doomguy\u2019s arthritic forearms.<\/p>\n

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Right now, the game that\u2019s easiest for me to imagine myself playing in a few decades is Dwarf Fortress, which has always felt like a hand-crafted heirloom that\u2019s come unstuck from time. Its obsessively detailed simulation produces results\u00a0that I find\u00a0endlessly surprising and delightful (even, or maybe especially, when they result in catastrophes), and I\u2019ve only become more enamoured of it in the 15 years it\u2019s been on my radar.<\/p>\n

At the same time, though, over the course of two years of pandemic, I\u2019ve found that online gaming has become an indispensable way to keep in touch with the people who are important to me. My solitary colony management sims and dusty old wargames can\u2019t provide the connection and shared joy I\u2019ve experienced in Al Mazra and Tertium, and when travelling becomes more difficult in my later years, I imagine I\u2019ll want to lean on co-op gaming to pick up the slack.<\/p>\n

As the AARP found in a study the organisation conducted in 2020, there\u2019s an increasing number of older gamers, and their (our?) share of the gaming market is only going to increase as my age cohort gets closer to retirement. All of us are somewhere on that path, and it\u2019s worth thinking about what we\u2019d like to still have with us when we get closer to its end.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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I can dimly remember a time before videogames were household fixtures, but only just. I was born in 1980, and the Nintendo Entertainment System showed up in the US about six years later \u2013 which is right around the time my dad brought home my family\u2019s first personal computer. So while I recall a time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":44591,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.pcgamesn.com\/wp-content\/sites\/pcgamesn\/2022\/12\/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-2-games-we-play-when-we-are-old.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[571],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pc"],"yoast_head":"\n