"Time to play" is a big factor, certainly. I've been playing Bayonetta lately, a Devil May Cry-style fighter, and while I'm pretty sure I have the raw skills to master the game, I sure don't have the <i>time</i>. (Or, if I had the time, the desire. But I certainly don't have the time.) I'm not lost in the action on the screen or incapable of understanding what I should do or what's going on, I simply don't have the time to put that stuff in my cerebellum where it needs to be to play at the highest level. For example, in the "Hard" mode, there are sounds that when you hear them need to immediately trigger a particular button press (dodge), ideally with a high degree of accuracy as well. I can do it when I concentrate, but you need to be able to do it without concentrating because there's other stuff to concentrate on, too.<p>But I also observe that these are also exactly the games you hear about the younger folk being so dominating in, that is, the games you need to have the time to download reflexes into the lower brain.<p>Oh, I don't deny that you get worse as you get older, nice and slow so as you can pretend it's not happening, and in a hypothetical fair fight my 15-year-old self could presumably beat my 30-year-old self in reaction-based gaming. But I don't think that explains the utter domination, I think that explains only a small part of the difference. The utter domination comes from having the time to train reflexes.<p>Also, interesting counterpoint: <a href="http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1399" rel="nofollow">http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1399</a> , the part in the first blockquote.<p>The other thing I would observe is that the controllers I grew up on were <i>terrible</i>. Everything pre-Nintendo was mushy and introduced what I now consider readily-visible latency into the game control. In hindsight, the Genesis controls were pretty mushy too, and even the Nintendo I call out was noticably more mushy than the Super Nintendo controller, the oldest controller I can still use today without cursing at the latency. This robbed my generation of valuable years of high-feedback gaming. I've played some of these old games in emulation in the past few years, and they are distinctly easier than I remember them, and I think that's mostly because when I play them in emulation I'm using modern controllers. (In particular, I played Beamrider on the Atari 2600 with original controllers and on the GBA through the Atari collection cartridge, and on my first try on the GBA I got further in the game than I could back when I was 12 or so on the original controllers. (If you think that doesn't jive with my age, you're right; it was old even by then, but the device was still functional. Those 2600s were pretty robust.))