Today Show hosts think gamers over 30 are "weird"

I think there is good reason to be skeptical of hardcore gamers who are above a certain age. These games all use the same basic tricks to trigger to pleasure mechanisms of the brain. As such, anyone who is sufficiently intelligent should be able to figure out that they're all basically the same, and thus to be avoided after a certain point if one wants to keep growing as a person.<p>Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy playing genuinely novel games when they come out like Katamari Damacy or Braid, but that's still not more than a few hours a year. And I appreciate that gaming can have other ancillary social or parenting benefits.<p>But at it's root most serious games today are designed to exploit the mechanisms of addiction. I don't think this is entirely a bad thing, it may even be beneficial to a limited extent. But if you eventually want to make your own art and contribute to the world in a meaningful way then this requires becoming fully self-actualized. And this is very difficult when you start spending several hours per day deriving pleasure from the baser parts of the brain.<p>That being said I'm not a neuroscientist, but this is sort of the vague feeling I get after reading some of the basic literature on both addiction and extrinsic motivation.

I am a gamer, and I will be a gamer in a couple years when I'm over 30. But one mistake that I've seen a lot of gamers make when getting riled up over this issue of perception, including the author of the linked article, is making a faulty jump in logic -- from "The average gamer is over 30 years old [according to a variety of sources]" to "People over 30 years old are more likely to be gamers than not". I have yet to see a credible source come out and directly say this. Take a look at the ESA stats in the article comments from Lea Hill -- they're given in a way that tries to imply it.<p>In this regard and many others, the rhetoric around social acceptance, identity (including age, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, political belief, and ethnicity or nationality), and maturity is really twisted. Most people are defending opinions instead of examining realities... I've been a lot happier since I stopped following the discussion in any serious way.

The headline refers to celebrities on the <i>Today</i> show, not "people".<p>It is sometimes hard to wrap one's head around the fact that generational change happens at the speed of... <i>generations</i>. One year per year, on average. Tune in ten years from now, when the average age of gamers may well be 47, yet gamers over 40 will be considered "weird" by people significantly older than 40.

I think many people in the Today show's late morning audience, were they to be mapped to the technology adoption curve, would be classified as late mainstream or even "laggards". Calling adult gamers "weird" plays into preconceived or outdated notions of gaming that many of them have.

I for one think this kind of mindset is ridiculous, only led by stereotypes of gamers and a general ignorance towards the video gaming community.<p>First of all, the question being posed is sexist, it only asks about "men over 30", which tells me there must be a stereotype about "girls not being able to game" or something ridiculous.<p>Their laughs disgust me, and I'm a bit scared at how many people their opinions influence per day.

For what it's worth, I think people who watch the Today Show are weird, independent of age.

I bet they judge men who watch television more favorably.

“Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.” -John Lennon

I believe the inflection point when video games became mainstream was the release of the original Playstation in 1995. Prior to that point, at least in my experience, video games were strictly a pass-time for nerds. The Playstation was very successful at marketing video games to a wider, if not older audience.<p>People who were in their early teens when they got their Playstation are just now reaching their thirties. Anyone older than that is likely to have acquired a contempt for video games before they became mainstream, and hasn't seen fit to update their opinions in the intervening decades.

Who cares?