Originally Posted by RSColonel_131st
Originally Posted by JohnnyChemo
As a person in their 50's who has been accused of being an adult at one time or another, I can say I prefer to play a game rather than watch TV most of the time. I find the games are far more engrossing, and I have to be an active participant, mentally engaged. Whereas something like watching a TV show or movie is a far more passive act.

I've considered this at times because I have sometimes questioned whether a grown man should be sitting in front of a computer playing games, but then I go back to the TV example. Nobody would look down on you think you weren't "acting your age" if you sat in front of the TV for a few hours in the evening to unwind, so why would there be a stigma to playing a game - which, as I mentioned, is far more mentally challenging and engaging than staring at a TV.


Totally also my way of seeing this. I've never felt a need to justify myself to anyone giving me a weird eye over my gaming habits, but if they were merely asking out of real curiosity, the nearest comparison I draw today is with the big-budget TV shows. Somehow there it's the totally grown up thing to spend 80+ hours passivley watching fictious people do fictious things, but if we do the fictious things ourselves, it somehow makes us childish.

Truth be told, I don't think it's a big deal anymore. Lots of girls playing these days, too.


Yes, it's definitely changed over the last few years. The stigma, if that's what it was, is lifting.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck.”
-Robert Heinlein