Vice suggests Millennial video game enthusiasts suck it up and admit they are old

Same, same. (Was also always more of a tabletop sort of filthed casual.)

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The average Millennial is 26

The average Gen Z kid is 7

It’s flawed premises all the way down

Yes

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My gaming skills began going down hill when they opened Video Arcades in Boston.

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Particularly the traditional ones that you played alone against the machine. No, I don’r want to chat with people or spend my time networking to join “guilds” or what not while I’m trying to relax playing a game.

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Shhh! You’re not supposed to mention “Gen X”. All the stories are about Millennials vs Boomers, so we Gen-Xers can go about our lives undisturbed.

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100% this.

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I think you won’t be disappointed. The companion dialogue is amazing.

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I was one of those people who grew up playing X-Wing/Tie Fighter too. I know people who are older than me who don’t uinderstand inverted y-axis because all they have played are FPSes.

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My GF and I have been playing through the Kingdom Hearts games in prep for KH3 (I know, but better late than never), and we both are struggling through games and bosses that we easily beat years ago. Either we’re just older and slower, or we’re used to games with better control schemes. Or both, I guess. Sigh.

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I have adopted Ludere Causa Ludendi, roughly translated as to play for the sake of playing, as my gaming motto for this reason.

I will admit that I shamelessly stole it from Queens Park FC, a Scottish amateur association football team who play in the Scottish professional leagues.

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A while ago I was handed a controller for a Sega or Xbox something or other, it had like a gazillion buttons all over it, 3 joy sticks and more knobs that I could twiddle.

Handed it back to my friend and said “fuck that noise”.

I may have then yelled at kids to get off my lawn, I don’t remember (age issue)…

If you can’t play the game with an Atari 2600 joystick then I don’t wanna know, go away.

I do think that any game that needs more than 4 buttons plus the joystick/directional-pad is going to be too complicated for me to enjoy. Keeping the learning curve reasonable means keeping the controls minimal.

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I’d settle for them growing up at all, honestly.

I also grew up playing X-Wing, and I can’t stand inverted y-axis for anything that isn’t a flight sim.

That said, I probably spent an entire hour fiddling with the various camera invert settings in Breath of the Wild before settling on the least-confusing-to-control option, and I honestly couldn’t tell you if either axis actually ended up inverted off the top of my head. I have never been great with dual-stick (the last console shooter I could easily control was GoldenEye 64, come at me). Give me a keyboard and mouse any day of the week.

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Back when I used to play WoW I had 67 key bindings (in addition to movement keys and mouse). Those were the days.

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Partial default keyboard for Mechwarrior Online:

It takes a bit of getting used to.

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Third-person camera controls are especially strange because in order to “look up”, the camera actually moves down in game-space. For me this just reinforces my existing preference for inverted-Y-axis. But I never know what to do with the X axis in third-person games (to look left, the camera moves to the right).

I also get confused by rudder pedals. I’ve never used a pedal controller for a flight sim, but once I tried to steer a kayak with a pedal-controlled rudder, and my instinct was to push the left pedal forward to turn right, but it was wired up the other way round. I did some research and learned that planes do that, too: left-foot-forward causes the plane to yaw left. That seems completely backwards to me!

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I don’t recommend competitive, multiplayer games anyway unless you’re playing them with a trusted group of friends, but is it really surprising that people with actual jobs and responsibilities are worse at those video games than kids who can devote most or all of their free time to playing them? Being good at video games doesn’t require a lot of physical vigor, but it does require practice.

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I grew up playing Descent on the PC. I guess the controls are more like a flight sim, but here you basically travel in 360 degrees of movement. If you are prone to motion sickness I don’t recommend watching. I can’t find any open area combat where you could spiral strafe into something that resembled a torus… Later on with Descent 3 I bought a dual stick gamepad which things much easier movement wise.

I think there are some differences between games now and then. A game like Wipeout XL takes insane levels of hand eye coordination, but so do any of your sequencing games like Guitar Hero. Different format, but similar skills.

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51 year old GenXer here and I just got #1 on the charts on Synth Riders on Oculus Quest tonight.

(Yeah the game dropped today but I’ve been getting #1 spots on the desktop version as well)

…ok … smaller pool of players but I’ll take it.

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