When Did You Realise That You Were An Adult Gamer?

As adult gamers, we often look back fondly upon our memories of gaming as kids.  We’ve written about our first favourite games, written about games that gave us fond memories in our youth (a special shout-out to Pokemon Blue – and Red, I suppose…), and regularly return to games from yesteryear to see how they play today.

We are adult gamers.  GrownGaming is a collective of adults who love to game and want to share our love of gaming through writing.  That is the whole purpose of our website.

But, when did we know that we were adult gamers?

For me, I thought the realisation that I was no longer a young gamer would come when I had children.  I now have two children and vividly remember sitting on the couch with my first child sleeping on my lap, playing Fallout 4 while my wife slept.  But, that wasn’t the moment that I realised “damn, John, you done got old”.

The moment I realised that I was an adult gamer was when I started using the time to complete games as a metric as to whether I’d ever play them.

I was around 25 years old, so, not so young.  I’d just bought my first ever gaming PC and had fallen victim to a few Steam Sales (anything reduced from £50 to £10 finds its way onto my radar).  Before adding a ridiculous number of games to my pile of shame, I used to buy a game and play it, rarely having more than 2 or 3 unplayed games in my backlog.  I was now staring at an abyss of games with no way to quantify quite how long it would take me to play them all.

A list of Steam video games.

I found myself Googling how long it would take to complete them and hiding the games that would take over 40 hours.  That’s the equivalent of throwing away physical discs.  Those hidden games have never been unhidden, instead sitting in a 150+ collection of titles never to be played.

I no longer cared whether a game was a 10/10 experience, but instead whether it would give me a decent experience preferably within a 10-hour timeframe.  Anything over 10 hours found its way onto the “One Day (Probably Never)” list, with few titles ever escaping.

It had dawned on me that I was no longer a kid or a teenager.  I couldn’t complete a 70-hour RPG over the course of a week while playing FIFA on the side, nor could I complete a 15-hour title on release day.  I had to be more realistic with my time, taking into account my responsibilities and commitments.  And that was before I was married with kids.

When did YOU realise that you were an adult gamer?