Games Can Still Be Magical in Adulthood

I see it all the time on social media; people are upset that games don’t seem to hit them the same way they did as kids. They claim games just aren’t made the same or even worse, that games are just for kids.

While I’m sure, like with any hobby, it can become tedious or simply not fun for some, I think for the large population who grew up playing games, the answer is more complicated.

This is, of course, just my two cents on the conversation. However, I feel, ignoring serious life events that might make any type of entertainment difficult to consume (eg, sickness, poverty, work, etc.), that games can be just as magical in adulthood if you’re willing to keep an open mind and evolve with the medium.

Your Relationship with Games

For most of high school and half of college, I swore off video games. Instead, I focused all my extra time on friends, reading, and typical school stuff and this partly started because I was having similar feelings at the time. Games weren’t “hitting the same,” but that wasn’t really it. I was changing as a person. Let me share my relationship with books as an example—a hobby that is perceived as more mature and healthy.

I read all the time as a child. From the bus ride to school and until I was back at my house, I was always looking for opportunities to read instead of doing what my teacher wanted me to do. I loved Harry Potter, Geronimo Stilton, and Goosebumps to name just a few, but when I hit Middle School, I stopped completely. Books had lost their allure. They didn’t hit the same. And I believe there are two reasons for this.

The first is the obvious one: I wasn’t finding the books that clicked with me for my reading level at the time. I didn’t even finish the books assigned to me by my teachers (if you know me that will come as a surprise). It wouldn’t be until my senior year of high school that I picked up another book and read it through to completion and it was thanks to new people showing me what else there was in the book world.

They showed me new and complicated books that challenged me and exposed me to more mature themes, and it snowballed. I was reading from dusk till dawn as if I was making up for lost time. The Great Gatsby, Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, 1984, Catch-22, The Book Thief, The Illustrated Man, All Quiet on the Western Front, Lord of the Rings—I was eating it all up.

I went from never picking up a book to spending my evenings reading until my eyes hurt, and it was partially due to people showing me that books had more to offer than a mouse pretending to be Indiana Jones.

Secondly, and the much more important part that I learned during this time, I learned how to develop new relationships with books—or, in other words, how I approached the material—and this was groundbreaking for me.

For instance, what was I getting out of each book? Well, it was different depending on the book. Sometimes I wanted simple entertainment, sometimes I wanted to think, sometimes I wanted to be inspired, and I could find something to meet each of these desires. I made lists to match these moods and ideas I wanted to explore and when I had a particular vibe, I went to the library and used my list to find something to hit the spot.

I was going about my handling of books entirely differently, and it showed me how magical books could still be in adulthood. I was no longer trying to pigeon-hold books as I tried to make them match some fleeting idea or feeling from the past. I wasn’t trying to read fiction with feel-good stories or teenage drama, I was reading books that made me look at the world differently in all of its components. I was seeing books for what they were: A way to experience life through another’s eyes. A very similar thing happened with games.

Games Can Be Just as Profound

I think part of people’s problem with enjoying games in their later years is that they want to recapture a feeling that never really existed. They are remembering a feeling and that feeling is twisted from years of nostalgia. When they were kids, every game was new and magical.

People don’t yet have a set idea of what games should be but over time pick and choose the games that hit hard when they were younger as the “gold standard.” In a sense, they train themselves to limit their view of games and how to enjoy them.

What people should really be doing is trying a bunch of new things with an open mind. In 2016, I was dating someone who got me swept up in the Nintendo Switch craze and that would ultimately introduce me to four games that would reshape my ideas going forward.

Those games were Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, Stardew Valley, and Hollow Knight. Breath of the Wild showed me I could still get lost in 3D worlds and have fun just watching birds fly through the sky. I searched every corner of Hyrule and enjoyed every second. Mario Odyssey proved to me that collectathons could still be enjoyable when creativity and whimsy were front and center.

Stardew Valley opened up an entirely new genre for me and gave me a new comfort game between my classes. While, Hollow Knight showed me that worlds that challenged me, ones that forced me to adapt and learn, were the games that captured every ounce of the magic games once held. Altogether, these titles proved to me that I just needed to be okay with trying new games and be willing to change my playstyle based on the needs of the game. Not simply hoping Halo, GTA, or Call of Duty suddenly become fun again.

I have hundreds of hours in these games, they are all fairly different from one another, and I lost myself in different ways to each one.

And it’s not like I didn’t try out new games and genres before I fell off. Xbox Arcade was becoming popular at the time, so titles like Super Meat Boy, Castle Crashers, and Geometry Wars were releasing.

I usually tried obscure full-length games when I could afford it such as Fracture or Dark Void, but these games just didn’t have the spark for me—at least that’s what I felt at the time. It was in the approach, it was in my mindset, and ultimately it was how willing I was to meet the developer halfway.

The games I played in 2017 opened my eyes to dozens of other titles that I would have never given a chance before, and honestly, it’s a good thing I didn’t because I might not have been receptive to them before. A great example of this is Dark Souls.

Dark Souls (and Souls-likes in general) has become my favorite games nowadays, but if I had tried them out when Demon Souls came out, I might never have returned to the series. Today, I’ve replayed many of the FromSoft games more than a dozen times.

I say all of this because I believe that games can still be magical in adulthood, but many people try to approach games in a similar way they did as kids. I think that kills the enjoyment. You need to evolve and approach any medium differently as you age. That’s how you get the most out of it. I don’t try to read War and Peace like I would as a kid reading Harry Potter, and I don’t go into Resident Evil like I would playing Call of Duty back in Middle School.

I guess that’s part of the reason that I started this blog. It’s a way to explore games in a new way for myself while hopefully giving other people a different perspective. It also encourages me to continue trying new games that might be outside of my comfort zone.

I want to keep watching this medium grow. It has so much potential for storytelling, immersion, and of course, entertainment and I want to celebrate the games that go beyond the toxic industry trends today that kids are growing up with (microtransactions, live service, battle passes).

It’s fine if you aren’t interested in games anymore, but don’t say that games don’t hit the same or that all games are trash because there are so many wonderful titles being released from studios big and small and in ALL genres. You can’t live in the past; you have to experience games how they are today with an open mind and digest them in ways that are meaningful to you. I believe that’s all it takes to recapture the magic—just like a good book.