Countdown 2016, 19: Coming of Age

Welcome to the Electron Dance Advent calendar. Each day will bring another post from the archives.

Have you read The Retired Gambler that was posted on 03 May 2011?

I hadn’t read this one in years, even though it still turns up in the Electron Dance Highlights. It takes the creeping suspicion that I am getting too old for games and makes me wonder if that is actually hiding a different problem… well, not a problem at all. I’ve been planning a return to the subject of players getting old for a few months and perhaps you’ll see an article in this vein next year.

But most striking is the very final line of The Retired Gambler. I don’t think I could write a final line like that today; it just feels too unnatural, unearned by the words that went before, a whiplash-level of subject change! I wonder what you will think of it.

Go read it!

From the comments:

• Badger Commander: “It is my belief that pretty much everything we do in life is some way a game”
• BeamSplashX who is no longer 22: “Although I’m 22, reading opinions like yours have made me more aware of when games are wasting my time”
• Jordan: “Is a game most identified by a measurable outcome set by its parameters, or simply by the act of playing?”
• Josh W: “games like VVVVVV fill a place in my emotional landscape; the semi-meditation space they share with tetris”