Common belief goes that Nintendo’s brain training, fat busting, mama cooking shift in focus is to blame for the army of octogenarians keeping Wii Fit and Just Dance topping the charts. The real culprit, however, may well be age itself. Why, for instance, might the more senior folks in the world wish to immerse themselves in one of the most accurately realised three-dimensional worlds mankind has ever created, when the opportunity to engage in some light wordplay is on offer? If that question doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, it’s probably because you’ve not got a pathological fear of buttons. It seems the gaming tastes of the older generations in our midst simply cannot be altered, regardless of how much time is spent evangelising on various facets of digital entertainment.

It’s also curious to note that elder relatives’ tastes seem to mellow, according to their age. Where once parents and guardians might have been willing to sit through many a primary coloured platformer, literally convulsing at the sheer gaudiness of it all, today they’re fit only for reclining in a chaise longue, watching a virtual ball bearing drop from one end of a screen to the other. Is this really what we thought the future of gaming would be in 1995? Because, of course, our current lives should always be judged against our expectations of them a decade and a half ago.

If this blog entry seems like a vague, barely directed rant we can only apologise, and offer the excuse that it’s difficult to spend holiday evenings in, rearranging three Qs and two Os into words that end up never to have existed. We also think that the gravitation of generations for whom home videogaming once didn’t exist towards licensed mid-afternoon tat is worthy of investigation, especially as criticism to the contrary is widely available. Maybe there’s some sort of genetic memory thing going on, as older Renaissance folk might revert to Chaucer or old folk in the Victorian age reading Marlowe. Hey, that might even be the plot of Assassin’s Creed III. There’s a reason why we don’t script videogames, you know…
Dave Shaw