How old is too old?

I'm 30-something.  It says so there, at the top of the page.  30-something.  39 to be precise - it was my birthday last week (quite possibly the last that I will publicly own up to). 

So, aren't I a little too old to be playing games? To paraphrase top Disney Channel TV show Phineas & Ferb, 'no - no I'm not'.

I've always scoffed at this question and stated that gaming is not something bound by age.  I've often quoted statistics about the average age of gamers being higher than the uninformed observer (i.e. non-gamer) would expect (though now I think that I am pulling that average upwards).  When I've felt pompous, I've said  'you don't stop playing games because you get old, you get old because you stop playing games'.

However, last year this belief was shaken when my brother came to stay at my house for a weekend, for his 50th birthday.  Twelve-thirteen years ago - i.e. when he was about the age I am now - I lived with my brother for a couple of years, when I first started working in London and didn't earn enough to afford a place of my own.  At that time, he was an avid gamer - PC FPSs mainly but he also had a PlayStation and played the big games of the time (Resident Evil, Tomb Raider and the like).

I had planned, on his 50th weekend, to get some co-op gaming in with him but he said hadn't really played games  since his mid-forties.  We started playing Left 4 Dead on split-screen co-op - an FPS, so nothing he would have been unfamiliar with, gameplay-wise -   and he was hopeless, barely able to aim. Or walk in a straight line. Or pathfind at all, actually. Dying though, he was an expert at.  We gave it up as a bad lot before even reaching the first safe house.

That led me to think that if he could turn from being a keen gamer to being completely out of the gaming loop, could that happen to me?  I'd like to think not, that gaming has been a large part of my life for nearly thirty years (with a brief gap in the late eighties/early nineties, when I was priced out of the market by the Amiga and the ST) and that I wouldn't just stop.  Apart from anything else, I'd need to find something else to spend my money on.

But this isn't something that anyone can be sure of. I'm certainly enjoying my gaming now as much as I ever have - as I've said before, I think we are now in what will be looked back at in years to come as a golden age for gaming.  I'd like to think that I will  keep plugging on with gaming, as long as it is enjoyable to me (something that I hope will continue for many years to come).  If game developers maintain the level of quality and innovation as they have in recent years, my worries should be foundless.  Hopefully.  But what of my blog and, more pertinently, its title?

When I used to read the 2000AD comic in the eighties and nineties, the subject of what would the comic be called when the millenium passed was raised sporadically in the letters page.  When the year 2000 came, the publishers kept the name - at the end of the day, you don't shoot your brand.  2000AD launched in 1977, when the year 2000 was a long way off (certainly longer than the expected life-span of a sci-fi comic).  I started this blog when I only had 18 months left of being a 30-something anything, let alone gamer.  Maybe that was because, subconsciously (or pretentiously - you choose), I was fearing not being a 30-something any more and wanted to plant my flag in that decade, rather than move on into my forties (though I haven't completely ruled out being hunted down in a Logan's Run -esque fashion - the Tories are back in now, after all).  Or maybe I just didn't think that far ahead - I'm not one for forethought (just ask my wife).

I think, when I'm forty, I'll just go the way of 2000AD and keep with the same name  - just don't tell your local trading standards officer.  Maybe I'll stick a disclaimer banner at the top of the site...