I supposed I used to consider myself a 'gamer'. I don't really like to use that word much any more because it's got a lot of baggage with it, but I don't know that I have a better word handy.

I used to play a lot of video games, but, more than that, I wanted to know everything I possibly could about them. I subscribed to two separate magazines¹ and read the video game reviews in things like Compute! and the Commodore Microcomputer magazine. I read books², I watched VHS tapes, I did the Mario, I had an XBAND modem. I even worked at a video game developer for about a year³.

There's more, but the point is that I was fully into video games. You can even take a look at this site. I'm not trying to hide it, I still have lots of games, I still buy lots of games, but that's about it, and even that is fading.

It's not that I don't like video games any more. I still do. I play some video game or other almost every day. I have 'game days' with friends where six hours feels like six minutes. And I can still spend an evening freeing Subcon from Wart without it feeling like the thousandth trip through Super Mario Bros. 2.

But my magazine subscriptions are gone (mostly because the magazines themselves are gone). And I almost never look at video game news websites any more for a litany of reasons⁴. I don't watch The Game Awards.

On one hand, I'm getting older. I don't like it, but I accept it. And video games are targeted to kids, so, since I'm not one of those right now, it kind of makes sense. Except that video games aren't always for kids. In the 80's arcade machines were fixtures in bars. The kinds that serve alcoholic drinks and kids aren't allowed into. The kind that still (kinda) exist today. Video games frequently had content not appropriate for children⁶.

On another hand, lots of video games try to be movies now. Hundred-hour long epics that tell convoluted stories that you need a story guide, an art guide, a lore guide, and whatever other supplementary materials to really understand (sold separately). I played Final Fantaxy XVI last year and I spent more time watching cutscenes than I did 'playing' the game. I finished it out of spite.

I don't mind a big story done well, but not every game has to be that. I still have the most fun with games that have the barest framework of a story and are just fun to do. I spent about 120 hours playing Balatro a couple of years ago, not because it was great, I thought it was mediocre at best, but because it was easy to pick up and play a few rounds and then stop. I didn't have to sit through any 20-minute cutscenes, I didn't have to decide whether to exit the dungeon and save or suspend my console and hope that an automatic update doesn't come along and wipe out my progress. It's like playing Solitaire or doing a crossword puzzle or whatever. An activity to take my mind off whatever is going on in my life for a few minutes without any deeper meaning than that.

I'll check out the end of year wrap-ups that consoles do now⁷, and they'll have some double-digit number of games spanning some three-digit number of hours total that I played that year, but almost none of the games will be in the Top {number} games for {platform} in {currentyear} lists that pop up every December. And those stats don't capture me spending a week with a portable 'game console' that's really just a cheap case wrapped around a bootleg multicart NES ROM or thumbing through an old guide to MUDs.

I do get it. I'm not the target market for most games now. But I also don't know who is.

Nintendo Power was an advertisement vehicle aimed at kids. EGM was the same thing, but aimed at slightly older kids. Those kids are adults now, and a lot of them have kids of their own. If video game news sites are advertisement vehicles for the video games industry, and video games are for children, then where are the news sites aimed at kids?

Who even is the target market for video games now? What is a 'gamer' anyway?

It's apparantly not me.

I don't really know when it happened, but I slowly started getting more and more disconnected from 'mainstream' video game media, whatever that is. I barely check any news sites because they're full of content that isn't related to video games at all. Giant blockbuster games are almost never the kinds of games I want to play. Digital storefronts try very hard to get me to either buy the current $80 darling or load up on $0.99 dreck. The games I do buy try to sell me add-ons to not play the game I just bought.

Despite that, I'm still having fun. I still drape myself in nostalgia from time to time, but I also sometimes exist in the present. I gave up trying to know everything about every game because there's just too many. I gave up trying to keep up on game industry news since most of it is column-filler anyway⁸. I gave up buying most blockbuster games on release day, or sometimes never getting or playing them at all. I don't engage in 'console wars'.

I play games that look interesting, even though none of my friends play them. I play low-stakes games with friends because it's the hanging out that's important. I write silly blog entries and do silly projects and do silly audioblogs to engage with my hobby.

Because video games are a hobby, they're not an identity. They're not my identity. Whatever the video game industry has decided a 'gamer' is, I'm not it, and I've made peace with that. Because the labels aren't important. Having fun is important.

And I'm having fun.

This article was posted on 30 Mar 2026 and I haven't looked at it since.