Parental Switch: Does video gaming have an age limit?

I lent my parents my Nintendo Switch for a fortnight, which was easier than I expected in the wake of the latest Zelda game. I left them with most of my eShop downloads, my physical copy of Breath of the Wild in the card slot, and my Pro Controller.

What I learned surprised me.

Impetus

One of the questions I have asked myself with some frequency over the past few years, as I have gotten closer to attaining that mythical status of “old,” is how outsider-hostile the hobby of video gaming can be. To put it more pithily, the question I find myself asking is essentially thus:

How steep is the learning curve of video gaming for someone completely new to the hobby – or for someone who hasn’t gamed since the Clinton years?

Context

Neither of my parents is completely new to gaming. Indeed, my mom introduced me to the hobby when I was a child, sparking a lifelong ~~love~~ ~~obsession~~ interest in games and gaming both as a form of entertainment and as a mode of expression. That interest has led me to write about gaming, attempt (poorly) to make my own games, and spend thousands of dollars (and thousands of hours!) on the hobby. I’ve played hundreds of games, accumulated a backlog of roughly 200 more, and I’ve amassed a collection of several hundred games, nearly two dozen consoles, three gaming PCs, and dozens of accessories and related peripherals. To put it plainly, video gaming has been my primary form of entertainment for most of my life, from the Sega Genesis through the RTX era of PC gaming. The release dates of games I want are personal holidays, I spend most of my leisure time gaming, and the rest of my A/V system is built in service of my devotion to video gaming. Insofar as a system designed by humans can, video games and computers come naturally to me. Demographers call people like me “digital natives,” for we grew up under the pervasive influence of computer and Internet technology. (For a bit of perspective, it’s worth noting that my generation was the one that made it more or less fashionable to be a nerd.)

My mom was born in the early 1970s and is, hence, a member of Generation X. Like many Gen X’ers, my mom got into video gaming when the hobby hit its mainstream in the United States, purchasing an NES console during its heyday in the mid-1980s. She played many of the great hits for the system, developing a particular fondness for the Super Mario franchise. Later, she picked up a Sega Genesis and became taken with Sonic the Hedgehog. She stopped console gaming when platform games became primarily a 3D genre, citing her personal difficulty of perceiving the perspective in 3D games, though she has messed around with a DSi XL and some retro-styled games, and she has remained faithful to casual games for the PC and Android.

My dad, born around the same time, was a keen arcade gamer with his friends, playing many of the legends of the golden age of arcade gaming. He had a particular fondness for Galaga and Donkey Kong, and when arcade games fell off in popularity, his interest in gaming waned (aside from dabbling in PC gaming after divorcing from my mom – my dad is an avid Trekkie and tried many of the Star Trek-themed point & click adventure games for Windows 3.1). He has never been a big console gamer and, like my mom, he primarily plays casual games on his Android phone.

That’s where I enter the picture. I cut my gaming teeth on Mario and Sonic, picking up a fondness for Pokémon when that franchise was at the peak of its initial popularity in the US, and later in life I got into pretty much every major franchise. I played through a rough fan translation of Final Fantasy V in ZSNES on my old Windows 98 PC, beat the first episode of Duke Nukem 3D, played through many hours of SimCity 3000, The Sims, and Age of Empires II: The Conquerors, and kept my console gaming alive with a Sega Dreamcast, a first-generation Xbox, and a Game Boy Advance. High school and, later, college intervened and kept me away from most gaming until the early 2010s, though I did build a gaming PC in 2009 – and that gaming PC divided its time between Windows Vista (Steam) and Fedora Linux (software development).

In the years since college, I’ve stayed true to my interests in PC gaming – the PC being my main platform since the late 2000s – and I’ve stayed kinda up-to-date with console gaming, only really getting back into serious console gaming with the rise of the pandemic in 2020. That reached its apex last year when I took ownership of an Xbox One and earlier this year when I got a Nintendo Switch, finally bringing me into the current decade with two currently supported consoles¹. Needless to say, I’ve stayed up-to-date with video gaming. As of right now, in my personal rotation are these systems:

Wii U (not quite like anything else, also plays Wii games and Twilight Princess HD)
PlayStation 3 (many cheap, abundant games that I missed during the 7th generation)
Switch (my No. 1 Legend of Zelda delivery device)
Xbox One (Game Pass is awesome)
PSP (best Tetris port ever)
3DS (playing Picross until my eyeballs fall out)
Windows 11 PC (bringing me BeamNG.drive and Doom since 2020)
MacBook Pro (Virtual Pool 4 and The Sims 2 courtesy of the Mac App Store and Borderlands 2 courtesy of Steam)

My parents haven’t stayed anywhere near up-to-date.

Case study: Generation X gamers and the Nintendo Switch

I agreed to let my parents borrow my Nintendo Switch for an initially unspecified amount of time. I was hoping to see how well they acclimated themselves to a modern gaming platform as well as to see how well they could learn to play some modern video games. My favourite Switch titles thus far in my ownership of the console have been The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (no, Zelda nerds, Tears of the Kingdom hasn’t knocked my socks off just yet), Super Mario Odyssey, Shining Resonance: Refrain², and Burnout Paradise Remastered.

My mom quite eagerly took to Odyssey, and after acclimatising herself to the 3D visuals, she moved around confidently in Mario’s world, eventually learning most of the tricks that I know. She remarked early on about the complexity of the Pro Controller and seemed to struggle with the four shoulder buttons. Aside from the sheer number of inputs, she seemed to enjoy her time with the Pro Controller, in particular its motion controls and HD Rumble. Mom was undaunted by the learning curve of Odyssey and aside from having me intervene to defeat a few bosses that she found too difficult (and completing the entirety of Bowser’s Kingdom for the same reason), she had a fantastic time and collected more than 300 of the game’s 830 Power Moons. She also had a brief go at Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker and Sonic Mania, but most of her time with my Switch was spent on Odyssey. Many of the nods to past Mario games were lost on her (there are references in Odyssey to every single mainline Mario game preceding it), but she appreciated the game for the tremendous achievement that it is.

My dad was curious about the Zelda games. He loves anything fantasy-related (I have him to thank for the Lord of the Rings trilogy sitting in my Blu-Ray backlog), and I figured that if he could master the controls of the Zelda games, he would appreciate their plot and narrative structure. Like Mom, he rather enjoyed his time with Odyssey. However, his difficulties with playing Breath actually inspired this post and made me wonder how much difficulty is too much.

Learning curves: how steep is too steep?

Breath of the Wild is a tremendously well-made open-world adventure game, commensurate in scope with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim but considerably better realised than Skyrim ever thought of being. It’s also a rather difficult game to get your head around if you have never played an open-world adventure game before. For me as a gamer in his mid-thirties, it’s hard for me to envision someone never having played an open-world game before – but for my dad, in his fifties, that’s much easier to envision seeing as he is one of those people.

After a few hours of Tears of the Kingdom, I unflinchingly recommended that he start with Breath of the Wild – a game that I have played for more than 160 hours and thus have a high degree of knowledge of. And even with the game’s interactive tutorial (the opening missions on the Great Plateau serve as such a tutorial that’s about two hours long for an experienced gamer new to Breath), I had to explain almost every mechanic to him – how Link moves, how he fights, how the cooking mechanic works, how the mission markers work, how the mission log works, how the map works, all of it. He struggled for more than 20 minutes on one of the easiest shrines in Hyrule Kingdom, though that was down to his lack of familiarity with the way the Sheikah Slate runes³ work, and it was good practice for him in learning how the Magnesis rune worked.

Dad seemed to prefer running away from combat rather than actively engaging in it, though I’m sure that with more time to develop his familiarity with Breath‘s combat engine he would be much more comfortable with it. The paucity of arrows starting out made it hard for him to practice his archery skills, though the archery in the game is a skill that you develop over multiple hours of playing (well, at least it was for me!). Likewise, the relative lack of powerful weaponry makes combat unnecessarily hard (as does Link’s early lack of hearts), so I recommended that Dad take his time learning the way the game works and spend some time completing shrines to collect spirit orbs. That was how I approached my own playthrough of Breath, though the learning curve was a bit flatter for me since I’ve spent several hundred hours with similar games (including other Zelda titles). For a rank newcomer like my dad, the curve is steeper but far from insurmountable. I have to imagine that for a motivated child (i.e., someone with fewer obligations but a similar amount of experience at gaming), the learning curve would be more or less the same.

Dad has arthritis in his hands, which necessarily limited his play time. However, even in view of this, he found the Pro Controller eminently comfortable during his play sessions – although, as Mom did, he struggled with the sheer amount of buttons on it.

Conclusions

Video gaming doesn’t really have an age limit. In fact, emerging science suggests that it’s good for the brain in older adults, particularly in 3D environments like those found in Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. These games, and games like them, require spatial reasoning, quick switching of tasks, use of short-term memory, and development of hand-eye coordination. And while I wouldn’t hand my Xbox controller and a copy of Dark Souls or Elden Ring to someone who hasn’t played a video game since Donkey Kong was a new release, I think games that have universal appeal – from Nintendo, Sega, Microsoft, Sony, and other developers – can bridge generation gaps, improve cognition, and overall serve as a positive force in a person’s life. These two titles, by themselves, have given me common ground with my parents in a hobby that I’ve held dear for my entire life. To be sure, I have my own systems (Xbox, PlayStation, PC) and my own tastes (FPSes, racing games, RPGs), but the appeal of Nintendo games is practically universal – and this little experiment has proven that to me.

Needless to say, I’m not counting on getting my Switch back anytime soon. 😹