Multiple times I was disconnected in the middle of a Starcraft match over our 56k modem… because my dad was getting a goddamned fax sent to him over the same line.
These are all fancy pants, high res … XP, i think?.. icons compared to Win 95 and 98.
Now excuse me while I teleport back in time and jack back in to the Matrix Online beta via an actual telephone line… we didn’t even get DSL untill a year or two after it fully released.
Going fully angry old man mode:
You whippersnappers have absolutely no clue what pain is.
Pain is playing Battlefield 1942 on a 56k modem with literally zero servers you can connect to being under 150 ping, the vast majority of them being 200, 300+.
Those packets had to march across shitty rural phone lines uphill, both ways! And a storm would throw a tree onto them every 3 weeks!
Pain is your shitty eMachine being so underpowered that the only way you can actually play through HL2 is all settings at minimum, and then also when Alyx is getting teleported out of Kleiner’s lab, you have to look at the ground, because the 8 or so particles with bloom that spin around her, + the flashing color negative post processing effect… is too fucking difficult for your moldy, sprouting potato of a pc to run without CTDing or even segfaulting.
About half a decade younger than that, just picked up pc gaming as a hobby at a young age.
But yes, I know that there are many significantly older gamer folks / tech dorks here on lemmy… but there are also now a lot of Gen Z folks, and even some Gen A… who just actually did not ever experience the ‘pre-internet’ era at all.
It gets difficult for me to manage my age perception whiplash at times.
I apparently look young enough that people irl, only 10 years older than me (or less) still refer to me as ‘a bright young man with my whole future ahead of me’, as if I’m in my early 20s… while people 10 years younger than me refer to me as an ancient elder gamer online, and irl, once I tell them my actual age, oh now I’m an uncle, I’m an old man.
You know how the common aphorism for dog years is that 1 dog year is 7 human years?
BF 1942 came out in 2002.
60 year difference.
…
I hereby propose a ‘Gamer Age’ formula:
(Real Age - Youngest Age you first put over 50 hours into a single game) * 6
…
So if you are now 40, and you mainlined Starcraft when it came out in 1998, your gamer age is 78… pretty old, seen a lot of shit in your time.
If you are 20, and broke 50 hours into Fortnite at age 14 (when Fortnite first released), your gamer age is 36… middle aged, been around the block a few times.
If you are 16, and broke 50 hours in Fortnite when you were 14… your gamer age is 12 (lol), you are still a little nooblet in terms of gaming experience.
If you are 60, and put 50 hours into a Pacman cabinet when it came out in 1980… gamer age is 240, true elder, arcane wizard status.
If you are Lord British (Richard Garriot), and you use the release date of the first game he developed (Akalabeth) as the 50hr game…
He works out to a minimum of 276, which is almost certainly a low estimate… by my reckoning, he could potentially be as old as 330…
…few know such things precisely, such is the nature of a truly ancient one, hahaha.
…
If I run this for myself… first game I put more than 50 hours into would have been… Sonic 3 / Sonic & Knuckles, think I broke the 50 hour mark in '96…
So… my gamer age works out to 174.
Unnaturally old, by no means the eldest of the wizened ones, but considerably more experienced than most would guess by my physical form, rofl.
…
Now, this isn’t a perfect metric, as … you could argue the 50 hour threshold should be some other number… and that it doesn’t account for people who have played a whole lot of games, but only a single playthrough… so it is kind of biased toward ‘hardcore’ gamers…
But it does seem roughly in line with the way online lingo and vocabulary and memes seem to work.
And also, non ‘hardcore’ gamers are probably not going to care about any kind of ‘gamer age’ metric.
When your starcraft LAN matches keep lagging out on the default option IPX. You try the other option but it says not installed. So you have to figure out how to reconfigure your network adapter in windows 98 to use this new thing called TCP/IP. You’re in middle school and youtube doesn’t exist.
… You go to the GameFAQ board to ask for help, rofl.
EDIT:
Blam, you timewarp 25 years into the future and realize… holy shit, Blizzard could have built Battle.net into Steam before Valve did, but they completely went all in with WoW instead.
EDIT 2:
You warp back to the late 90s, and are extremely confused as to why the ‘replay’ of your last Starcraft game diverges into a whole ass alternate reality after about the 3 minute mark of a 90ish minute match.
Man, I am even older than this.
Multiple times I was disconnected in the middle of a Starcraft match over our 56k modem… because my dad was getting a goddamned fax sent to him over the same line.
These are all fancy pants, high res … XP, i think?.. icons compared to Win 95 and 98.
Now excuse me while I teleport back in time and jack back in to the Matrix Online beta via an actual telephone line… we didn’t even get DSL untill a year or two after it fully released.
Going fully angry old man mode:
You whippersnappers have absolutely no clue what pain is.
Pain is playing Battlefield 1942 on a 56k modem with literally zero servers you can connect to being under 150 ping, the vast majority of them being 200, 300+.
Those packets had to march across shitty rural phone lines uphill, both ways! And a storm would throw a tree onto them every 3 weeks!
Pain is your shitty eMachine being so underpowered that the only way you can actually play through HL2 is all settings at minimum, and then also when Alyx is getting teleported out of Kleiner’s lab, you have to look at the ground, because the 8 or so particles with bloom that spin around her, + the flashing color negative post processing effect… is too fucking difficult for your moldy, sprouting potato of a pc to run without CTDing or even segfaulting.
you’re like 40. There are people here who played Maze War.
About half a decade younger than that, just picked up pc gaming as a hobby at a young age.
But yes, I know that there are many significantly older gamer folks / tech dorks here on lemmy… but there are also now a lot of Gen Z folks, and even some Gen A… who just actually did not ever experience the ‘pre-internet’ era at all.
It gets difficult for me to manage my age perception whiplash at times.
I apparently look young enough that people irl, only 10 years older than me (or less) still refer to me as ‘a bright young man with my whole future ahead of me’, as if I’m in my early 20s… while people 10 years younger than me refer to me as an ancient elder gamer online, and irl, once I tell them my actual age, oh now I’m an uncle, I’m an old man.
??? confused millenial noises ???
Battlefield 1942 because you played the game in 1942, eh?
Ok so… hear me out.
You know how the common aphorism for dog years is that 1 dog year is 7 human years?
BF 1942 came out in 2002.
60 year difference.
…
I hereby propose a ‘Gamer Age’ formula:
(Real Age - Youngest Age you first put over 50 hours into a single game) * 6
…
So if you are now 40, and you mainlined Starcraft when it came out in 1998, your gamer age is 78… pretty old, seen a lot of shit in your time.
If you are 20, and broke 50 hours into Fortnite at age 14 (when Fortnite first released), your gamer age is 36… middle aged, been around the block a few times.
If you are 16, and broke 50 hours in Fortnite when you were 14… your gamer age is 12 (lol), you are still a little nooblet in terms of gaming experience.
If you are 60, and put 50 hours into a Pacman cabinet when it came out in 1980… gamer age is 240, true elder, arcane wizard status.
If you are Lord British (Richard Garriot), and you use the release date of the first game he developed (Akalabeth) as the 50hr game…
He works out to a minimum of 276, which is almost certainly a low estimate… by my reckoning, he could potentially be as old as 330…
…few know such things precisely, such is the nature of a truly ancient one, hahaha.
…
If I run this for myself… first game I put more than 50 hours into would have been… Sonic 3 / Sonic & Knuckles, think I broke the 50 hour mark in '96…
So… my gamer age works out to 174.
Unnaturally old, by no means the eldest of the wizened ones, but considerably more experienced than most would guess by my physical form, rofl.
…
Now, this isn’t a perfect metric, as … you could argue the 50 hour threshold should be some other number… and that it doesn’t account for people who have played a whole lot of games, but only a single playthrough… so it is kind of biased toward ‘hardcore’ gamers…
But it does seem roughly in line with the way online lingo and vocabulary and memes seem to work.
And also, non ‘hardcore’ gamers are probably not going to care about any kind of ‘gamer age’ metric.
…
Thoughts? Suggestions? Critiques?
When your starcraft LAN matches keep lagging out on the default option IPX. You try the other option but it says not installed. So you have to figure out how to reconfigure your network adapter in windows 98 to use this new thing called TCP/IP. You’re in middle school and youtube doesn’t exist.
… You go to the GameFAQ board to ask for help, rofl.
EDIT:
Blam, you timewarp 25 years into the future and realize… holy shit, Blizzard could have built Battle.net into Steam before Valve did, but they completely went all in with WoW instead.
EDIT 2:
You warp back to the late 90s, and are extremely confused as to why the ‘replay’ of your last Starcraft game diverges into a whole ass alternate reality after about the 3 minute mark of a 90ish minute match.