Is gaming better as a kid or an adult?

Adult. I can afford it more easily and nostalgia means gaming systems cost less too due to lower spec requirements.

College Adult, growing up my parents only let me play games on the weekends and even then it was rare that I could play for longer then like 2 hours. Most my crazy long gaming sessions occurred when I was at a friend's house and it turned into an obsession because of how much I was limited.

You should add a third category, cause I had the best time playing games in college. So many late night gaming sessions with friends, and while I didn't have money to buy many games, there were ways to obtain them.

As an adult I have more money and pretty good at balancing gaming with everything else, but it's mostly solo gaming because friends I would play with in college are also busy all the time

I mean when i was a kid i struggled to get double digit fps in ironforge, but now i struggle to get that same sense of wonder from ul'dah. But also i actually have more than three games so i pick adulthood

You're not wrong except I've never been met with such a dream situation.

Thats the correct. Young adulthood.

Too young to be a real man, and too old to hang with the kids, but enough job money and time to afford any game you want and all the time to play it.

It's a tough question to answer, since we can't go forward in time and game as a kid with the games we have now. And playing games now that we had when we were kids is different, since you already know all about them. I think I have to answer "as a kid," though.

As a kid, we had a sense of wonder about all the new things we were unlocking. But how much of that was just being a kid and how much was the still-evolving game industry finding new ways to be exciting? Playing games now feels insane to me, because I grew up being astonished by Galaga and Pac-Man. Comparing those to Elden Ring, which is graphically and difficulty-wise and story-wise light years ahead, just doesn't make sense. At the same time, I don't know that I could have gained much from playing Elden Ring as a kid. For one, I would have been destroyed by the first enemy and turned away crying... not that different as an adult if I'm honest. But I probably played as much Super Mario Bros as I did Elden Ring.

I'm lucky that I have time to game as an adult. Sure, it's only about 3 to 5 hours per week, but that's better than a lot of adults. Some weekends I'll get 10 or 15 hours to game. As a kid I could play for hours a day. I could have friends over most days after school to game with. They could spend the night on weekends to play late. I could borrow their games, and they could borrow mine, so I usually had a new game to try even if I didn't have my own money.

Yes.

As an adult I finish more games. I have more patience and there's a lot of things that are better today than when I was a kid (level scaling/difficulty scaling is definitely one, and so is the art).

But I miss storytelling. I miss game mechanics that worked really well but we're based on the limitations of the hardware and software available at the time. I miss having to explore because there were no walkthroughs or guides or anything.

So I think perhaps gaming has gotten better, but my experience with gaming isn't as good now as it was when I was a kid because I have something to compare it to and it can't beat my nostalgia.

Ul’dah is still pretty cool, though.

I hadn’t felt that feeling in many years, until I played Elden Ring’s DLC. It was the first time since being a kid that I felt a true sense of awe and wonder. I wish I could relive that feeling again.

This so much.

Gen 3 Pokémon games which I mainly played as a preteen were basically my second home, I knew almost everything there was to know about them.

Games I played later in life, including later Pokémon games, I mostly forgot the details after playing.

I know older gamers too, and can tell you firsthand that the amount of "busy" in a person's life varies wildly. I am the second busiest person I have ever met, and the busiest person does not have children and I do, for example.

If I were to carve out more time for leisure, something else would absolutely have to suffer. Sure, that is a choice I could make, but I dont think any reasonable person evaluating the trade-offs in good faith would consider that choice to be on the table, hence why I used the "ackshually". It is technically a choice to a pedant, but not _really_ a choice to anyone acting sane.

That's a good tip, thank you!

I am using that word as follows:

Prioritize: to adjust the priority ranking of something to a higher level than it was previously.

not

Prioritze: to assign something the highest priority.

Maybe I am using the word wrong, but I believe both definitions to be valid. Sorry for the confusion.

What I meant was that I do not have anything on my docket that I think a reasonable person would demote in priority to make room for gaming. That day may come, but it has not for many years now. You may be surprised how wildly varied people's level of responsibility is and how busy that makes them.

Exactly, thank you. Of course I _could_ prioritize gaming over nearly anything, but no reasonable person would for important things. I guess I have more things I feel are important going on than this guy and some others find believable. I assure you, I am not making up a story to earn fake Internet points that could not have less meaning.