As kids me and my friends used to muse over the fact that growing old, eventually moving into a care home would be awesome. Pension, you say? Well, what's that if not an unending LAN party!

It turns out reality is different - the older I get, the less interested I have in computer games. It feels like I've seen it all at this point, and I'd rather see grass twice than a virtual anything.

When me, and my generation, are old enough where people start getting shipped into care homes, I suspect there won't be any interest at all, save perhaps a nostalgia trip every now and again.

I feel both sides of this. I'm almost 40 and for me it comes in waves. I dumped like 100 hours into ARC Raiders over the past few months and had a great time with it, and before that I've loved obsessing over single player adventures like Spider-Man and RDR2, as well as indie darlings like the Hollow Knight games.

But there are always gaps in there where I don't feel as drawn into it. Right now I try to get in a few rounds of Deep Rock Galactic every week with my twelve year old, and that hits the right things as far as having some progression for us to chase together while still being time-boxed to clear rounds and not having a huge survival/base-building component to it like Minecraft or Valheim or Don't Starve Together.

Basically... I expect this pattern will remain for the remainder of my adult life. I'm not going to retire and suddenly be like "ah yes now I will revisit six decades of forgotten gems sitting in my backlog" but I'm also not going to completely walk away from it. Rather certain things will grab me and I'll obsess over them for a bit, and then I'll take a break to work on a coding project or build something with my hands, or putter around the garden, or whatever else it is.