I've been a gamer since...well since the blippety-bloopy days of getting excited about a tiny little white square being batted back and fort by a couple of white oblongs on a black background, which means I'm bloody old. Fucktastically old. Old in all the wrong ways.
As there are no long-term medical studies to tell you of the detrimental effects of a lifetime of being obsessed with videogames I thought I'd produce a list myself. So if you're one of those kids who thinks you're indesctructible just because you can knock up a handy wall on Fortnite in double-quick time to avoid sniper fire, let me tell you a little bit about what your future holds
- Handheld consoles are bloody uncomfortable with prolonged use. Yep that's right, even the most ergonomically designed ones are a pain in the wrists when you use them for more than a couple of hours. Remember that scene in The Simpsons when Kearny gleefully stated "I have the wrists of an 80 year old" after playing too many videogames? Yeah, that.
- Your eyesight will get worst. Steadily worse as you get older and there's bugger all you can do about it. Regular eye check ups and glasses or contacts are your future. In fact I recently got a new pair of super-lightweight very comfy glasses to help with distance vision, tried them on for gaming and realised that the reason I was so shite at everything was because my vision was borked for that distance. Now PS games look almost 4K good even on my humble old 1080p telly, and I can actually see distant enemies or oncoming traffic when I play shooters or driving games and can browse the play store and see the prices without having to squint or edge closer to the telly. HOORAY!
- You'll begin to suffer from the gaming equivalent of senile dementia. That game you got stuck on, put back on the shelf, then came back to a year later? You will not have the faintest clue how the mechanics of the game work. Take Horizon: Zero Dawn as an example. There's no "pick up where you left off' refresher tutorial to remind you how the path dynamics work, or even what the basic controls are so you'll either have to bluff your way through or (do what I do) just start the game all over again, play through the tutorial and just hope that you can get past your initial sticking point this time around (you won't!)
- You will complain bitterly about the price of games nowadays, forgetting completely about the time you shelled out the better part of £70 for the SNES version of Street Fighter II, or the price of old microcomputers / consoles back in the day (Can you believe the PS3 launched at nearly 500 quid?)
- You will also complain bitterly about the constant cycle of downloads, patching and updates that your games get. Got a sneaky half hour while the missus is out at the shops? Fancy a quick few rounds of your favourite game? Sorry bucko, that sucker needs an update and won't let you play until it's done, and on your crappy internet connection that'll be in four hours time. Enjoy staring at that progress bar!
- You'll have rose-tinted specs on about classic games. "God, I really fancy a few rounds on Pac-Man" you'll cry, before firing up MAME or whatever sneaky nefarious ways you've got of playing classic old games, realising that you still can't make it past one screen on Pac-Man or one sheet on Space Invaders, before switching off your retro console and firing something modern up instead.
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