Well, perhaps relaying the experiences of the two older women I know who got into gaming might help you in some way.
1. Some years ago, a friend of mine who was in her 40's, after watching me play some DOOM 3, decided she wanted to give gaming a shot. She wanted to play an FPS. Half-Life 2 sounded like a good place to start, since it's intro was just a lot of walking and looking around. I fired up HL2 for her, and what felt like hours of walking in circles while staring at the ground ensued. Many short gaming sessions ending in motion sickness later, she began making real progress and having a lot of fun. The motion sickness went away and eventually she got pretty good at the controls, and managed to finish HL2 on easy difficulty.
After that, she wanted to play it again on normal difficulty. She seemed to have the hang of things now and was able to get through the game much more quickly the second time around. After HL2 she moved on to DOOM 3, F.E.A.R., FarCry, Max Payne 2, Riddick, Tomb Raider: Legend, Condemned, and several more.
Therefor, I'd say it's entirely possible to be a 40 year old woman who has never played a video game before, and jump head first into the FPS genre.
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2. The other person would be my mom, who used to play a lot of Tetris, and only Tetris. On Gameboy, specifically. This was in her 40's, and she played Tetris for about a decade before dropping it. After her Tetris binge, there simply wasn't anything else she wanted to play. Many years later, I set up Steam on her computer and bought Plants vs. Zombies, I thought she might like it. I chose it because I know she gets motion sick easily. Like, easily enough that she looks away from movies any time the camera is panning or if there's a shot from inside a moving vehicle. So, Plants vs. Zombies sounded like a good choice.
She's played over 700 hours of PvZ on PC. She also has PvZ and PvZ 2 on her iPad and has most certainly put in more than 700 hours on those there. From this, we determined that she might like some more Tower Defense games. PixelJunk Monsters seemed like an okay game. A couple games in, she declared that she didn't like the PS3 controller and that she like Zombies better. A few months later she was telling me about how she had perfect rainbows on all of the stages and was trying to get all of the diamond rainbows in Hardcore mode.
Eventually she wanted to try out some other games and the downloading of lots of demos began. Since then she's mostly settled on whatever she can play on her iPad, like Two Dots, World of Goo and stuff like that. She gave Mortal Kombat 9, Orcs Must Die, Bayonetta and Tokyo Jungle a try and enjoyed them, despite her motion sickness. She actually completed both Orcs 1 and 2, playing co-op with one of her similarly-aged friends.
Therefor, even being 60 isn't too late for a motion sick mother to get into this sort of gaming nonsense. She fought the controller and won.
So, you don't have to start out simple or easy, just hand over the controller, and let them figure it out. Your job is to be encouraging and helpful. Perhaps just play some Dead Rising 3 with her.
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