An ageing gamer: The eyes go first

I’ve reached a point in my life where I can’t pretend I’m young anymore. Once you cross into your 40s you’re firmly middle aged, and while I’ve had gray hair for awhile it’s now started thinning and there are wrinkles slowly etching their way into my face. I’m generally okay with this, but one place I’m starting to feel my age is in my gaming. It’s not just about carving out time or the fact that if I stay up past midnight to finish just one more level I will feel it the next day. It’s also not my reflexes, which may have slowed some but aren’t a huge deal because I was never a pro level gamer and I can generally compensate. The place I’m feeling it most is in my eyesight.

I’ve always had pretty good eyesight and never worn glasses. In recent years I’ve started wearing reading glasses sometimes, since I can’t quite focus on small text the way I used to, but that’s only for really small text and generally in low light. But I’m also noticing it in video games. I think it’s a combination of a few things. One is that my eyes take a little bit longer to focus than they used to. This can be a serious problem in a fast game. I’ve been dipping back into Horizon Chase Turbo, which I first played in 2019, and four years later I’m finding it much tougher to flick my eyes to the corner of the screen to check how much nitro I have left or what my lap or place is and flick back to the road than I used to. This is an extraordinarily fast game where you need split second reaction speed and I’m just not seeing things as quickly as I once did. It’s also harder to react to grab the coins on the track (where you frequently have very little notice they’re coming up unless you’ve memorized their placement, which is how I’ve been compensating) and some of the day to night changes have left me unable to see the road well.

But it’s not just split second racing games. I’ve had a lot more “what the heck killed me?” moments in recent years than I used to. I’ve been playing Diablo IV and there have been times when I just could not see some small variation in color indicating an incoming attack (Diablo IV loves putting darker red on lighter red to warn you, which is a tough one) or I just couldn’t really tell what was happening in the chaos on screen. I died more than once with a full grip of potions because I just didn’t see myself getting blasted until it was too late.

This can’t all be attributed to my eyes. As screens have gotten bigger you need to move your eyes a lot more to see anything than you used to back in the day. And maybe some of this is in fact reaction speed as I just can’t make out the visual mess in time to react to it. But in some games I’m just not seeing as clearly as I used to.

At the end of the day this won’t stop me from playing video games. There’s lots of stuff I can do to make things easier. I can bump down the difficulty, use accessibility options, or even change the kinds of games I play. I like turn based games and slow paced games. Norco was one of my favorite experiences last year, and you can have the reaction time of tapioca pudding and still finish that. And for now I’m still able to perform fine in 99% of games, or if I do have issues like with Diablo IV they’re rare. It didn’t stop me from finishing that game’s story on medium difficulty and I only died a few times that way. But it was noticeable. And while glasses may help (and I probably will get them at some point) I don’t think my eye focus is going to get any faster. And it won’t be the only thing to go eventually. Father time remains undefeated.

So for now this is not a big problem, but aging is an odd experience for a lot of reasons, and seeing some of your capacities decline is one of them. You spend your whole life (that you can remember) with your eyes working one way and then they just…don’t anymore. And it happens to your hands and your ears and, if you’re very unlucky, your mind too eventually. I’m nowhere near there yet, but I’m thinking about it.

Eyesight isn't a problem for me but reaction time absolutely is. 50~100ms slower than the average player if I had to take a wild stab. Some games are just physically impossible (if they require quick reflex e.g. Sekiro), some games I can tank through by lowering difficulty, but too many games do lazy diffulty adjustment like making games less punishing (e.g. lower damage) instead of widening reaction time window. I don't want them to remove punishment and trivialize all aspect of the game - I still want to engage with all the systems!

I hope as more and more gamers age, the developers add option to enter player age, or maybe a quick reaction time gauging minigame... and adjust timing windows accordingly for parrying/QTE/etc.

I miss big-ass JRPG size fonts from the PS1 and PS2 era. Things are slowly getting better in that regard but man, fonts are still coming in three flavors, microscopic, almost microscopic, and almost-close-to-readable.

Yeah plus higher resolution desktop screen sizes don't encourage app writers to use the new found space for letter clarity, it seems to me. The app I worked on was designed by someone who decided that 8 pt text was the way to go, so they could just jam more options onto the same screen as screens got bigger. Adjusting the system font size upward simply made the letters too big for the fields they were intended to be typed into. Didn't change the number of characters you could enter, but the letters became clipped by the field boundary. A big problem when you trying to run the app on a surface screen, and our customers complained about desktop monitor sizes too.

It's my hands for me. Playing guitar in my teens, taking some falls onto my palms on rollerblades in early 20s, working in a pizza shop for 2 years, has all had a profound effect on my tendons. Now I can't use right triggers, and moving thumbsticks can often be sore. Mouse and keyboard gaming is a relic of my past. Not stopping me though.

as someone who has had glasses since just after highschool and i'll be 33 in aug i gotta say ... that focus issue , while it could be you i definately feel it being a screen size/distance thing too. i'm near sighted and glasses are fine on my 55 inch in front of the bed it is very much less good on the couch with the same size tv playing the same game . i have that same focus issue in the living room as you mentioned , and it part of why i don't go out there to game when my fiancee is sleeping. i'm willing to bet he has the same issues as you , hes 56 and refuses to wear his glasses and i Know he has a hard time seeing just based on how he plays n what doesn't notice at times. i got him to put his glasses on once and he did much better ...

for me its more my aches and pains that are an issue , my hand just doesn't love being on a mouse for hours at a time to play certain pc games and when i do i really feel it where i never used to when i was younger . ..... getting older sucks

Regarding focusing on fast-paced games, I have a hypothesis on that. With no proof, and maybe someone else thinks it's crazy, but hear me out.

Video games have only gotten more and more and more detailed and high resolution over the years. We can fit so, so many pixels on the screen these days. When you flick your vision to the top right of a screen to check a health bar or a cool-down meter or whatever else and then flick back to the center of the screen or whatever you're focusing on, your eyes have so much more to take in than they did when 3D video games consisted of seventeen triangles on screen at a time. If you go back and play a fast-paced PS2 or 360 game, do you have this same issue? If you play Devil May Cry 3 or the original Halo or something, do your eyes have as much trouble adjusting? Or, something modern but maybe far less detailed? I also feel like modern displays show more colors and more contrast in colors, another thing that looks great but also makes it harder for your eyes to adjust in a split-second's time. They have so much more to take in and your brain has so much more to process.

@justin258: Well Horizon Chase Turbo is not exactly the most detailed game in the world, though it is very colorful. As for older games doing it, I don't think any older games that I've played recently move quite that fast. Certainly it does relate to the level of detail on screen, and also the number of colors too because in old games there were limited colors so everything stood out more. You didn't have darker red on slightly lighter red because there were like 4 shades of red.

But my eyes have gotten worse in other aspects of my life too so while that stuff may make it worse I don't think it's entirely to blame. As I said, I can't read small print in the dark like I used to be able to. I'm not going blind or anything (that I know of) it's just normal age related decline. And I think it's a factor here.

As someone who has been wearing prescription glasses most of my life, I can agree about the eyes when it comes to video games and aging. Everything else, however, has been fine so far. I never had hand issues keeping me from playing. And I never had an issue where playing a long session resulted in me feeling some type of physical issue the next day, other than possibly waking up later that day. I do notice now that if I do play a long session and I'm stationary for a long time, my legs feel like logs when I try and stand up. But this has always been a common issue with human beings in general, its just that I feel it more because of my age now. I probably should start stretching everyday now before my video game fun time.

Being old kicks ass though

Fair enough.

Just throwing this out there, it might also be worth asking your doctor how to get checked for diabetes, as that can affect eyesight. Yes, your eyes get worse with age, but it can't hurt to consider it.

@justin258: I am well aware that diabetes can affect eye sight but my last A1C (taken in 2022) was 4.9 and my non-fasting glucose (taken in May) was 80, so I'm pretty sure it's not that.

I suppose I should consider myself “lucky” that my vision has been terrible for nearly 30 years now, so I don’t remember unassisted eyesight. But the last two generations have been brutal for me in text size, to the point where some AAA releases were turning into reminders to get my eyesight checked again. Another big decline happened in 2012 when I got my first smartphone; I’ve been told my eyes adjusted to the distance they needed, which was much closer to my face than in years past. Now I can barely read the screen with glasses off at any distance, which probably shows in my posts occasionally.

As a result, font size is the very first thing I look for when I get a game. I make it as large as it allows me, with the exception of Gears 5 (where the largest size can occupy half the screen). Fortunately, I don’t require any color/background adjustments yet, but I appreciate whenever you can color code different speakers. My hearing is also kinda garbage, but I wanted to focus on eyesight.

Same. I just went from playing Persona 4 Golden, which retains the giant text from the PS2 version despite being modernized otherwise, to Persona 5 Royal and I literally went into the settings to see if I could find a way to crank up the text size within 10 minutes of starting P5R. The difference in UI readability is pretty huge, especially after getting comfortable reading the big text sizes from P3 and P4 for the last few months. It's not that the text in P5R is unreadable, but given that at most usually there is only a couple sentences of text on screen at a time, it seems silly to make it so tiny. It's just easier on the eyes.

The choice of font a lot of games use is also a factor though too. Fonts back in the CRT TV days had to be chunkier with more distinct individual letters because of both the built-in blur on CRT TVs and the lack of resolution. A few years after HDTVs became the standard, it seemed like thinner fonts and smaller text became much more common and that's remained since then.

But vision is a general issue for me. I'm not in my 40s yet but my eyesight has been slowly but steadily declining since I was about 15. As a result I've been finding myself using UI scaling to make UIs bigger whenever I can in games even if it loses a bit of information density.

This is a huge problem with a lot of app developers being people in their early 20s with good eyesight. They don't get that not everyone can see as well as they can and that there are use cases that are very different from 20/20 vision and a standard desktop monitor. Usability and readability has been a talking point in software development for over a decade now but we still constantly see examples of apps that are horrible to navigate or read because the text is either too small or badly laid out with the incorrect assumption everyone is using a screen of similar size or pixel density.

I've heard comments about text size in game vids as well. The menus are intricate and small, and the various HUD status indicators can be harder to read, also possibly chat. I'm fortunate in that I haven't noticed colour blindness, so that's a plus for me. But I'd like to have options for that for others. Unless I'm missing something, also at the point of install they say "which buttons do you use most frequently" and make them bigger. Rather than expecting me to work through each button area to reduce the screen footprint. So some forms of just "open", "build", "run", "dependencies". All available elsewhere, but make it simple, I guess.

Edit: This applies to both apps and games, customisable menus are a thing I'm sure (like WSAD is a thing) and probably exists, but I'd really like that idea in Kerbal, for example

@ben_h: There's one other thing |I've encountered, though. The use of grey on a white background to try to make text look subtle. Sure, it's prettier, although I think it's harder on the eyes. I would prefer the reverse, white text on a gray background. Unfortunately dark mode on Edge has limited options, (I don't like Edge much though anyway).

@mekon: Agreed. When the colors don't naturally contrast against each other, it's a royal pain, especially with a thinner font. I forget which RPG it was from five or six years ago but they had this beautiful parchment style background that unfortunately their black text blended right into and it was like an instant migraine. Did it look pretty? Sure. Was it functional? Nope.

Oh yeah that's another one of the things they're horrible offenders for too. It's wild because there's literally a W3C standard for what the difference in contrast between elements of a website should be to meet their accessibility standards. The formal set of web accessibility standards has been around for like 15 years and isn't even that big so conforming to it isn't that tough yet the standard is largely ignored by even major companies running websites.

These standards also could largely apply to game UIs. Game developers have got a lot better at things like not relying purely on colour to signify things but every once in a while we'll see some game come out where the signifier of good is green and bad is red or a game will use colour-coded emblems with no shapes in them, leaving colourblind people in a lurch.

I'm 44 and so far I've noticed maybe a slight reduction in reflexes, which I seem to be able to compensate with having a good sense of rhythm, and yeah, my mouse hand doesn't like super extended play sessions but I got a more comfortable mouse for my hand size and the problems have all but disappeared. Same with controllers.

I assume my eyes will eventually degrade, and I'm hoping that the increase in accessibility options will help me there if I find myself unable to enjoy what is going on 39 years of my favourite hobby now. Currently coasting on good genetics but I know I won't outrun the clock forever. Getting old does suck, and I've barely started feeling it.

I'm 43 and I've definitely noticed a decline in my vision, but not one that's really impacted my gaming. I'm still pretty good at Apex and I can at least hold on my own in fighters still, but I do believe that a lot of that is simply the amount of time I waste playing those games. When's the last time you had your vision checked?

Size of text is and issue on 4K because it really does make text small. But, at age 54 what I notice most is I am impatient with BS in games, I just don't feel like jumping through hoops to get stated and I just expect more quality in an era where developers and publishers do the bare minimum. Why can't we get games of the quality of story telling in Mass Effect 2 or Uncharted 2.

@monkeyking1969: I feel that too but that's because there's more BS than ever in games. Starting most games these days is a chore because the ramp up is so slow.

I think we still do get stories equal to Mass Effect 2 or Uncharted 2. I would put the Spider-Man games and the God of War games up there against those. I think Psychonauts 2 had some incredible storytelling. But we get a lot less of those straightforward action 10-12 hour campaigns than we once did. Almost everything is focused on live services or at least open world, and a lot of it is just manipulation for micro transactions, which is intentionally unsatisfying because they want you to spend money to get through some obstacle so they have to make the obstacle intentionally unpleasant.

Telling a good and satisfying story over the course of the campaign can maybe get you a full price purchase (if people don't wait for sales) and perhaps sell some DLC with additional stories but it won't make the kind of money that Fortnite makes, and everyone's chasing that recurring revenue stream.