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.