The_Yoda said:
It all depended on the circles you ran in I guess. I started gaming with the 2600 and there was never a stigma around gaming being for kids in my neck of the woods. You may have just had assholes for peers. It is also possible i am part of a sub-set but Final Fantasy was very much ubiquitous with Nintendo up until Sony stole them away (cough Nintendo were dicks to quite a few third parties back then). I cannot really speak to that being the case with the majority of my peers at the time since Final Fantasy was not a couch co-op series.  |
My thoughts exactly.
On that topic, people equating video games to D&D is just silly in my opinion (no offense to D&D/LARP fans). Besides, when people get older they often enjoy a completely different kind of roleplaying... but I digress.
I do agree with some that Sony elevated gaming to another level of "cool", partially because of some reasons mentioned in this thread already, but also simply because now there was an electronics company that had broken into the mainstream with video games (i.e. it wasn't just "Nintendo or Sega fans" that owned a games console anymore).
But it's not like gaming was really "uncool" before Playstation lol. I mean, the jocks in my school weren't gathering on Friday nights to play SNES or Genesis or anything but we all still talked about playing them at the keg parties and people weren't embarrassed to admit that; the home version of Street Fighter 2 alone saw to that, to say nothing of Mortal Kombat, etc. Nintendo releasing the N64 as the "fun machine" compared to the more "sophisticated" CD-based Sony Playstation may have seemed like it was more for kids to some, but once Goldeneye came out most PS owners I knew were completely down with Nintendo play-sessions too. We also have to remember that teens, which Sony was largely targeting with PS advertising, are highly impressionable and view things they did when they were younger as "kiddie". However most people grow out of that phase when they become adults and don't quite care as much about things like that anymore once they get to college and beyond. This is why Rol is correct in saying that Nintendo fans often skew older just as much as younger, not just because of nostalgia. There's no doubt Nintendo is bigger amongst families enjoying games, but that is a significant strength regarding sales. Fun is fun; it's not something you grow out of like playing with dolls or action figures when you were a kid.
The whole thing with "video games are for kids" kinda reminds me of how WB cartoons like Looney Tunes way back in the day weren't initially intended for children at all, what with all of the violence, tongue-in-cheek racial jokes, political references, etc. If we look at video games' origins, they started in the arcades. And those of us who are old enough to have lived through the late '70s/early '80s can tell you that it was mainly adults and college kids who were popping quarters into arcade machines in those smoke-filled havens of yore. Kids my age and tweens were vastly outnumbered by people 18 years and older, huddled around arcades and pinball machines. I remember watching college kids playing Donkey Kong at the campus arcade laughing their asses off on this screen. Obviously, I didn't get it at the time:
