Age definitely plays an important factor with your life, you may be more spry than when you were younger but 90% of all old people are frail and less twitchy than when they were in their prime, I don't see a lot of old people doing things that they once had when they were in their 20's let alone as kids.

 I play plenty of games during the week, I just don't care for difficult challenges because I now feel they are a waste of my time and don't give me any amazing rush of any sort, I'd rather just play games for their stories, scenery, character development, gameplay that's fun than a tiring grind.

younger are better simply due to quicker reflexes and (most likely) a better memory retention rate

simple as that. but it depends on the type of game. Something like an FPS or an extremely fast strategy game (think like League of Legends) are going to favor quicker younger gamers. but there are generes that probably don't favor either direction

I'm 42, started gaming at 6. Younger games don't appreciate the progression games have gone through and beg for a mid gen upgrade cause it's not going fast enough :p I guess I grew up at the right time as apparently this is the last gen!

Last night I had the pleasure of playing an adventure game again without the temptation of the internet (14 hour power outage due to ice storm, yay for laptops) It's much better. Games are diluted and padded in length to the max nowadays. It has to be easy yet must last long too, so kill counts keep going up. Playing on hard is fine yet gets boring after the same thing over and over, might as well skip most of the fights and do a few fun bosses on hard.

My reflexes are still fine in racing games, although that's more anticipation and learning the tracks, aka muscle memory, than reflexes. Same for platformers. I grew bored of rts, a genre I used to love. Same with competitive multiplayer, just not as much fun online as in LAN. Plus now it's all about levels and perks and crap. In my day you ruled when you knew all the locations of the power ups. Near daily rounds of HL Quake and UT with 4 to 8 people in LAN was awesome.

My journey with games has been epic. Started with my dad's homemade PC running Basic, then first PC green and black with beeps 0.8mhz 10mb hdd to 4 color cga, ega 16, vga 256 colors. MSX 3 tone midi music, C64 funky music, first home made sound card, Amiga 500 awesomeness, first online multiplayer fs4 over dial up, downloading cheats and games from various bbs in 2400, 4800 then 9600 baud, first cd-rom player cd's still loading in trays, Soundblaster 16 every sound format mixed through the pc in crystal clear 16 bit in 1992, first gpu, first dvd player Tex Murphy Overseer in early 98, tv card to watch tv on pc in a window or play pc on tv via svhs, first stereo graphic 3D game Descent 2 on a projector, first surround sound, the birth of the internet, first mmorpg, and then we're finally at the ps2.

I pity those that are skeptic of VR because the tech is supposedly not powerful enough yet. It's not going to look like the Order 1886 or mythical Crysis with 1000 mods, oh noes. How did I survive playing at 0.0008 ghz!

Reaction time starts going down when you hit 25. Say hello to us old farts over here. :P

I never aspired to be a pro gamer anyways, I couldn't care less if I'm a bad gamer, but there is a reason most po gamers are teens, other than 'they are the deographic that plays games most'. They have the best reaction times and that's what it comes down to in twitch based games.

Shit I'm 25 now. Looks like my best days are behind me. Luckily, I wasn't that good to begin with

eh, i'm 37 and played battle toads.... take that!

I'm 19, I've played games from the 1970's all the way till now. I haven't missed anything that the older gamers played. The games back then were more challenging and imo, better. I mean, 8th gen has been great across the board but the 8 -64 bit eras contain my favorite games of all time. I may have not experienced the games when they came out but I have played a majority of the most important releases from 2nd to 8th gen. Younger gamers have the chance to experience more but in a sense we'll all be equally versed as time goes on. 30 years from now, I'll be the old 50 year old fogie.

Agreed.  

30 year old something master race!! 

I grew up with the ps1 so I got one of the first proper gens but it would have been cool getting the 2 gens before.  but I'm glad I seen the ps1 gen first hand and something like the ps3 gen being my first.  

Kids nowadays grow up with online games.  they don't appreciate the old style offline classics as much. 

games are easy these days, think about that :)

I am 50, and I can assure that the youngsters are better in most games. Reaction times and eyesight are not quite what they used to be. I can still win my son in car simulators, but only because I know the tracks by heart, but in shooters he is easily better than I.

Anyways, gaming is still so much fun at 50.