Old people playing games is just wrong

I’ll be honest here, if there’s one thing that annoys me about Xbox Live it’s voice chat in general. In theory it’s a good thing, but in reality I have no wish to talk to strange men on the internet.

It’s even worse when you have 30-something ‘men’ in the same game with pre-pubescent boys. The whole thing’s just rather icky.

Still, on the whole gaming is a very solitary experience for me. I like getting bogged down like you do with a book or a film.

Someone do a survey. Pat! Get morriss on it.

I agree that one of the problems with it is that it’s all very ‘current or nothing’ stuff.

You can get a game of COD4 in seconds these days, but if you wanted to jump into a game of COD2, for example, you might be trying for hours just to get a single game.

It’s full of MP games because that’s the way that most people are going.

I can appreciate that different people want different things from gaming, and that people from a certain skill level might get intimidated by the steep learning curve that online gaming can put you in, but the biggest selling games these days are usually known for their online aspect.

You say that Gears is crap, but people are still playing it, paying for expansion packs and making associated micro-transactions. (gamerpics, themes, etc)

I know for a fact that this is the direction that the biggest publishers in the world are looking to expand.

It’s not the be all and end all of gaming, but I don’t think that it’ll be far off.

I have very little interest in competing with other gamers. I like to choose which games I play and when I want to play them rather than be tied to whatever everyone else is currently playing and particular times and places.

Give me a nice single-player title any day.

You don’t have to.

Sometimes I feel like just playing COD4 without talking to or hearing anyone, so I just play Free-For-All on my own and plug my headset in with the mic off and the volume down so that I don’t have to.

I still get to play other people and enjoy the multiplayer that way.

Having said all that the best online experience with PS3 is Everybody’s Golf which is limited to short text messages. It’s a great chilled out experience to end an evening on and the limitation to text only really adds to it. Helps if you have a BT keyboard mind :). If there is one game which makes me glad I got a PS3 - it’s Everybody’s Golf.

Online gaming is the future of gaming. I’m suprised to see people saying that they’ve only ever done it once or twice.

I’m on LIVE almost every day, so I know its best and worst bits.

You do get people spewing out hate, but it’s not a constant by any means. Sometimes you can go weeks without hearing anything, sometimes you might hear lots of hate speech all in one day.

The best thing to do is to play in a clan if possible, because just like in real life, people tend to only attack people who don’t have anyone else to defend them.

Playing people and competing against people from all over the world is an infinitely better experience than just playing a few mates every now and then. It’s especially good when you come up against a bunch of foul mouthed Americans and beat them so bad that they quit before the next match in utter silence.

Whenever I’ve actually played against people I do know, the stock phrases are enough to get you into a game and then there’s always the phone and text messaging to sort out anything else.

I really don’t feel the need to talk to strangers, or receive abuse from sore losers / gloating victors.