"You Have To Manage On Your Own": The Challenges and Resources of Gaming In Old Age

This paper examines how older adults engage with video games, challenging the prevailing "silver gamer" narrative that frames digital play as a tool for cognitive health, intergenerational connection, or digital literacy. Drawing on a research project conducted in France between 2018 and 2021, the author argues that older players' practices are shaped less by biological decline than by the social marginalization of old age. The study combines a discursive analysis of European Francophone newspaper coverage from 2000 to 2018, interviews with 16 older adults who play video games across a wide range of genres and play styles, and an ethnographic investigation of WiiBowling workshops held in thirty nursing homes across eighteen French cities in 2019.

The findings indicate that older video game players are both symbolically and quantitatively marginal. In France, roughly a third of people over sixty play occasionally, a lower proportion than in other age groups. Because play is culturally associated with childhood and older adults are often imagined as technophobic, their gaming tends to be received with derision or disapproval. In response, many older players keep their activity inconspicuous, describe it as something more acceptable, and play alone without access to gaming communities. This solitude limits opportunities to learn new games, so practices tend to be stable, centered on a single title for long periods, and interrupted by extended breaks. Recent retirees in particular express ambivalence about play's addictive potential and its impact on their time.

The author concludes that old age shapes the material, social, and symbolic conditions of older players' experience, constraining sociability and resources while also fostering creative adaptation. Older players thus pursue a resilient, low-profile form of play distinct from the health-oriented project of the silver gamer. Video games, in this account, serve as both a challenge and a resource for individuals negotiating the marginalized identity of "old person."