I was a gamer back when I was a kid, but not so much these days. My last few years of school holidays were spent alternating between playing football and networked computer games. Real-time strategy (RTS) games and simulations were generally my favourites, though I did like car racing games (especially the Need For Speed series), as well as football-related games.
I am not a gamer these days by any means, however one of my jobs is to oversee the playing of computer games. It's the least well paid job I do, but it is perhaps the most enjoyable! I do this for around 3 hours most weeks. This includes Red Alert (
OpenRA) and Quake 3. Most weeks I do join in with a game of Red Alert. Today I took on four youngsters (4 vs 1) and I was only narrowly defeated. I do like the challenge of introducing a new generation of youngsters to classic computer games. This can be a very sociable thing, unlike modern games, where it seems to be based on people playing remotely from each other, with the underlying game often being free but having to pay for in-game purchases.
During the lockdowns of 2020-21, we did some
OpenTTD and SimSig games through the forum, with other forum members (mostly people I'd already met in person). We did build some very intricate networks. I no longer have time to spare for that now, but it did make the Covid period a lot more tolerable than it otherwise would have been. I have kept the saved games.
