The Aging Gamer

By: Riley Marsh

About a month ago, I read that Roblox, the online gaming platform, had more concurrent users over the course of one weekend than the entire Steam user base combined, somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million. It’s no secret that a huge portion of Roblox users are children, and this astonishing statistic caused me to sit back and reflect on how my relationship with games has changed since I was a kid myself.

I knew I was going to be a gamer as soon as I picked up a GameCube controller to play Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros for the first time in the early 2000s. I couldn’t have been more than five years old, at my friend Luke’s house for a playdate. Within an instant, I was transported to another universe, one with a whimsical hammer-swinging pink blob, a mysterious armored woman with a cannon for an arm, and a gun-toting fox who could dash around at lightspeed. This place immediately felt like home, somewhere I could let my imagination run wild.

Grand Theft Auto V meme

As I’ve grown older, my relationship with gaming has gone through many phases. In elementary school, it was staying up way past my bedtime playing Pokémon Emerald under the covers or rocking out on Guitar Hero. Then in middle school, it was playing Halo for hours every weekend on the Xbox. Obsessing over World of Warcraft in high school. Discovering the magic of PUBG in college. Lengthy Warzone marathons to keep in touch with my school buddies during COVID-19. While the amount of time I spent playing these games varied throughout the seasons of my life, one thing was always constant: I was just a consumer. I would open up whatever game was my fancy at the time, play for a while, and close it when I was done.

A few years ago, I felt the urge to change how I engaged with games. Maybe it was my frontal lobe finally developing, or maybe it was sparked by all the recent changes in the industry, but playing by itself no longer satisfied me. I wanted to understand how games are produced, how they made money, how studios strategize, and what made them so good at keeping me coming back time and time again. Hunting down knowledge from experts, I found podcasts like GameCraft and Deconstructor of Fun, which enlightened me to the core driving forces of the gaming industry while staying aware of current events. Books like Blood, Sweat, and Pixels (Jason Schreier), Masters of Doom (David Kushner), and Console Wars (Blake J. Harris) helped enrich my understanding of gaming’s fascinating history.

The more I learned, the more insatiable my curiosity became. Eventually, it dawned on me that the only way I could keep feeding the beast would be to make it my career. I was listening to an audiobook narrated by the legendary Arnold Schwarzenegger, a seriously credible authority on career pivoting. In one chapter, he discussed icons like the Williams sisters and Steven Spielberg. They latched onto their earliest passions, tennis and film, and became some of the greatest of all time at what they do. I decided to follow in their footsteps, latching onto my first love, hoping to achieve a mere fraction of the success they did.

This brings me to the present day, where I am going all in at Kellogg to earn my shot at the gaming industry and finally contribute on the other side of the screen. A Strategy class case discussion on Disney prompted me to think about how studios can best leverage IP [intellectual property] across mediums. A Marketing class lecture on Red Lobster (of all things) opened my eyes to the importance of market positioning and customer segmentation, and an exercise in Business Analytics class examined whether a game’s Metacritic score is strongly correlated with its sales. A few weeks ago, I even teamed up with a couple of other students with a passion for games to compete in the Supercell Global AI Hackathon, where we created our own game from scratch in just a weekend. It has been a privilege to soak up so much knowledge in my first few months here, and I can’t wait to apply it.

Now, as I look at myself in the mirror, the lines on my face are much more prominent than they were in 2005. But two decades later, that twinkle in my eyes tells me that the little kid who could get lost for days in the Kanto Region is still in there. Gaming has helped me stay in touch with my inner child my whole adult life, and it would be an honor to become a steward of the industry to usher in unforgettable games for the next generation.

If you enjoyed this piece and would like to read more, check out my Substack, Words on WoW where I post regularly about what I’m playing, gaming industry news, game design concepts, and more! Read More about Gamers at Kellogg: Amir Alizadeh (MBAi)