Falling in Love with Video Games as an Adult

Culture Study Podcast

Arts, Society & Culture

4.5 • 789 Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2026

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Did you get into gaming as an adult? Did you come back to gaming as an adult? Or, like me, did you savage people on Bubble Bobble in the early '90s... and are trying to figure out how to reproduce that feeling as an adult? Or maybe you're gaming-curious... but can't shake the feeling that gaming is a waste of time (and/or associate it with POS ex-boyfriends). Keza MacDonald, gaming critic for The Guardian and author of a stunning new book on the history of Nintendo, is here to field all your questions: about those dude-gaming stereotypes, about gaming as "unproductive"... but also what sort of new games you should be playing (based on what you already play and love). Melody came to gaming as an adult and says THIS EPISODE IS SO GOOD, and I'm still trying to figure out my way there and also say THIS EPISODE IS SO GOOD. Wherever you are in your gaming journey, you're gonna love Keza and love this conversation. And if you want Keza's expert recommendations for games, you'll definitely want to become a paid subscriber so you can access this week's Ask Anne Anything!GREAT NEWS: WE HAVE VERY GOOD EPISODE TRANSCRIPTS NOW! They come out within 24 hours of the pod — just come back and click here. We pay an actual human for help with these, so thank you for either being a paid subscriber or listening to the ads that make this model possible!If you're a paid subscriber and haven't yet set up your subscriber RSS feed in your podcast player, here's the EXTREMELY easy how-to .And if you're having any other issues with your Patreon subscription — please get in touch! Email me at annehelenpetersen @ gmail OR submit a request to Patreon Support. Thanks to the sponsors of today's episode!Ollie. Feed the Obsession. Go to ollie.com/culture and use code culture to get 60% off your first box!Save 20% Off Honeylove by going to honeylove.com/CULTUREGet 15% off OneSkin with the code CULTURE at https://www.oneskin.co/CULTUREShow Notes:Go buy Keza Macdonald's Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play ( I mean, it made Melody cry!) Read Keza's treasure trove of columns at The Guardian here Make sure to check out the much longer conversation I had with Keza about the history of Nintendo over in the newsletter! A nice write-up of "cozy games" (and refusing to let that label delegitimize them) Same Face Syndrome or Why Scruffy-White-Dude Protagonists Don’t Help Anyone (look for the image on the right of all the protagonists) Stats on LGBTQ representation in game development: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/feb/19/video-games-industry-diversity-women-people-of-colour Keza references The Score: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/735252/the-score-by-c-thi-nguyen/Thinky Games! https://thinkygames.com/We're currently looking for your questions for future episodes about:HISTORICAL GOSSIP! We're talking with Nichole Hill, host of Our Ancestors Were Messy, about hot, messy, ideologically fascinating world historical gossip (and how gossip works today). We really want to make this episode happen but we need your questions! WHITE LADY HAIR! Cultural critic Sarah Mesle will be joining us to talk about her new book Tangled: Seven Iconic Moments in White Women's Hair and What They Tell Us About Power, Pleasure, and Complicity. If there's a white lady whose hair interests you, I guarantee you it interests Sarah, too. We can talk about specific celebrity/actress haircuts but also specific styles/trends. I cannot wait for this one. EMILY BLUNT! (and secondary characters becoming primary ones!) with Xochitl Gonzalez — obvi we're gonna talk a lot about Devil Wears Prada and 2000s-era striving but you can take this in so many directions BOOMER MOMS! Tracy Clark-Flory and I need your questions about why boomer moms (very broad designation here, I realize) are the way they are — we're specifically going to talk about the constrictions of growing up in '60s/'70s U.S., particularly around femininity, race, education, body image, employment, and motherhood. This one's gonna be really good, I know it. INTERGENERATIONAL FRIENDSHIP with Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less (and Villa Coco, a new book with an intergenerational friendship at its center). You can ask questions about how to find intergenerational friends, how to sustain those friendships, what people seem to love so much about them, wherever your heart takes you. HOW TO FALL IN LOVE WITH A CITY with Lilah Raptopoulos, editor of the Financial Times city life vertical. We're going to talk about how to fall in love with cities WHILE VISITING (for fun, for vacation, for work) and how to fall in love with the city where you currently live. What tips do you want? What city are you struggling to fall in love with? Anything you need advice for/want musings about for the AAA segment. You can ask about anything, it’s literally the name of the segment.As always, you can submit your questions (and ideas for future eps) hereFor this week’s discussion: We'd love to hear all your thoughts about your successes (and struggles) getting into gaming as an adult. Take this in whatever direction you'd like!

Transcript

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0:00.0	When I was little, I had older parents and they were somewhat technophobic.
0:05.0	So long before I ever laid hands on a game controller, I used to just sit and read video game magazines, look at the little screenshots, read the words, and just imagine, just imagine how good these things were going to be when I finally got to play one.
0:18.0	So weirdly, my first video game memories are not of actually playing them.
0:21.1	They're of reading about Nintendo games in magazines in the supermarket.
0:32.5	This is the Culture Study podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson.
0:35.9	And I am Kezzle McDonald. I'm the video games editor at The Guardian and the author of a new book about Nintendo
0:41.7	called Super Nintendo, How One Japanese Company Unlocked to the Power of Play.
0:47.1	Can you remember which games seemed most vivid in your mind that you read about
0:52.7	in the supermarket checkout line.
0:54.8	It was always Nintendo's games. So Mario and Zelda. When I was growing up, the Super
1:00.9	Nintendo Entertainment System had basically just come out, I think, by the time I was the age.
1:05.7	This is when I was about six or seven years old. So it hadn't been out for very long.
1:09.3	And it was slightly before the PlayStation
1:12.0	became the biggest thing in the world. So all of the pictures that I was sort of imagining
1:15.9	these games from, there were these beautiful pixel art, really colorful. They looked like
1:22.1	the fantasy worlds that I had, like the fantasy novels I read all the time as a little kid. They
1:27.0	looked like that, but in a game like interactive. So it was, and the legend of Zelda linked to the past. I remember that was the first game that really caught my eye properly. And then I didn't get it. When I finally got a games console, I didn't get it for ages, like months afterwards, because it was so expensive. When I finally got to play it, it felt like this like fabled myth that had been handed
1:45.0	down through generations, even though it'd probably been about six months.
1:48.2	I hate being like, back in my day, the games were like this, but I do think that there is
1:53.8	something really interesting about, like, the way that I started playing, you would, like, I had a,
2:00.2	I had a Nintendo, just an old school Nintendo,
2:03.0	but then also you would like rent games just for the weekend.
	...

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