Old gamers...

[LochnarITB]

Please do remember that computer gaming is still very new.  Although there may be people out there that have been avid typers their entire life, the day and age of MMORPG's or the type of 'twitch' or 'reflex' gaming that dominates most aspects of games has still been short.

Oh great! My nurse gets me all propped up in my wheelchair after giving me my sponge bath and changing my depends just so that I can read this forum and see this insult. I'm so worked up that she'll probably have to bathe me all over again - wait maybe that's what gets me worked up. I just don't remember. OK, now where was I...

Oh yeah! You young'uns these days. Sheesh. You and all your fancy graphics and big screen color displays and ergonomic joysticks and gamepads. In my day, we stared at tiny monochrome (with the fantastic choice of green, amber or b/w) screens until we ended up with glasses so thick you could use them to get your boy scout fire starting merit badge. We started out with knobs you twisted for a half an hour at which point your wrists were ready to fall off. If we had keyboards, the keys were so hard to press that an old Remington manual would have had more feel. For joysticks, we had a block the size and weight of a large brick with a thin stick that the California Gov. would have had troubles pushing into position. For gamepads, we had short little nubbins attached to 10 key pads with metal foil switches under the numbers that required both thumbs pushing down on one to get it to register through all the built up gunk inside. The games themselves were at least as exciting as those now, and probably more so. They were new experiences. We weren't jaded as players are now. We were lucky to have 16 colors. The best graphics were those in our imaginations. Walking down the line drawn hallway of Wizardry, tiltowait spell at the ready, imagining the smells and the sounds and the crumbling walls just out of sight of the light while tensing for the monsters about to strike, was far more immersive than experiencing someone else's imagination as you do in today's games.

Anyway, back to the question at hand - I've been gaming for (oh my!) 30+ years. I have experienced no physical problems, short of the extra pounds from the chips and M&M's and whatever consumed during marathon sessions. I think that gaming requires you to make several different movements. We pick things up and put them down. We move the mouse back and forth. We reach for keys instead of placing our hands in the proper touch typing position. My understanding is that problems such as carpal tunnel come two ways. One is from the vibration sent through the wrist by such things as a carpenter hammering all day. The other is from extended periods of limited movement repetitions such as the fingers moving around the keyboard with the wrists kept in a fairly fixed position.

I really don't think you have anything to worry about, even if you were to keep your gaming habit into old age like some of us here. Besides, by the time you become one of the senior members of the Lounge, they will probably have perfected mind implants for controlling all our gadgets. We will finally be to the point where we can let these oh so troublesome bodies atrophy away while our mind-sync robots do all our manual labor and we are left to the exclusive pursuit of pleasure.