this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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Single player games (ani.social)
submitted 18 hours ago by GolfFoxtrotLima@ani.social to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 33 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (4 children)

It's unlikely your reaction time has changed much in your 40s. You probably have well over a decade before that starts to happen. On your first couple of tries, reacting to something is going to seem impossible. After you've seen the same stimuli and practiced what you should do in response, you'll be right around where teens and 20-somethings are. If you don't want to put the time in to make that happen, that's fine, but don't think it's unattainable to get good at a given multiplayer if you were otherwise interested in doing so. E-sports are now old enough that we've seen enough folks age into their 40s and remain top talent, as long as that remained an ideal career choice for them when so few are going to be able to support themselves in that career.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

In my own experience, now in my 50s and having played games since my teens, including a long period of RPGs and FPS online, reaction times start dropping in your 30s.

It's a tiny bit and you only really notice it when you're operating near your limits (same for intelligence, by the way - if you're using it near capacity, you'll notice that your capabilities start falling at around your mid 20s).

However, you can compensate it with experience, smarts and even wisdom - for example in FPS games you use the environment against other players, lead them into doing something predicable and get them then and/or prefer play styles that don't depend on reaction speed.

(IMHO, the world top people at for example sports, are the ones who already early in their careers combine top physicallity with experience, smarts and wisdom)

It's just a fact of life that physical and mental capacities do decay with age and far earlier than you seem to think, and whilst if you keep on using them it's not that much, if you're using them at a near peak-level it's noticeable if you pay attention as you can't just reach the peaks you could reach before.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

And in my experience, having gotten into fighting games in a serious way for the first time at age 30 (I'm now 37), people tend to attribute atypical "good reaction times" to what are actually smart input buffering techniques. In a crowd populated by mostly 20-somethings, I still routinely end up in the top 15% in a given game, and those opponents that beat me never feel like the difference was reaction time. Going from memory from a link I'll surely never be able to find again, so take this with a grain of salt, the US Air Force had a vested interest in studying how reaction times change as we age and found that it didn't really start to decay in any meaningful way until long after 40.

[–] ati@piefed.social 1 points 4 hours ago

I'm 50 and it's started getting noticeable in the last year or two.

[–] otacon239@lemmy.world 17 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Watching NakeyJakey’s video on competitive shooters put into perspective how hard it really is. I knew I wasn’t cut out for it, but that just demonstrated how not cut out for it I was.

[–] Zarobi@aussie.zone -3 points 8 hours ago

I used to have 50ms reaction time 15+ years ago as a teenager. Now I have 300ms reaction time according to the previously linked test. I'm not sure if it's age or laziness though. I really really wanted to beat Zombie Goku back then and actually trained hard for it