Video Games Causing Many Older Americans to Think They’re Wizards, Fairies
In the wake of the video game industry’s recent demographic busting expansion, millions of elderly Americans have begun dropping their bingo cards and picking up Wii and Xbox paddles - only sometimes with unnerving consequences, a new report shows.
In contrast with the ambiguous influence video games exert over the behavior of their younger enthusiasts, many senior gamers are not only emulating the action of the games, they think they’ve become the wizards, fairies and rock stars whose onscreen actions they control.
“I am Gandalf, head of the order known as Istari and leader of the Army of the West,” proclaimed Al Matusiak, 82, as he stood in the doorway of the Golden Years Harmony House dining room last winter, draped in a bed sheet and brandishing his walking cane like a sorcerer’s staff, “Let the festivities for Shire’s eleventy-first birthday begin!”
Mr. Matusiak, who Harmony House staff members say had been playing “Lord of the Rings – the Fellowship of the Ring” on his Sony Play Station 2 nearly non-stop since receiving it as a gift from a family member two years ago, then attempted to use his “staff” to magically transform that evening’s buffet selections of Salisbury steak and spaghetti into “cuisine more befitting the occasion” before falling backwards over a full dining table, breaking his hip and exposing his genitals in the process.
Sadly, such incidents are becoming more common amongst the nation’s senior gamers.
“At first I thought it was pretty cool that my grandma was getting into playing Guitar Hero, but now she literally thinks she’s Slash,” said Brandon Hurst of Lexington, Kentucky, “She’s totally changed. She’s always drunk and smokes like a chimney, and her temper is awful. When I tried telling her that Slash has been sober for years, she told me to ‘mind my own fucking business’ and threw a bottle of Jack Daniels at my head.”
According to clinical psychiatrist Noah Ramsey, Video Game Induced Dissociative Identity Disorder (VDIDID) is a condition brought on by the coincidence of chronic video game usage during the onset of the symptomatic stage of a degenerative neurological disorder that is actually a lot less funny than it sounds – at least for those who must deal with people affected by it on a daily basis.
“Can you imagine an entire nursing home facility full of these people, all dressed up like Pokemon, Super Mario, Manny Ramirez and so forth, carrying on about how they’re on a quest to save some princess or have to get to Fenway Park by one o’clock? It gets old pretty quick,” said Ramsey.