Some of you are so uncomfortable with anything that's coded as feminine, soft, vulnerable, cute, emotional, etc, that you can't engage with that without also insisting that it's infantile in a pejorative sense. Feminine = infantile is an old, patronising saw - so old that you have The Yellow Wallpaper from 1892, about how a woman is driven out of her wits by menfolk who patronise her, who refuse to believe that a weak-brained woman is capable of understanding her own needs. Feminine = weak-minded = infantile = in need of adult (male) guidance is... Just boring.
And what is so wrong about being childish anyway? If you are a certain type of rigid person, then that's something to be feared. But not everyone is that rigid.
C.S. Lewis:
Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
He was writing about writing for children, in 1952, and he went on to make further points along the same lines:
The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? I now like hock, which I am sure I should not have liked as a child. But I still like lemon-squash. I call this growth or development because I have been enriched: where I formerly had only one pleasure, I now have two. But if I had to lose the taste for lemon-squash before I acquired the taste for hock, that would not be growth but simple change. I now enjoy Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Trollope as well as fairy tales and I call that growth: if I had had to lose the fairy tales in order to acquire the novelists, I would not say that I had grown but only that I had changed. A tree grows because it adds rings: a train doesn't grow by leaving one station behind and puffing on to the next. In reality, the case is stronger and more complicated than this. I think my growth is just as apparent when I now read the fairy tales as when I read the novelists, for I now enjoy the fairy tales better than I did in childhood: being now able to put more in, of course I get more out. But I do not here stress that point. Even if it were merely a taste for grown-up literature added to an unchanged taste for children's literature, addition would still be entitled to the name 'growth', and the process of merely dropping one parcel when you pick up another would not. It is, of course, true that the process of growing does, incidentally and unfortunately, involve some more losses. But that is not the essence of growth, certainly not what makes growth admirable or desirable. If it were, if to drop parcels and to leave stations behind were the essence and virtue of growth, why should we stop at the adult? Why should not senile be equally a term of approval? Why are we not to be congratulated on losing our teeth and hair? Some critics seem to confuse growth with the cost of growth and also to wish to make that cost far higher than, in nature, it need be.
The whole association of fairy tale and fantasy with childhood is local and accidental. I hope everyone has read Tolkien's essay on Fairy Tales, which is perhaps the most important contribution to the subject that anyone has yet made. If so, you will know already that, in most places and times, the fairy tale has not been specially made for, nor exclusively enjoyed by, children. It has gravitated to the nursery when it became unfashionable in literary circles, just as unfashionable furniture gravitated to the nursery in Victorian houses. In fact, many children do not like this kind of book, just as many children do not like horsehair sofas: and many adults do like it, just as many adults like rocking chairs. And those who do like it, whether young or old, probably like it for the same reason. And none of us can say with any certainty what that reason is.
C.S. Lewis understood that different people (of all ages) like different things, and that that's sufficient in itself.
When you are closer to 50 (as I am), you might understand that a gift you can give yourself is to simply enjoy the things you enjoy, without worrying if that makes you "childish" or not. Like I decided years ago now that I like colourful socks with cute animals on them, and I was simply going to wear colourful socks with cute animals on them, because they make me smile every morning when I pull them on. I could have thrown away all the socks that made me smile, out of fear of being "childish" - and then my mornings would have been that little bit more grey and joyless.
The "liking soft, cute, gentle, cosy videos games means you are childish and not a Real Gamer" stereotype was boring in the first 35 years of the 40-odd years I've been playing vidya games. And it certainly hasn't gotten any less boring in the past 5 years or so, when cosy/wholesome games have become a more distinct genre of their own. That's seen angry, gatekeeper-y, Gamer-types yelling about how all these sorts of games are for WEAK WIMMIN AND BABIES rather than REAL BIG BOY ADULT GAMERS. (They also ignore the fact that some of the people who enjoy violent games also sometimes enjoy some cosy games, and some of the cosy gamers also sometimes enjoy some violent games. Like, there's not a rigid separation for everyone.)
If I was a joyless kind of person, whose main relationship to games is to get angry about them, rather than, I dunno, playing games I like, I could have spent the past 40 years talking non-stop shit about fighting games, or racing games, which have simply existed en masse for decades now. But I'm fine with other people liking stuff that's not for me. Fighting games and racing games are not my cuppa tea, so I wish ya'll joy of them! Go out there and fight some cars with my blessing, and I sincerely hope you have the best times of your lives doing it! 👍
Meanwhile, I'm happy that after all this time I get to see more games that I wish I could have had for the first 35 years of my gaming experiences. Formative years of enjoying Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, Nintendogs, while Angry White Male Gamers shit themselves trying to insist that these games were for GIRLS and BABIES, and weren't REAL VIDEO GAMES, and you weren't a REAL GAMER if you enjoyed them... I've heard it all before.
Unfortunately, I'm sure I'll hear more of it again, because if there's one thing that a particularly joyless type of person enjoys, it's not so much actual video games, but wagging the finger at people whose prefered flavour of game is cute, colourful, soft, emotional, coded as feminine, coded as silly, peaceful, chill, cosy, cozy, wholesome, pastel, farming, full of cats, frogs, capybara, made by devs of colour, streamed by cosy streamers of colour, etc, etc. Because some people haven't worked out yet that having a soft, girly, feminine, vulnerable side, etc, etc, is not a liability, and doesn't also preclude being strong, being determined, being any other thing in life too.