I’m by no means great at games anymore. But in these casually competitive games, you get matched against people in similar rank.

For anyone playing The Finals, I’m hovering around 30-40k ELO. Definitely mid-tier.

I play about 4h a week fwiw.

I see this sentiment and rationalization a lot but I don't understand it.

Age aside, presently, are you saying you cannot meet a threshold you would label competitive? Competitive games are almost always played on a spectrum? I would argue your placement in the spectrum should curate the ground for competition if the player base is large enough (and ladder system coherent).

Now with my framing understood, how does age fit in? I can buy that as you age you have less time to put into a game and potentially weaker reflexes (I'm not going to pretend to know the science here), but this should simply inform your placement on the ladder?

I don't think it has anything to do with "people who play 6 hours a day and are in their peak twitch-reflex years" unless you mean your enjoyment is derived from overcoming this archetype.

Competitiveness implies desire to win. There’s no fun if you constantly lose, and you’ll always lose against a kid who spends half of their living day making sure they’re better than you in the game.

Most games use ranked match-making to resolve this. If you're in Bronze, compete trying to get into Silver, etc.. My experience is that you have to be extremely bad to get stuck at the bottom of Bronze in most modern games.

Yeah, you'll lose a few matches as the ranking system figures out where to place you, but the cost of competition is unfortunately the mortifying ordeal of learning that you are not in fact the best in the world.

That's the point, though? To climb rank you need to get good, to get good you need to play a lot.

I slowly climbed up the ranks of the "Go" ladder over the course of playing 1-2 games a week for a couple of years. "Play a lot" doesn't require "play a lot TODAY". There's a ton of games that have stable, long-term communities where you can reasonably expect that game to be around in 5-10 years.

"There’s no fun if you constantly lose, and you’ll always lose against a kid who spends half of their living day making sure they’re better than you in the game" is true, but hardly reality for the reasons I provided.

While I appreciate you leaving the value of competitiveness in the air... on the other hand, by defining it so purely, you've essentially resigned yourself from participating.

I'm curious what games have molded this perspective.

Any fast FPS shooter (CS, competitive TF2, COD and others), any RTS (LoL, Dota 2) to start with, if you're a bit older - MMORPG is essentially grind for 10 hours or pay someone else to boost you.

Quite the variety, most of which Ive also experienced.

But your original claim simply doesnt apply to most of these (MMORPGs are exception). What I suspect is that the barrier for reaching "flow" or analogous competitive states has gotten too high for _you_ for whatever reason.

In face of this you've constructed an absurd reality to justify your feelings where its the children with infinite time mucking it up.

The truth is, many adults still tap into the competitive spirit in spite of the barriers youve folded to, which I do agree exist, but always have.