Portrait of a gray gamer: A macro-self reading the big picture

Abstract

While considerable critical attention has been directed toward digital literacy in recent years, most of the research has focused on young people. There are few articles on elderly gamers and not one of these specifically addresses digital literacy. Partially, this void is due to the historically limited usage of the term, “literacy." Only recently has this usage begun to be replaced in professional conversations by the concept of multiple literacies1 in order to foreground the fact that literacy can be talked about in ways other than the alphabetical. Another reason for the dearth of research on digital literacy and the elderly is the fact that, within our contemporary cultural ecology, a rhetoric of rehabilitation has predominated conversations about the elderly’s use of computers. While the first article on the elderly and computing, “Computers and Technology: Aiding Tomorrow’s Aged," appeared in 1973, actually a few years before the advent of personal computers, it was more interested in how the elderly could shore up existing cognitive skills than in how they acquire new literacies. The lion’s share of elderly/gaming articles over the next two decades continued to focus solely on the concept of rehabilitation.2 Then, in the 1990s, the baby boomers, entering their twilight years, began to champion a portrayal of the elderly as both physically and intellectually vibrant, as in effect active learners, not only capable of but eager to conquer new cognitive domains.