This past Saturday was my birthday. My 30th birthday, to be exact. Man, am I getting old or what?

I had read some blurbs about SOE’s 10th Anniversary EverQuest Hardcover, and thought it sounded great, and with EverQuest being the first MMO I started with back in ‘99, I thought it would be a great present. Unfortunately the local Borders and Gamestops were all out of it, so my loving up wife picked up me up a copy of World of Warcraft: Rise of the Lich King. It’s been a good read so far, but I wish that EverQuest book had been in. Then I stopped to think… 10th anniversary….

I’ve been playing MMO’s for nearly 11 years. Six of those years were spent in the world of Norrath, almost eight if you count my dabbling in EverQuest 2. And in between all that time, I’ve had my nose in almost everything that has come out since EverQuest originally launched.

That’s a long time. A decade. I guess you can say I’m hooked on the MMO genre. From the looks of subscription numbers around the world, I’m not the only one. And looking at the coming release list, from Star Wars: The Old Republic to Star Trek Online, it doesn’t look like the genre is going to fade anytime soon.

That’s when it hit me, I’m getting old. Now I know, I’m sure that many of our readers our over the age of 30, so don’t take offense. But when I was 19 and I loaded up Everquest, Lanys T’vyl server, I met people from all ages and all walks of life. I gamed with some of those people for years, met them in real life even.

But at 19, playing a MMO with people a decade or more older than me, I thought it was a little strange. Here is a genre that brings people from all walks of life together, to have fun in a social environment. But even then, I tended to think differently about the older people I was playing with. Only being 19, I thought it was strange that people in the 30s or 40s or even older, would want to play a game like this.

But now that I am 30 and still playing MMOs, I realize that I am slowly but surely becoming one of those “older folks.” My gaming habits have changed over time, I cant spend four to six hours a night farming Kael Arena. I have a family and kids that need attention. I can’t log in at server up to hit 3 day timed spawn contested mobs, or mobs that just had insanely rare spawns. I have a full-time job now. And yeah, it does kind of bum me out that I don’t have as much free time as I used too, but at the same time games are becoming more short play time focused, allowing us to get more done in shorter periods of time.

And along with those 30 long years, comes other things. My son is getting close the age that pretty soon here we can pick a game and play together. My wife and I used to play City of Heroes together, and while I don’t always think she had a great time with her husband the crappy healer getting her killed all the time, it was still something that I wouldn’t have experienced if I hadn’t gotten older and the genre wasn’t around.

Even though I am 30, I don’t feel like it, especially in game. It’s amazing that after playing MMOs for 10 years, at times I can still feel like a 19 year old noob trying to run through Kithicor forest from Qeynos to Freeport. And while sometimes it is very strange to meet someone in a title that is like, “whoa, dude u r 2 old 2 pwn”, I can understand to some degree where they are coming from.

You hear a lot of people decrying what seems to be a design change from the original MMOs. What I mean is going from hardcore grouping, long hour raids, extreme time commitment quests, to more casual oriented solo content, dungeons that are mini sized bites, and better rewards for people who don’t have hours upon hours to spend on content. But the real question is this: Are developer’s really just making easier games? Or are they learning that a large part of the player-base is like me, an aging gamer with increased responsibilities?

There will always be a schism between people who work very hard on advancing their characters, and those that want to be able to have fun with less commitment and yet still make progress. You see games being designed from the ground up to cater to the casual crowd, and you even see some developers going back retroactively and trying to make titles more accessible.EverQuest is a good example of this. I used to spend hours just waiting to find a group to spend even more hours grinding out XP. While nowadays if players just want to log on and go do something, they can just hire NPC mercenaries to help fill empty spots.

I am still hoping to get a copy of the EverQuest 10th anniversary book, but until then let me ask you this: the MMO is a great genre. It lets people from all corners of the world, and all walks of life adventure together. But just how does age play a roll in how you game?