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My grandmother lives in Florida and enjoys playing golf and having friends over for dinner. My friends' grandmothers bake oatmeal cookies, knit and go to museums. Barbara St. Hilaire is a different kind of grandmother: a sixty-nine-year-old video gamer known as Old Grandma Hardcore.
Since last July, Barbara's grandson Tim, who turns twenty-three on Christmas, has been chronicling his grandma's gaming exploits on oghc.blogspot.com. Her talents haven't gone unnoticed; MTV recently asked Old Grandma Hardcore to become an official reviewer and even sent over a new Xbox.
Barbara plays every kind of game imaginable (although she doesn't like first-person shooter games) and also swears liberally. According to Tim, it's not uncommon to hear Grandma yelling "Fucking cocksucker won't fucking die!" at two a.m.
Elderly gamers are more common than you might think: according to a recent Business Week piece, 19% of gamers are over fifty, and the category is growing. Hooksexup reached Barbara and Tim at home. — Sarah Harrison
When did you start playing video games?
Grandma: Back in the '70s, we'd go to a bowling alley or take my kids to a movie, just drop them, and I'd put some coins in a game and start playing arcade games. And then when the first Nintendo came out, I got hooked on it.
What interested you about the arcade games?
Grandma: I don't know. It was just something to do.
Where did the name Old Grandma Hardcore come from?
Tim: I can take credit for that. It was a way that we could put it up on the blog and sort of redefine hardcore. It's a term that's used in the gaming community a lot but it was more known on Google as . . . something different. Now when you type in Grandma Hardcore into Google or MSN it's all about us and not about the geriatric porn industry. It's kind of cool, but at the same time we get a couple hundred hits a day from people searching for the wrong thing.
Do you have other friends your age who are gamers?
Grandma: Not really. They think it's sort of weird.
Tim: Sacrilegious, to say the least. A lot of our friends are religious types of folk — no offense to anybody who is religious — we're not very, but they are. If they see Grandma swearing at a television screen playing a video game, they gasp.
Grandma: A couple of them will go on the computer and play a card game or something like that but that's about it.
Do you have other hobbies besides gaming?
Grandma: Oh, I dabble in little things — ceramics.
Tim: You do more than dabble. She's actually pretty good at oil pants. Most of the paintings we have up in our house she did. She's decent at it.
Grandma: I read a lot. I love to read. I like Dan Brown, Anne Rice, Stephen King.
How much time do you spend gaming?
Grandma: Tim says I average out about ten hours.
Tim: It's not like ten hours in one go. After breakfast she'll have three hours of World Championship Poker. Then if she can't sleep at night, I'll come in at two or three in the morning and she's playing whatever it is that she's addicted to at the moment.
Do your hands ever hurt?
Grandma: Every once in a while. Like if I play shooter games they hurt my hands because it's a constant motion of the buttons.
Tim: That's your own fault too. You grip the controller pretty hard when you're playing.
What's it like playing something that's targeted to young people?
Grandma: I think it really helps because it gives me something to talk about with the younger generation. All the kids think it's cool.
Tim: It's funny actually, we were at Wal-Mart when the 360 kiosks came out and there was some kid, he looked like he was still in high school, and he saw Grandma playing. And she just started having a conversation with him about when Shadow Colossus was coming out and these two people who otherwise wouldn't have anything in common, could really connect with each other.
Do you wish the gaming industry would focus on adults?
Grandma: No, I don't. I like the games the way they have them.
Do you think they're marketed toward kids?
Grandma: I don't think it's strictly toward kids. There are all different kinds of games out there. I mean take your Nintendo — most of their games are kid-oriented, for the younger kids and stuff. But a lot of the other games are challenging — you have to use your mind.
What do you like about gaming?
Grandma: It takes away the boredom. When you hit a certain age and you don't have money to go out and travel or do this or do that, it's something to do. Plus it relaxes me. I can get aggravated with something, I'll come take the controller and beat somebody up on the TV. It's very cathartic.
Have you always cursed so much, or is it just a gaming thing?
Grandma:It's basically at the video games. Out in public — most of my friends didn't even know that I swore. Every once in a while I'd say something, but usually in the privacy of my own house.
Why does that side come out?
Grandma: I think it's because I realize that I'm not going to hurt anybody's feelings or have to watch what I say or be a certain way. I can just relax and do whatever I want to do. It's an outlet.
I'm not a gamer — can you convince me that I should take it up?
Grandma: I think that you could find something in a video game that you could really get into. I mean I don't know your taste or anything, there's got to be something out there that would catch your fancy, and it takes off from there.
Do you have a favorite game?
Grandma: My favorite game of all games would have to be Final Fantasy VII. I just loved the storyline. It was fabulous. You had to use your mind and build up your characters, their strength and magic.
So your favorite games involve strategy.
Grandma: Yeah, I'm not a big sports fan or first-person shooter — it's not my cup of tea. Something I've got to use my mind on.
Tim: That's not entirely true. She did get into God of War. There isn't a whole lot of strategy involved in that. It's pretty much just whack whatever's in front of you.
Do you two play together?
Grandma: Sometimes we do.
Who else in your family plays video games?
Tim: Oh God, everybody. Grandma's sort of at the top of the matriarchal system we have in the family; there are I think fourteen consoles in our house at the moment: Gameboys, Playstations, Xboxes, Gamecubes, everything. We just got a new one — the Xbox that MTV gave us.
How do you feel about having your life documented on the net?
Grandma: It doesn't bother me. I think it's hilarious really, because I don't see what the big deal is. It's like I'm living in one of my games.
What do you think about violence in video games?
Grandma: Everyone makes such a big deal out of it. I agree that there's a lot of violence in video games, but I don't think it's up to the government to try to put a control on it. I'm a firm believer in parents. If you know your child, you're the one who is getting the games for them. You pick and choose. I also don't believe in young people sitting in front of the TV gaming like I do. There's a whole lot ahead of them! Get out there and do things to improve your life, and rainy days when you have nothing to do, fine, go play games. Being young, you've just got too much ahead of you to be sitting in front of a TV twenty-four hours a day.
It seems to me that there aren't many good female characters in video games.
Grandma: There are some decent female characters in video games — not just sexually, or something that men would find interesting. There are fairly intelligent women portrayed in video games. Beyond Good & Evil for the Xbox — the main character is female.
Why do you think guys got into gaming before women?
Grandma: I think it's basically because women were a little bit intimidated by it. I don't know how it is nowadays, but when I was young, women were brought up to think that guys were smarter than them. They figured that with video games guys were going to be smarter than them, going to be better at it — cause guys are supposed to be more violent than women
What about sex in video games?
Grandma: It's in some of them, but most of them are buried or censored.
Tim: Like Indigo Prophecy, which she played recently. When it was released in the United States there was actually a sanitized version of a game in the UK called Fahrenheit. The reason it was sanitized was Fahrenheit contained sexiness that you could control much like in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Grandma: In God of War there's a scene there where the main character can actually have sex with two girls. I mean, you don't have to. It's just there. You don't see anything, just a rocking bed. As far as sex in video games — there's not even a tenth of what is on television.
Do you think there's too much sex in pop culture in general?
Grandma: I don't think so. I think it all goes back to how people are taught to believe. We have societies where — well not in the U.S. but — where parents and kids live in the same room. I'm sure the parents have sex and the kids think nothing of it. Kids that are raised on farms see sex all the time and think nothing of it. But other people make it out to be something dirty.
You're single. Are you looking for a man?
Grandma: No, thank you!
Tim: We've had fifteen marriage proposals since the beginning of the blog. "You sound like the kinds of person I'd like to get to know" or "We're about the same age..." She's got her own thing going. I don't think she has time for that.
Grandma: I was married for twenty years and I had enough of it. Don't want no more.
Do you have any sex advice for our readers?
Grandma: Play it safe. n°
©2005 Sarah Harrison and hooksexup.com
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