Meet the Counter Strike e-sports team where everyone is over 60

Are you one of those crazy oldschhol ST players?

Me too. I've been playing CS on and off since it came out.

But Netrek is still my favourite multi-player team game.

I didn’t find amusing at all, being less than a decade away myself, and having come off a Call of Duty session last night where I’m sure I was in the top half seventy percent of the time. I might be old, but cunning, patience, and strategy can still frag yer ass. :-)

Now at an e-sports level? Frankly I can’t judge as games haven’t been something I put effort into, but I imagine it’s like anything else where there are few outliers, but mostly dominated by younger players. I know I m just not as quick to juggle the multiple things that need tracking, all while trying to line up that headshot. Not crippling by any means, but noticeable. On a “fun on a Friday night” level it doesn’t make much difference, my K/D is about the same as it always was. But once in a while I’ll go up against an organized team and where previously I could help keep it respectable, now we just get run over if the randoms on my team aren’t any good.

In summary, I’m still a pretty good casual player, but I’m not the strong player on any arbitrary team anymore.

I agree, those stats look too good.

I’d be baffled if they didn’t. Time and again studies have shown that the complex overlapping cognitive demands of games such as shooters have a distinct and lasting benefit. IIRC, researchers in one case studied people playing an early iteration of the Splinter Cell franchise. They believed that the combination of having to manage inventory dynamically, memorize and keep track of shifting 3-D map, plus seek out and engage hostoles added up to quite the workload. This would tend to fit with the “use it or lose it” theory of neuroplasticity.

Even if they have a lower ceiling and could never compete at the highest level, I think older players could go toe to toe with lower but still competitive levels, especially in a team game with plenty of strategy. And I think promoting this is a worthy cause.

I'm formerly a competitive golfer and there's plenty of 60 somethings out there who are better than me even though I can hit it 50 yards past them. I expect (and hope for) similar things playing out in gaming.

No. It's a PR stunt. A fun hobby. Seeing them play it's obvious they play like any other group of people that just started. You need several thousand hours to be decent and tens of thousands to be competitive. These people have maybe a hundred or a thousand tops. I applaud the initiative and wish more people would start playing, but any random team of 17 year old CS players will beat this team, despite having a coach. I wish there were "masters" (40+) and "legends" (60)+ classes in competitions.

This is true for various sports, like running - organizers just organizer age-based tiers. Maybe we'll see a 60+ CS tier!

Apropos of nothing much, I think I've still got the 8MB alpha version from about the year 1998 burned on a CD here somewhere. As I recall, run the executable and CS is added to the opening menu of Half Life.

Why do I remember it being 8MB? That's an odd thing to remember.

I didn't down-vote you but whomever did, probably did it because you didn't read the article.

Second paragraph: "At 62-years-old, she was the youngest member of the team, but all the members had something in common beyond their age: none had ever played Counter Strike before."