Where Did She Go? On Women, Gaming, and the Long Way Back

Losing a hobby you didn't know you'd miss, and finding your way back to it

I was eight when I first played a video game. It was 1992 on my cousin's NES, and the game was Super Mario Bros. 3. Oh, I loved it unreservedly.

Super Mario Bros. 3, where it all began.

By my mid-twenties, I’d stopped. I didn’t make this as a conscious decision (I don’t think), it just slid off the edge of my life, the way a lot of things do when you’re busy performing adulthood. There were better things to spend my time on. More appropriate things.

Reader, there were not better things.

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I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, partly because I now write a Substack about cosy gaming over 40, which means I’ve essentially built a small corner of the internet around the thing I once talked myself out of. But also because I keep hearing the same story from other women my age. They drift away, and then, somewhere in their 30s or 40s, they return.

It’s not a coincidence, and I don’t think it’s just about having more time, though that is of course part of it. Here’s what I think actually happened…

The generation of women who are now in their 40s grew up with the NES, SNES, the first PlayStation, or the family PC. We were there at the beginning of gaming as a mainstream thing. We played Sonic, and Tomb Raider, and The Sims at 2am with our cousins. Gaming wasn’t a niche hobby we discovered, it was just part of the furniture during the 80s and 90s.

Then we hit our twenties, and the furniture got rearranged.

The original Sims.

Most of it was time. Careers, relationships, the sheer ADMIN of adult life. But some of it, if we’re being honest, was social pressure. Gaming was still coded as a young man’s hobby. Publicly admitting you spent your Sunday on a RPG felt vaguely embarrassing in a way that, say, watching four hours of TV somehow didn’t. So a lot of us just stopped mentioning it, and stopped doing it.

The thing is, nobody sent us a letter telling us to stop. We just absorbed the message anyway. That’s the permission slip problem.

Women’s leisure has always been expected to justify itself. It should be social, or improving, or at least aesthetically acceptable. Crochet: fine. Book club: great! Binging Netflix: ideal. Terraforming a planet or solving a murder in 1920s Paris? Slightly harder to explain at work.

I think cosy games have become such a significant on-ramp for women returning to gaming partly because they sidestep this. They’re beautiful, narrative, and easy to describe to someone who doesn’t game… “it’s like a little world where you tend a garden and befriend the villagers.”

But I’d push back on the idea that the genre is the point. The genre is just the door. What’s actually happening is that women in their 40s are, in many cases, finally feeling settled enough in themselves to stop auditing their hobbies for social acceptability. The kids are older, or gone, or we chose not to have them at all. The need to be taken seriously professionally is perhaps less fraught.

The data backs this up, for what it’s worth. The average gamer in the US is now 41, and women make up over half the gaming population. The most common reasons cited aren’t competition or achievement, but stress relief, mental engagement, and fun. Specifically, straightforwardly, fun.

That sounds really obvious but it’s actually a bigger deal than it sounds. Women reclaiming the right to do things just because they’re enjoyable, with no improving purpose attached, is still (in 2026!!) more radical than it should be.

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For me, the return had a specific starting point. A severe anxiety episode in my late 30s, some time off work, and someone suggesting I try buying a game for Nintendo Switch that was gathering dust in the living room. I was sceptical; I didn't think there was a game out there for me anymore. Then I found Spirit of the North on the Switch, a game about a fox moving through a vast Nordic landscape, and I've played games almost every day since.

Spirit of the North; the game that brought me back.

I’m not the same person who played those old games on the SNES and N64. My taste has changed; I’m less interested in pressure, and way more interested in world-building and story.

But the feeling of being inside a good game? That hasn't changed at all. I was eight, it was 1992, and it was my cousin's NES. I loved it unreservedly.

Turns out I still do.

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Are you a woman who came back to gaming later in life? I’d love to hear when, and what brought you back. Drop a comment below!