The round begins. There’s a momentary flurry of fingers on keyboards as the players input commands to purchase guns and equipment – and then the game begins proper. The players fan out to defend a bomb site from the enemy team, calling out their positions as they go.
They spot digital enemies and react accordingly. Bullets are fired, grenades are thrown, bombs are defused, and the gamers emerges victorious.
It’s just like any other round of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), a first-person team-based tactical shooter played on the computer, except that the four players are all silvers.
Meet the S-Team, the four graduates of an intense 14-week e-sports training programme conducted by the Singapore Cybersports & Online Gaming Association (SCOGA) E-sports Academy.
They are the “only survivors” of a group of over 20 seniors that first participated when the programme kicked off last July.
It is the latest in a series of programmes under Lien Foundation’s Seniors Go! initiative, which seeks to create a safe learning space for seniors to take up challenges outside of their comfort zones, thereby demonstrating older people can match – or outdo – younger folks with proper guidance.
Interests explored by the non-profit’s previous senior groups include music, magic and rock climbing.
With the e-gaming programme now over, the four silvers in the S-Team – Jimmy Tang, 75; Maisie Lim, 75; Philip Tang, 69; and Evelyn Thio, 63 – continue to meet up twice a week online for gaming sessions, which can last up to two hours long.
Yet, getting to this level of proficiency wasn’t easy. Only one of the team, Jimmy, had ever touched videogames on a computer before – and even then, the avid golfer and tennis player went for FIFA, a football game, and SimCity, a city-building simulator.
For the other seniors, the short videogame taster session that Lien Foundation organised to kick-off SCOGA’s programme – and find suitable seniors to train – was their first experience playing games on a computer.
As it turned out, the weekly three-hour sessions held at SCOGA’s clubhouse in Bukit Merah Central were pivotal to getting the seniors up to speed, especially for a game as challenging as CS:GO.
The first-person shooter requires players to juggle between using a mouse and keyboard to perform basic functions of the game like shooting and moving, reacting to enemies on-screen and communicating with teammates.
Indeed, getting used to the first-person perspective of the shooter – let alone moving around and completing game objectives – proved to be a challenge for the seniors at first.
Evelyn and Maisie suffered from bouts of motion sickness and had to keep a steady supply of sour plums on hand to ward off nausea.
Nevertheless, all four seniors persevered until they had completed the course and gotten the hang of the game.
According to the S-Team, their takeaways included “improved confidence in troubleshooting issues with their computer”, whether that be a lack of disk space or difficulties getting Discord, an instant messaging and voice chatting platform popular with gamers, to run; more “common topics” to connect with their kids and grandkids; as well as “great friendships” that kept them hooked to the game.
Their sentiments are backed up by science.
While it is inconclusive whether these benefits will continue into the long-term, researchers generally note that gaming is relatively cheap, accessible and most importantly, fun and engaging for most players, making it easier to stick to.
To that end, the Lien Foundation is planning to collaborate with SCOGA and a yet-to-be-announced community centre to realise their vision of a gaming club that caters to seniors.
The S-Team, naturally, will be roped in as mentors to coach these seniors, with the aim of eventually forming a senior gaming league – assuming they’re not too busy gaming, as they’ve already moved on to Left 4 Dead, a team-based survival shooter facing off against zombies.
Opinion: Can Online Gaming Be The Next Frontier Of Entertainment For Singapore’s Seniors?
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Challenge of the game brought them together
Benefits
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SilverStreak Editorial Team
SilverStreak Editorial Team
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