I usually play RPG, singleplayer FPS and some adventure games. I never really felt like my age (41) and reflexes impacted this at all, and figured I'd be gaming in some capacity until I died. Recently though I got some nostalgia for a genre from my youth and dove into it and well, my age is a factor here...

Fighting games!

As a kid I played lots of Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat 1-3 with my friends on SNES, before moving to PC gaming in my teens. Recently I got some SF and MK games in the Summer sales for nostalgia reasons and they're actually pretty fun! However man, I cannot do these long combos at all! I would get destroyed online, and have to play on medium AI settings. Even in the tutorial it's telling me to hit like 6 buttons in a row as fast as I can and I can't do it! Long gone are the days of my youthful fighting combos I guess.

Could be practice related as well. Yes, your reactions aren't as good (none of us have the same reactions we did when we were kids), but I reckon if you give it time you'll get to a reasonable level again.

Both reaction time and muscle memory (more important for combos) can be trained. You'll probably never reach the reflexes of a 15 yo esports enthusiast, but it's possibly to get at least decent at these things again.

I notice it with myself, in times when I play mostly slower games my reflexes and instinctive reactions (button presses) deteriorate, but a few rounds of a fast and stressful days for a couple of days give it a boost again. Of course it's more frustrating nowadays, but I blame the backlog staring accusingly from the shelf... and I have way more patients with games that take their sweet time to get going, but less patience with dying over and over.

I still go to locals for a great many fighting games. I'm probably decades older than ya but I can still play with some of the younger crowd depending on the games.

It's all about practice, but you have to be into that kind of stuff.

I can play for hours just doing LAB for brawlers and fighters. It's part of the longevity of these games too.

I'm really good at SNK games from 1992 to 2005 era. I sort of struggle with KOF XIII but I can handle most of my opponents that I come across. I'm decent in Skullgirls but one of my kids destroys me in this game when they come to visit. I have to lab that game a lot to defend probably against her. Tekken 3 to 7 I am Decent to Great in. My grandkids can pose a challenge to me in 7 sometimes but with the right character I'm going to devour them - Gigas, Geese, Akuma, Miguel and Negan.

Air dashers are my only challenge but I believe that is due to my lack of interest in those types of fighting games. Not because of my age.

MK 1 to 4 and 11, I rock everyone I know and I do excellently at locals.

But I do think when I approach my 80's I may need to tap out.

As for online, I do not play online at all unless it's with ppl I know in real life. I mostly do locals. If and when I do go online it has to be with Fightcade as too many online fighters have trash netcode.

Maybe, but it's been a few weeks and I'm not seeing much improvement haha. I'm still plugging away at it though. MKXL is really great!

Everyone's cognitive/motor/hand eye coordination skills, etc. decline with age. That's just how life works.

That's why you never see eSports pros who are in their 40's or 50's. Because by that age, their skills will have naturally declined too much, simply because of their age, which renders them no longer able to compete with their younger rivals.

or because most esports are fake and a cynical attempt to make money or promote something else. Minecraft conventions had the same undertones.

This is not true in the fighting game scene. Most of the top tier pros are 40+ from Daigo Umehara to Zerok to Trung. In the SF, KOF and Tekken scene a lot of the signed up pros are up there in age. Around 50, they start moving into commentary.

I've been watching tournaments over lunch lately and they're pretty much all kids, but I'm not watching Tekken or SF much. I'm watching ML, Injustice and Killer Instinct.

SF? I totally suck at SFA3, SF3: 3rd Strike and USF4! so let's have some nice and relaxing online button mashing someday?

I dunno, being a bit older I thought I was able to train up my skills pretty well. I think it somewhat balances out by being a bit more tactically wise and shrewd than younger players. For example I've read The Art of War, while I would probably guess they havn't gotten around to it yet.

Execution was something I always struggled with. It's not just about how quickly you can input a command, but also your ability to time it. Modern fighting games tend to be more lenient from their 90s counterparts though.

That being said, I'm a still a better than I was during my teenage years because I started to work on fundamentals more. In simplified terms, it's knowing what, when, and where to attack/defend in a given situation.

I haven't noticed any discernible impact by my age playing fast action games (related to e.g. reflexes or eye-hand coordination), when trying some early arcade games or TI-99/4A or Amiga games from my youth. I still seem to be doing just as fine as I remember doing it in my youth, playing e.g. Munchman, TI Invaders and Parsec today.

Then again, I never was that good and liked Street Fighter 2 or Tekken type of fighting games in my youth anyway, so I didn't play that particular genre that much, if it is some kind of ultimate test of one's reaction times and eye-hand coordination. I always abhorred the whole idea of the gameplay consisting mainly of memorizing different moves which were behind complicated button combos etc. I did play Virtua Fighter 2 in arcade a bit, but when I bought e.g. SSFT2 for PC and there were very complicated moves to learn, I just gave up on it, I had absolutely no desire to learn such gameplay that didn't feel... natural, but felt more about memorizing all kinds of button and controller combos.

One thing that has changed is my eyesight. I was always (genetically) a bit "farsighted" (so I've always seen ok far, but seeing small text near is more challenging without reading glasses), so nowadays I need to use reading glasses (+1.00 or even +1.50) if I am reading little text. I don't need glasses when playing e.g. a generic FPS game like Team Fortress 2 online, but I use reading glasses when playing e.g. the Homeworld games, as they tend to have very small units on screen when you zoom out, so you want to see even the tiniest details and pixels on the screen.

Poorer sight is basically nature's own antialiasing and texture filtering for all your games! Suddenly you don't mind blockier graphics and lower resolutions that much. Who needs 4K or 8K, when HD looks just as good to your eyes even on a bigger monitor?

Well, only fighting game I follow is Tekken 7, and famous Korean players JDCR and Knee are over 30. That being said, I don't recommend learning Tekken as a fighting game if you don't have a lot of time and patience, because Tekken 7 has over 40 characters with each having over 100 moves.

It's still the most fun fighting game to watch, though.

So you're saying your ability to aimlessly mash buttons has diminished? :P

I jest - but to be honest I've never liked fighting games that relied on impossible button combinations for combos. Not even when I was young(er) could I get them right. I think I managed to pull off a few old-school Mortal Kombat fatalities in my lifetime, and that's enough for me :P.