I’m gonna go against the current here and say no. Videogames are not a good hobby and a poor investment of your time. If the alternative is deer hunting or anything shady then playing videogames is one of the less harmful things you can do on earth but among the thousand activities you can do and pick up as a hobby videogames are not free of issues.

First of all by specifically getting into video games you are looking at stare at a screen and sit for hours. Not a big deal if you can manage it but don’t limit yourself to just videogames, there are board games, social games, mind sports and many other games you can get into.

Videogames industry has become very rotten and has appropriated the whole community. Many of the titles being suggested here are “products” made by evil companies with mechanics built to mess up with people. Steam which many recommended you to download is a proprietary software launcher that belongs to a company that has no problem pushing loot boxes and abduct kids into gambling. That’s the sort of business you are getting your hands into.

My wife didn’t typically game in the traditional sense, but games she’s enjoyed in the past are the older Mario games, the Sims, and project zomboid (which she describes as the Sims but with zombies).

She’s also got like 100 hours in power washing simulator and she’s too scared to try Stardew valley because she knows it’ll consume her life.

Get a Switch Lite and go from there. If you already have a midrange PC with decent iGPU, download Steam and play an older but highly rated game.

Don’t spend too much before deciding if it is for you. Find the cheapest entry point.

… Yes?

Start wherever. Buy games with interesting covers or play free demos.

I’m 31 and I only really started playing games around 4 years ago, apart from playing on bootleg NES consoles or C64 as a kid.

It is worth it if you have fun doing it, and you probably will!

If you don’t know where to start, you probably still haven’t figure out what genres you’d be into.

You might like Steam Deck, an affordable console-like handheld PC, because:

• It offers a wide variety of games from all generations, so if you want to experiment with different genres you can always find something for yourself - you can purchase a game on Steam store and if it’s not for you, just return it below 2h of gameplay
• Very user friendly, easy to navigate for non-techies, despite being PC, for the most part it just works, great entry for folks with no prior experience with PC gaming
• It’s a handheld! Take it with you anywhere easily, play in bed, on couch, toilet, whatever. If you’re used to playing on a phone, this might be appealing
• you can still dock it as a regular PC and have mouse+keyboard+external screen if you want to try gaming this way
• if you want to tinker to explore even further, you can emulate older consoles, play with 3rd party launchers, use it for other things than gaming, even replace the software completely - it is all possible

Other choices are perfectly valid like Nintendo Switch, Xbox or PS5, but they’re within their respective closed ecosystems. With Xbox and PS5 you’re also stuck with TV. Consoles have limited backwards compatibility, so for example Switch only supports games for Switch, PS5 supports games for PS5 and PS4, and it’s a bit better with Xbox iirc.

If you want Nintendo Switch (if games like Mario or Zelda are appealing to you), maybe wait a little bit as they’re cooking new generation for release soon-ish, and the current one is old and miserable in terms of performance.

A lot of women I know who aren’t the typical “gamer” type really enjoy Stardew Valley. It’s a little farming game where you live in a town, foster relationships with the townspeople, and generally go about small town life. Very cute game, especially fun with friends.

Also Minecraft, it’s very open ended and there are many ways to play it.

As for how to start, an affordable laptop will run both of these fairly well, if you want Nintendo games you’ll probably have to get a Nintendo Switch.

Definitely make a Steam account though, you’ll find pretty much all the games you could want in one place there (Minecraft is separate).

This game recommendation thingy might be helpful: https://apps.quanticfoundry.com/surveys/start/gamerprofile/

In the profile you choose what you are looking for in a gaming experience - it doesn’t matter if you don’t know yet or need to make up some answers. There are questions like “How important is working towards a common goal with other players?”

It’s a place to start anyway.

I’d say start with some of the most popular games, like Mario and Pokemon. Those are the two biggest video game franchises in the world, they’re very accessible and even decades later still a ton of fun.

edit: FWIW, Nintendo is a problematic video game company and trying to destroy video game preservation of their games (and trying to prevent community-run video game competitions/tournaments of their games), but they still have made some of the best video games of all time.

Can I go completely 180 and suggest programming as a hobby? If you want a hobby where you’re in a computer. Then try learning to program little things. If you work on a computer then it’ll make things easier for you in the future, it’ll keep your brain sharp and teaches you problem solving.

My wife is a 30+ woman and she loved (among others) OneShot, World of Goo, and Final Fantasy XV.

OneShot is an atmospheric, story-based game with some puzzle elements and a lot of lovable characters. On the flip side, there’s a lot of walking and it’s easy to get lost. Nevertheless, there’s a deep connection you as the player can build with the characters and the world they inhabit.

World of Goo is a physics-based building game, where you build bridges and towers out of cute sentient rubber-like balls, but beneath the solid physics, art and music there lies a deep social commentary too.

Final Fantasy XV is the most mainstream of these, but it is an entry into the FF games specifically designed for newcomers in mind. It follows four main and several supporting characters on a journey that starts as a road trip interspersed with beginner-friendly but still jaw-droppingly well rendered and animated combat and slowly but surely escalated to an epic catharsis.

If you like puzzle games I suggest trying portal. Portal 1 is inexpensive on Steam and playable on any modern PC including on Linux. It’s low pressure, has some humor, not very violent, and you can restart from anywhere you like.

Get a switch lite, yeah. I highly recommend playing star fox 64, Pokemon stadium, and the older legend of Zelda games. They are very good entry points into gaming and are all available via a Nintendo online membership.

Try out open-source games too, not just the big corporate games. Space Station 14, OpenTTD, Endless Sky, Naev, plenty of choices. Saw someone here rant about how the “videogames industry has become very rotten” and decided I’d point you to a non-rotten part of it.

I will say, as a 30 year old man I had the urge to start playing games because they just looked so good these days. I played a little here and there growing up, but all of my friends were gamers and I just wasn’t interested. When I got interested, I found a lot of fun and joy in it.

I’m still not your typical gamer. I find a few games I really love and I keep playing them over and over—great campaigns with great story telling and great characters and great graphics are so much of it. Since I started playing video games in like 2020, I’ve basically played four games, but two of them I’ve played a bunch of times (red dead redemption II and Cyberpunk).

Now I’m looking at Stalker 2 and I think that might be my next game I want to play to death. Gotta wait to hear how people feel about it though.

App games are video games so if you think playing on your phone is worth it, then playing on a dedicated gaming device should be worth it too.

You can start by choosing a platform. You can stick to mobile (Switch, Steam Deck), go console (Xbox, PS5, Switch), or a gaming PC.