Think of the average gamer you meet when playing online. What sort of person is it? Probably some 12-year old kid that inexplicably knows your mother intimately. He’s only one of many of course – angry kids are a dime a dozen in online games.
The more mature the game the more kids there are – a famous example is of course Call of Duty. You couldn’t shake a pistol around in the game without finding an angry kid. That however is beside the point. What is the point? There is a kind of person that DOESN’T show up in video games. Grandmothers. The sweet, needlepoint-loving, grandkid-feeding kind. The kind that almost everyone has or had and remembers fondly.
That just doesn’t happen. After all, old people aren’t exactly known for their love of video games. Now, obviously we aren’t writing this article to tell you that there isn’t any gaming grannies out there. There is one, and she is the cutest thing you have ever seen.
Her name is Shirley Curry, and September last year, she uploaded a video to YouTube, one of herself playing Skyrim. That’s right, the lady has great taste in games on top of being the sweetest thing on the Internet. Overnight, her inbox was flooded with messages. A Redditor had posted her video and it was shared time and time again.
Shirley was terrified. Apparently, all the attention was too much for her and she even cried about it. To quote the 79-year old: “I just sat there and cried. It scared the puddin’ out of me. I didn’t know what to do.”
After she got over her surprise and shock, she did what any amazing grandma would do – she opened each and every one of her emails and wrote back. Did we mention there were over 11000 of them?
This is what she had to say about it: “When I realized the kind of comments I was getting, it got really fun. Some of them were really touching, and as the days went on and the comments kept coming I started getting attached to these people. Some of them would really make me cry and some were so hilariously funny I’d just sit here and laugh. They were all so very sweet.”
Despite this, she never wanted all the attention – she joined YouTube to better follow the channels she herself enjoyed. She started gaming in the 90s – her first game was Sid Meier’s Civ 2. She has REALLY good taste in games.
A few subscribers asked her to record herself playing Skyrim and she obliged – then, suddenly, it blew up. She’s played more games of course – Ark: Survival Evolved, Fallout 4 and even No Man’s Sky. Before her instant fame, she used to spend her days reading sci-fi novels and quilting, but now she doesn’t have much time left for that any more.
Instead, she spends most of her waking hours working on her channel and recording her videos. Some of them are downright boring by YouTube standards. She doesn’t record epic battles or even action-packed PvP scenes…no, quite often she will record herself taking a stroll in a beautiful world. It takes some immense talent and skill to make this stroll interesting to watch, and she does it perfectly.
Now, we’re not conclusively saying that Shirley is the BEST grandmother out there (after all, all grandma’s are amazing by default) but on the overall scoreboard, she ranks pretty damn high. Now, obviously not every comment was kind. This is the Internet after all, and we’ve spent enough time on it to know better than to expect good things.
To begin with, Shirley responded even to the hateful ones. Now she’s more selective, something she actually regrets a little: “I think of the people that are on my channel and I don’t want them reading that nasty stuff, I want my channel to be a good channel. I’ve actually had some comment back and say I’m sorry Grandma Shirley, I won’t talk like that any more. That surprised me to death. They need somebody to try and teach them some manners. Evidently they don’t get it at home.”
If you’re wondering why she’s so good at being an awesome grandma, it’s because she has real-life practice. Her nine grandchildren have gotten to enjoy her for a long time, and thankfully now the Internet does too! She has slowed her activities down a little bit – that kind of effort takes an incredible toll on a woman of such a respectable age. Despite this, the kind and loving comments she receives are what keeps her going.
So, if you get the chance, watch one of her videos on her channel and leave her a kind comment – if there’s someone who deserves it, it’s her! You can find her channel here (last we saw, she had well over 287,000 subscribers: Keep on being awesome, Shirley!