SEATTLE – Local gamer William Irons reportedly hasn’t left his basement to eat or sleep in 14 hours, instead opting to spend his only day off continually solo queueing ranked Valorant matches.

“I just need one more fucking win. It’s always my rank up and then some asshole will lock a duelist and then bitch about how we don’t have any smokes. Why should I have to do everything? All of my teammates today have been terrible,” complained Irons, crushing up an Adderall and stirring it into his energy drink.

“I should get a microwave down here, to go with the minifridge under my desk. Then I could make pizza rolls without standing up, which would probably help with the muscle atrophy and general fatigue.”

We reached out to several players that were in games with Irons in order to get another perspective on the situation.

“I matched with him for two games in a row, and he really brought the mood down both times. Any time he’d make a callout I could hear his stomach growling, and he really did sound like a zombie,” said hard-stuck Platinum player CSisBetter when we sent them a DM.

“We even won that first game, which was surprising because he instalocked Jett and then complained we didn’t have any smokes. It was a close match for sure. We won in overtime, but he still seemed really down about it and called us bad teammates right at the end. I confronted him about it when we matched again, but he kept interrupting me by saying I was gaslighting him and pretending he didn’t know what I was talking about. I’m pretty sure I heard him crying in the background at some point. He seems like a generally really nice guy and honestly I feel really bad for him. Maybe he needs therapy or something.”

We then decided to follow-up with Irons’ therapist, who really shouldn’t have replied to us at all because of patient confidentiality.

“He gets like this a lot. Maybe he’d be happier if he learned Brim or Omen like I keep telling him to, but he refuses to play any agents that aren’t duelists. I’m not a therapist, by the way. I’m really not sure how you got that impression, or how you found out where I live. We just play Warcraft together sometimes,” said Irons’ therapist.

“I am really concerned about him though. After his girlfriend left him because he couldn’t climb out of Gold I’ve barely seen him. Apparently he only eats frozen garbage, if he eats at all. I seriously am done talking to you though. Please get out of my house.”

In an attempt to better his mental health, Irons has decided to pick up League of Legends

SEATTLE – Jack Jones, a 27-year-old accountant, was reportedly shaken to his core during his morning commute when a podcast he was listening to described Grand Theft Auto IV as a “classic game.”

“I dissociated so hard I almost crashed my car,” said Jones, taking the opportunity to talk to a reporter directly after a therapy session. “I mean, ‘classic?’ Really? We’re not talking about NES games here. GTA IV was on the Xbox 360! I didn’t think I was that old… but ever since I listened to that podcast, my back has been hurting.”

What happened to Jack Jones was no anomaly, sources confirmed. Many “young” people in Jones’s age group are beginning to experience the same phenomenon, with even younger games.

“I remember the first time a game I had played on release got called a ‘classic,’” recalls Suzie Dupree, a grizzled old gamer of 24 years. Dupree has spent the better part of a decade as an avid gamer and she says that this experience is becoming a regular part of life for aging citizens. “I played God of War III when it came out in 2010. When the first new God of War came out, a few years ago, I began to hear people refer to the old games as ‘classic’ God of War. It came as quite a shock to me, then, but I’ve begun to adapt. We’re all getting older, after all. And there’s nothing wrong with growing older!”

In order to help grapple with this issue, Wallace Quaid, 37-year-old gamer and Jack Jones’s therapist, shared some words of wisdom.

“You can’t let it eat away at you. That’s what it comes down to, really. Our lives start passing faster and faster, and you eventually start going, ‘hey, where’d the time go?’ But things will get better for you if you accept it,” said Quaid. “It is important to start understanding that you will never properly understand what a ‘skibidi toilet’ is, that your taste in music is increasingly set in stone, and that we are no longer the target audience for most games. These people are still young, in the grand scheme of their lives. They are just starting to experience the first pangs of getting older and becoming out of touch.”

The interview with Quaid was scheduled to go longer, but he excused himself. “I have a doctor’s appointment to get to, if you don’t mind ending this interview early. My physician told me the other week that I need to start getting prostate exams annually.”