82-year-old 'Gamer Grandma' takes YouTube break over comments

At 82, Shirley Curry doesn’t fit the mold.

It’s endeared her to some online. For others, it’s made her a target.

Curry of Rocky Mount, Va., was born the same year as the invention of what’s been hailed as the first programmable computer. Eight decades later, she shares with thousands of YouTube followers her adventures in the digital world of Tamriel in the massive epic fantasy game “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.”

When Vice featured her in a 2016 profile, she was 79, had only recently begun monitizing her videos and was known as Gamer Grandma to her 115,000 YouTube subscribers.

In the mid-90s, according to the profile by Xiaoran Shi, Curry got hooked on the strategy game “Civilization II,” fixating on the series until Skyrim got its talons into her much later (the game was released in 2011). Her first gameplay video went viral overnight, flooding her inbox with 11,000 emails.

“I just sat there and cried,” she told Vice. “I didn’t know what to do with all of it.”

She related to Shi that she wished more elderly gamers would be up-front about their favorite pastime.

“Then everybody would know there are lots of older people and it wouldn’t be such a big deal,” she said.

Apparently, it’s still too much of a leap for younger players to believe an 82-year-old grandmother knows her way around Tamriel. And it’s taken its toll on Curry. In fact, it’s had such an impact on her that’s she’s decided to take a break from posting videos.

“After four years of consistently uploading videos in which she roleplays through the games’ myriad quests, Curry is scaling back because she’s tired of the way that her own fanbase treats her,” Vice reported.

In a video last month explaining the decision to viewers — she now has 887,000 subscribers — she laments, “Some of the comments are stressing me out way too much.

“My health isn’t very good,” she says. “My blood pressure is going insane. My stress level is way too high. And I’m going to have to take control of it.”

“I’ve played Skyrim for years, and I know about the (heads-up display),” she says. “I know about the different mechanics of how to play the game. And I don’t have to be reminded and told all the time.

“I don’t have to be told about what games to play and describe to me what the games are like. I look at all the games. I’m a gamer. If I wanted to play them, I would be playing them.”

She’s not worried about how many followers she has, she says. She was planning on taking a break from uploading videos, after which she planned to scale back her posts in an effort to recapture the fun of the game.

“I’m not enjoying recording anymore at all. It’s no longer fun,” she says. “I feel like I’m under a microscope all the time.”