And what exactly does "growing up" entail? I mean i have many of the same responsibilities that my father had, and that his father had before him. I work, i pay bills, i have family obligations, i regularly go out with other non-gamer adults. The one difference between my life and the generation before me is that i also play games.

Actually, the "oddity" is that "adults" _are_ "growing up." They're growing out of the projections force-fed to them by previous generations. There is no _instinctual_ need to stop playing in the human organism. Many mammals continue to play throughout their life cycles in order to sharpen needed life skills, socialize, and simply relax.

It is a human oddity that we _feel_ the societally-projected need to appear "something" (that something being a psychological state, setting aside the peacock's [and other fauna's] need to appear bigger and more threatening when threatened) to someone else. In this case, the misconception is that "adults" need to appear "responsible" to their fellow humans. What are appearances? Appearances are a facade, nothing more. Actors portray "appearances" all the time, yet that doesn't make them the characters they appear to be.

No more, then, is the "normal" adult who appears to be "responsible," who _only_ carries out the expectations of society and then drowns their repressed selves in alcohol, drugs, anger, or any other self-destructive behavior. Such a person is only "appearing" to be "normal" and "responsible." When society, or an individual, forces themselves to adhere to a "norm" that, frankly, isn't them, you will find the births of aberrations in that individual or societal being.