Creator “retirement” has been something of a trend this year, with stars on Twitch and YouTube stepping back from the content grind. The latest person to join their ranks is Shirley Curry, the beloved 88-year-old who plays Skyrim.
In a vlog yesterday titled “No More Gaming Videos,” Curry announced that she’s going to stop making gaming videos because, like many of the folks who’ve made this announcement before her, she’s tired of it. “I’m old and I’m tired,” she says. “It seems like I spend most of my time sitting in here at this computer, and lately–probably for the last month–I walk in here and look at my computer and think, ‘I’ve got to make a video today’ and then I just shake my head at myself and say ‘I don’t want to, I have no desire to’ and I turn around and walk back out.
“I’m just doing it for fun, and it isn’t fun anymore,” she says later in the video. “I’m tired of it, I’m bored with it, bored to death with it, so I’m making the decision now totally, finally, I am not going to be making any more game videos and uploading them.”
Curry isn’t completely abandoning YouTube, however. She says she’ll still make vlogs when the mood strikes her, “if I were to receive a gift or if I buy something I think is really cute, anything like that, if I see some pretty flowers sometimes I might take a video or a picture or something and come make a vlog and let you see it.” She also says she might make videos of herself reading Skyrim books, books she likes, or even stories she’s written herself.
In her offline time, Curry says, first she’s going to be having eye surgery. After that, there’s a quilt she’s been meaning to make. And she reminds viewers that she has a hefty backlog of videos for them to watch if they still want to get their Skyrim fix.
Part of Curry’s appeal is the incongruousness of someone who looks and sounds like your grandma (she calls viewers “grandkids”) making gaming videos, but that hasn’t made her immune from the common pitfalls of content creation. In 2020, she took a break due to toxic comments. And she’s wrestled with the pressures of being online since she started, telling PCGamer in 2016 that “The obligation makes me feel worn out a lot of the time. But the obligation also makes me feel guilty… It makes me feel guilty if I skip a day or two."
It’s a pressure a lot of content creators echo, though many of them have the added stress of it being an actual job they can’t just step away from. And Curry’s retirement mimics that of big-name streamers who’ve changed their approach this year: not actually leaving their platforms or giving up making videos, but stepping back from the most grind-like aspects to focus on the content they like. As Nathan wrote of streamers “retiring” earlier this year,
creators aren’t actually quitting: They still want to make stuff! They just don’t want to spend their lives in mind-numbing thrall to The Algorithm… The big creators who’ve announced their "retirement" are finally breaking free of that cycle, and good for them. They’re also doing something that smaller creators – and people working regular, less glamorous jobs – cannot.
In Curry’s case, it seems like she’s fallen into a pitfall many people far younger than her do: turning a hobby, especially online, into basically a fulltime job, thanks to the expectations of an audience and the infectious tentacles of hustle culture. I am certainly not one to speak here, since my favorite thing to do in my non-work hours is to do more work, but it can be easy to lose a sense of balance and forget that fun things are, well, supposed to be fun. If Curry, with decades more life experience than me and likely most of you reading this, can fall prey to the siren song of overwork, what hope do the rest of us have?
But I think her example here is a great one: noticing and naming her feelings, and taking steps to bring her life back into balance. The videos she still intends to make are the things that bring her joy: pretty flowers, cool stuff, hobbies outside of gaming. And she’s going to focus on her offline life too, including her health. (::Looks at pile of doctor’s appointment reminders I’ve been ignoring::) Few of us will ever be able to create a life that only contains things we want to do, but we can all prioritze making a little more time for fun, and remembering to focus on the fun aspect of that stuff and not turning it into something that takes from our lives more than it gives.
So enjoy your retirement, Skyrim grandma. I hope the quilt turns out well.
