They play CS:GO, Street Fighter 6 too: More seniors interested in e-sports

SINGAPORE – As the clock ticked down at the top of his screen, 71-year-old Philip Tang knew he had to defuse the explosive quickly to win the round for his team.

Stress was building as opponents shot from all angles at him. He ended up rushing to the wrong site and could only watch and laugh with his teammates as the bomb exploded.

“As a newbie, there are blunders, but each of us enjoys it with laughter for our silliness. All these bring the team closer together as we learn and share in the joy and failure together,” said Tang, as he recounted his earliest memories of playing the video game Counter-Strike.

The retired technical manager is the captain and rifler of SQUAD2X2, an e-sports team of seniors specialising in the first-person shooter game. The team was founded with four members, aged 64 to 76, after they completed a training course for the game in September 2023.

They now have five members, two men and three women, and have found some success. The team placed first out of six at Silver Showdown 2025, a national senior e-sports competition organised by the Singapore Cybersports and Online Gaming Association (SCOGA).

Tang, whose in-game name is TAnGo, said: “(Playing as a team) also creates opportunities for social connection and support in helping each other as we continue to learn together and build up one another in handling the ups and downs of gaming.”

As the number of seniors interested in e-sports grows, various organisations are considering how they can offer this group more such activities.

OCBC and Lions Befrienders on June 27 launched a programme to provide 2,400 e-sports coaching sessions for seniors in gaming facilities in Bishan, Pasir Ris and Jurong West.

The sessions will be funded by a $100,000 contribution from OCBC and will be supported by 800 volunteers from the bank, as well as coaches from SCOGA.

Each class of eight to 10 seniors will have 12 sessions under the programme, where they learn to play games such as Counter-Strike 2, Street Fighter 6, Nintendo Switch Sports, Ring Fit Adventure and Just Dance.

SCOGA president Dennis Ooi said from 2023 to 2024, more than 100 seniors attended its e-sports training sessions and events. That number has doubled to more than 200 in 2025.

He said: “The first challenge is unfamiliarity. Many seniors have never used a gaming mouse, keyboard or a controller… The biggest hurdle is not the games themselves, but getting started and overcoming the worry that gaming is not for them.”

Noting that e-sports was formally recognised as a sport in Singapore earlier in 2026, Ooi said the programme was to make sure that e-sports is accessible to everyone, including senior citizens.

Lions Befrienders executive director Karen Wee said the agency sees opportunities to integrate artificial intelligence into e-sports to support healthy ageing.

“AI could personalise training according to each senior’s abilities, monitor progress in cognitive and physical performance, recommend suitable games, provide multilingual coaching and generate insights that help identify early signs of cognitive decline or social isolation,” she said.

NTUC Health has also introduced e-sports through Nintendo games across its active ageing centres (AACs). It organised Nintendo gaming competitions during its inaugural Active Ageing Centre Day on Oct 1, 2025.

In January, its AAC in Woodlands East introduced a Counter-Strike pilot programme.

Lily Yeo, head of NTUC Health Active Ageing Centres, said that the number of e-sports sessions across the enterprise’s AACs has more than tripled from under 100 from April 2024 to March 2025 to more than 300 from April 2025 to March 2026.

She added that NTUC Health now offers e-sports activities at 17 AACs, up from 12, and plans to continue expanding its range of such activities.

“We see e-sports as one of many ways to engage different profiles of seniors,” said Yeo.

Retired operations director Lim Beng Hong, who has recently picked up Street Fighter 6, said e-sports facilities in AACs may attract senior citizens to the centres and promote social interaction.

“Some seniors may go to the community centres to play table tennis or badminton. Once the AACs have e-sports facilities, they can go there instead. At the same time, they can join in other activities and make more friends,” said the 65-year-old.

For Norhana Yahaya, participating in e-sports has improved her stamina, mobility and coordination. You may catch the 70-year-old dancing to hit song APT. by Blackpink’s Rose and Bruno Mars – her favourite song in Just Dance – at the arcade.

“Sometimes when I play mahjong, I realise that my hand moves faster than my brain,” Norhana said, citing e-sports as one reason her reflexes have improved.

Anthropologist Zahirah Suhaimi, from Duke-NUS Medical School’s Centre for Ageing Research and Education, said that there may be growing interest in e-sports among the incoming cohort of older people who adapted to new technologies during their working lives.

“Some, like my father and uncles, were playing first-person shooter and multiplayer console games with their kids. They are understandably more comfortable and competent with it than the cohort before them,” said Zahirah.

She said that the social element of e-sports can combat loneliness, which is linked to poorer health outcomes later in life.

“What shifts loneliness isn’t simply turning up – it’s the quality of the connection and a growing sense of one’s own competence or personal mastery,” she said.

“E-sports, played as a coached team, is interesting precisely because improving at the game builds confidence, and doing it with the same people over time can build friendship.”

But a person may work alongside the same team for years and yet not feel close to anyone, said Zahirah.

“Identifying the subtle social mechanisms that genuinely shift the needle on loneliness is what makes a programme like this worthwhile… Whether e-sports function as a social scaffolding mechanism for older persons in this existing arrangement would be an interesting phenomenon worth looking at,” she said.