Meet the Skyrim obsessed gamer granny with 170k YouTube subscribers
She's got more subscribers than you
After a quick poll of the ShortList offices, nans tend to fit into one of two broad categories: bitter Daily Mail readers harbouring concerning shades of racism, or awesome. Biscuit pedalling, cake making, salt-of-the-earth awesome.
Shirley Curry, hailing from Virginia, USA, fits bang in the centre of this latter category. She is the awesome nan around whom all other nans orbit. Curry is an 80-year-old grandmother (she's got four sons, nine grand children and one great-grand son) with a gaming obsession. Since September 2015, she's run a YouTube channel (169,759 subscribers, 4,192,729 views), dedicated to her love of gaming - and she's just posted her 300th vlog entry.
"For those who want to know what kind of games I like: I only like real people/movie type games. I've tried other kinds of games but I don't enjoy them. :)", she explains on her channel.
Her most beloved "people/movie type" game is Bethesda's sprawling role playing adventure, Skyrim. Curry's love of Skyrim parallels your grandmother's love of knitting.
You might not be a fan of YouTube gaming videos; it's a divisive medium, some people taking untold pleasure in watching other people sit and play video games while narrating their own adventure, while others (like us) get bored after three minutes as we'd rather play the game ourselves. However, Curry's video style is so charming, so inoffensive, so granny-ish, that you can't help but be sucked in by her exploits.
Take this, her first Skyrim episode...
This isn't some doddery pensioner getting strong armed into playing video games on YouTube by some grandkids who think it would be "a laugh". This is a proper gamer, with a genuine love of video games, upgrading her gaming computer and taking great care in replying to the requests of her fans across YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
She just happens to be old enough to remember the creation of the first console, the launch of the first Game Boy, the release of Pong for goodness sake.
Here she is playing Fallout 4 for the first time, where she explains that "The apocalypse just happened", like it's an episode of Corrie.
She's on top of matters the wider video game community is engaged with: here she gives her take on the schismatic title, No Man's Sky...
If you've got a mild interest in video games, we urge you to have a click through her videos right here. She's not overbearing, she's not opinionated, she's not desperate for your subscription. She's just a gamer who loves gaming.
We hope we're half as cool (and lucid) as Shirley Curry when we're 80.
