Greetings

Greetings All,

I read the article on 2old2play in The Wall Street Journal and thought, "that sounds like a community of people like me!"

Basic 411: Living in Portland, OR, 38, medical librarian and education coordinator at a hospital, live with my girlfriend. Two masters degrees (the impractical "warm up" masters in creative writing and the slightly more practice masters in library science)

I have pretty eclectic interests from competitive distance running and cycling, foreign policy, economics, avid sports fan and science fiction geek, tabletop old school RPGs like dungeons and dragons to gaming. I'm not very competitive in cycling and in most races get dropped like a bad habit but in 23 years of running I've won a handful of races and run a 2:44 marathon/34:07 10k.

My first experiences with video games were, of course in the arcades in the early 1980s, but the first system we owned was the "Intellivsion," followed by a Franklin Ace 2000. My siblings and I would tell my parents to get us either an Atari or a Coleco...we got an Intellivision instead. We asked for either a Commodore 64 or Apple II....we got something called a Franklin Ace 2000, instead. Very lame. Moved on to Nintendo in 1985 and then Sega Genesis II in 1994. Totally stopped playing both video games and tabletop RPGs when my life become dominated by work, school, commuting, run training (aka "modern life")....until about four years ago when I rediscovered the enjoyment of both PC video games and RPGs. I spent the first 3 years getting "caught up" on the games on the 2000s (Everyone's playing Final Fantasy XIV and I'm playing Baldur's Gate from 1998....everyone is playing Star Wars Old Rep MMO and I'm playing Star Wars Old Republic very, very much offline from 2003).

Current video game tastes: grand campaign and historical strategy games, a few sports games, and "well done" shooter games like World of Tanks, Left4Dead2, Spec Ops and hoping WarZ will someday grow up and become a complete game with a culture and play style a little better suited for me. I'm coming to like some first person shooters but for some reason gravitate towards third person (loved both Death to Spies).

Likely next game purchase: European Escalation.