Sooo, what now?

 My decision to quit being an avant-gardistic gamer yesterday was a long time in the making. It does beg to pose a few questions. Do I return to my roots? And what will I do now?

By returning to my roots I mean the genre of games that grabbed my attention more than anything else. Text and point&click adventures. Those aren't made anymore except for homebrew genre-fan efforts and quite frankly, 99% of those efforts aren't worth anybody's time. The cross-over to full-blown RPG's was an easy one, as the hard rock and metal-scene overhere also included table-top pen&paper rpgs and miniature tabletop rpg/battles. Sadly, I have long since outgrown the target-demographic for miniature gaming and visiting a Games Workshop store makes me feel like a pedophile now. (Oh little booooyyyy, wanna see my "battlehound"? -- I pass on the stigma, thank you very much.)

So narrowing my hobby to a light-version focussing squarely on RPG's seems like a logical and sensible choice, be it that RPG's themselves, RPG's of worth that is, are few and far between. Most of them are "enjoyable" if you're willing to close your eyes to lack of choice and freedom. many are just badly done and ill thought out. Ego Dragonis, Two Worlds and the most notable one, Fallout NV, amongst others. JRPG's aren't much better, we're still playing a differently told FF7 ever since FF7. And that's not even mentioning trying to figure out what Square wanted to do with FF13...

And even though Skyrim is quite probably the most impressive RPG ever, raising the bar in many aspects for other studios to even try and meet, nothing can take away from the fact that Skyrim has been dumbed down to accomodate easy of play. It isn't overly complicated at any rate. I do find that many people make the game hard on themselves by ignoring all the things that Bethesda has given them to make their life easier and looking for helpful glitches instead...

It looks thus, that my hobby will become extreme-ultra-light! When my XBL-sub runs out early next year, I'll let it lapse to Silver. I never was much of a multiplayer to begin with and the one game I would be interested in MPing is RB3. The chances to jam with 2o2p-members are too few for me to warrant paying another €50, and playing with randoms result invariably at me being booted because I like to play on hard instead of expert online. That said, rythm gaming is a nice side to RPG's and I will only give that up when Harmonix calls it quits and shuts down the validation-server. I mean, the Nickleback DLC of this week -- what rythm-gamer passes up on that?

What you people don't know about me is that I hold the largest most complete SF-novel library in the Netherlands. Many of my books are first prints and portions of my collection are given in loan to the National Library. It's a library my father and I built over decades. Something we did together, as father and son. I can boast having read at least 80% of the entire library... but since a few years I have been less active collecting new titles. I'm thinking about restoring the library to former glory, and expanding it to include titles that aren't being translated to Dutch. My father couldn't read english very well, so I kept those titles to a minimum.

I'll have my work cut out for me though. There's the hunt for translated titles the library doesn't hold yet, the research in what has been published since my hiatus and to start expanding into different languages (if they are original titles, that is.).

What I'm actually hoping for is that over time, my library will absorb my attention completely. I'm not going to force myself away from gaming, but if it happens it will have happened naturally, a result of my interest making a shift that came logically.

The biggest problem I have isn't gaming however. It's my disability. I have just too much time on my hands! XD