First!

    Lets be honest with each other from the beginning. I'm writing this blog because I'm thirty years old now, and I feel the slow inevitable chill of age creeping into me. Not in my joints or bones, but into my mind. I have begun to look at things and think to myself "In my day things were better". And I have to wonder, were they? After all, when I first entered the world of gaming, we did things with pencils and paper, with cards and miniatures. We had imaginations back then. Now, I can sit down at my computer, hack away at the corpse of my enemy until... well.... until I have to get up to pee really.
    An imagination is no longer required. I know what every monster and magic sword from here to Meridian looks like because it has been rendered for me in glorious and for some reason slightly cartoonish fashion. Where once I looked forward to descending into my buddies basement to roll some dice and drink Mt Dew until the sun crested the horizon, now I simply plop into my computer chair and repeatedly mash my action bar (four arcane blasts and then my missiles should have proced). I don't need to interact with another living soul to get my game on. Some nights my wife and I will be mere feet from one another, but will communicate through online whispers. Have I lost my mind.... My sanity?

He's clearly lost something

    No, I've just forgotten my roots. Lets face it, to be a gamer today is to exist as a member of a prime marketing demographic. Companies have caught on that gamers spend money, and they devote much of their time to churning out products for you to tear through your disposable income like Charlie Sheen in a meth lab.
In the dark days of the 80's, when Dungeons and Dragons was something your parents still feared, we were filled with glee when a new book was finally released, months if not a full year after the last. There was no web page to hype it's production. Hell, if you even knew about the books release before you saw it on a dusty hobby store shelf, it meant that you either had some connection deep inside the gaming underground, or you had used the last wish from the ring that old man gave you for rescuing his daughter from the Githyanki. Now, however, we are virtually guaranteed a new release every month from a slew of major companies all fighting hard for your dollars. Let us get back to the 80's, where it was socially acceptable, and completely normal to dress like this:

This photo was described as a costume

If I wanted to jump over turtles and shoot ducks while a dog laughed condescendingly at me, I turned to my trusty Nintendo game console (after blowing into its game cartridge) and tapped away at A and B. But if I wanted an adventure, my options were investigating that odd smelling smoke coming from my neighbors sweet van, or getting together with my friends, rolling up a druid and seeing where things went from there. We were creative back then, and we had it all. From maps neatly drawn on lined graph paper (that we stole from my older brother), to elaborate histories detailing our character's undying fear of unicorns.

And that's when shit got real

The point is, with all the hack and slash mmo's out there, the goal stopped being an immersive and imaginative experience. Now we obsessively grind for gear score and track our dps output. It is with that in mind I move on to the true point of this blog. I have taken a bold and frightening step backwards, towards what gaming once was. Today I have deleted every RTS, FPS, and MMO from my desktop. This may sound like a trivial thing, but if you truly believe that than by all means, go and type DELETE on the load screen of your tier 12 level 100 Beastmaster, I'll wait.... No takers?

I wish I knew how to quit you

This is how I shall chronicle my journey (and inevitable withdrawal symptoms) of rediscovering my imagination. Old school gaming, nothing but books and dice. I'll paint some miniatures and maybe inspire some of you to do the same along the way. Though to be fair, you can just order a fully painted replica of your toon in her epics.... that's probably way easier.