Gaming and the Real World

It’s definitely a little crap when both of your gaming groups have to cancel due to the Real World encroaching. It does leave me with a slightly deflated outlook for the rest of the week. Especially as I was really looking forward to it today, having had a visit to the dentist and 3 work-related exams earlier.

Leaves me wondering about other methods of gaming. Do I start searching for a good MUSH again? I’ve not been able to find one in my most recent forays into the world of online gaming. Do I get myself embroiled in World of Warcraft? Or City of Heroes (now available to us Mac Users through the wonders of BootCamp)? Do I try and recruit an online gaming group via Skype? Or Second Life?

But then what if the two gaming groups did manage one week? I’d potentially end up with 3 gaming sessions a week and I know I just couldn’t cope with that. I’m no longer a young man.

My weekends, traditionally the source of morning, afternoon, evening and night (ahem, late) gaming are now completely sacrosanct and to be spent entirely with the kids. I only have the nights of the rest of the week to fill and not only do we tend to start a bit later (as the group manage to weave their way across Belfast to wherever the game is held) and we tend to finish a bit earlier (because, you know, work in the morning and all that…plus the long journey home.) It was very different when everyone in the gaming group lived within 2 miles of the house we were gaming in and half the group lived in that very house!

I guess this is why I have memories of older gamers turning up to conventions with boxes and boxes of games and selling them off. It may not have been that they were done and dusted with those games, it may have been that their adult life just couldn’t support the dedication needed to be a game addict. I have boxes and boxes of games, some even unread, scattered across the province wherever I can store them. I still live in some small hope of finding somewhere where the many boxes can be re-united under one roof and that I might even find time to organise them, you know…. Do I do it alphabetically? Or by genre? Or by game? And then within the genre? Alphabetically or Chronologically? It will take a lot of thinking to be sure. (and some may note that I may be painting myself as a bit of a Rob Gordon character here, and who wouldn’t…and many will tell you I am the most vain man in the world.)

My gaming life, my Hyde is unfulfilled. As the doctor says,

“…and it was as an ordinary secret sinner that I at last fell before the assaults of temptation.”