I get distracted. I always have.
I like learning new things and enjoy a variety of interests.
Some things come quickly and easily to me, while others hold my interest but I have to work a bit to pick them up. Then there’s other things that cause me frustration or boredom. I don’t think I deal very well with either really so I am stunted in my growth of some areas that I do not or did not put effort into and work towards.
I say this because lately my ESO interest has resurfaced but my Gaming page remains blank. I like computer gaming and the essence of playing a role in them. Gaming has always been an escape for me and consequently a big chunk of my time (wasted). I still do and when in front of my PC I tend to go play a game more so than write about it. I spend a bit too much time in front of PCs and not enough dealing with rubbish.
I think this predilection started with the old Choose Your Own Adventure books I had early on. At that point personal computers were in their infancy. My neighbor, a Brown University Professor then, had an Apple II and introduced us neighborhood kids to it but computers were still a novelty and not widespread. As we moved into the early 80s it was an interesting time. IBM had their personal computer but who could afford it? I had a TI-99 and a friend a Commodore 64. In school we learned BASIC on TRS-80s. PCs were not a thing yet though by mid-80s my dad had gotten us an IBM Clone in an Epson 386. It had two floppy drives and no internal hard drive and ran DOS 3 if I recall.
It was great though. I moved from those books to Infocom interactive text adventures. It was so crude by today’s standards but a giant leap from those books. Gaming steadily evolved as PCs did. By Freshman year of college we were playing Pool of Radiance from the old SSI Gold Box line. RPGaming steadily evolved and perhaps the pinnacle of gaming adventure by the late 90s was found at Black Isle. Games like Planescape Torment were graphical descendants of those early books and story was still tantamount.
Anyway there’s been lots of new gameplay introduced in the twenty years since. Perhaps the biggest seismic shift in gaming was the introduction of MMOG which itself was an evolution of an offshoot of those early text adventures where mainframes would host a game like Adventure prior to the internet and then as soon as networks started propagating evolved to MUDs. It is a very social experience now.
Multiplayer online gaming grew along with the internet and along with that a subset utility of VoIP apps to facilitate quick communications in games when taking your hands off the controls to type might mean death. In the very late 90s and early 2000s I was hosting a Roger Wilco server for the MW clan I belonged to then. Voice has evolved to the point now that Discord is the pre-eminent VoIP app offering much much more tools to facilitate build online community.
The biggest hurdle for me is that gaming distraction. Given time and some though and a little effort I can spin a yarn like this one in front of my computer, but most times I am in front of my computer I like to game and socialize. I have been playing ESO since 2017 and belong to the best guild on the PC-NA server Unmitigated Badassery! Today they are down for a nine hour maintenance window and not expected to be up until noontime… so in front of my PC with nothing else I’m itching to play at the moment, my CPU can spend a few cycles on this site…