Still Playing PC Games

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I was reading a blog post I wrote two years and decided it’s time for an update.

So I didn’t dial down on playing PC games, eventually giving it up as I was pondering. As you can see in the latest couple of pages in this blog, I’ve actually played quite a lot in my recent Christmas vacation.

There has been a few changes for the better.

First, and probably most important, I’m getting better at making my writings shorter. Cutting to the chase and leaving out the fat. It’s a difficult art to master and I certainly overdid it for many years. I think I’m finally starting to find a balance that works. But it’s still work in progress, and probably always will be.

Another thing I’ve really learned is to leave games behind and not have this intense desire to complete it at all costs. This was exactly my biggest problem back when I was obsessed with PC games about twenty years ago. No matter how bad, how difficult or how amateurish, I absolutely needed to complete it. It was so important to me that I gained another tick in my spreadsheet of conquests.

Luckily, I’ve managed to shake that obsession today. It helps that many games I play are already very short, often less than 3-4 hours. But no matter the length, it really has to grab me before I decide to see it to the end. Another reason is that it helps reducing my backlog a lot. As most everyone else with a backlog, I also have a desire to eliminate it. I want to see what I paid for, even if on sale.

You Do Not Talk About SID Club

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Having been part of the big demo scene on the Commodore 64 in the 80’s, coding a popular music editor and making music on it, I’ve been entangled in this hobby for years before taking a break for decades and then returning to make both more music as well as a web site to play SID music.

Craving to keep myself updated on this very specific hobby, I’ve been scouring through lots of web sites, editors, players and social media every day to find interesting news, and some of this has even been used to good effect at my site. At one point I even considered adding a WordPress blog to this site with SID news presented as blog posts – and maybe even allow guest posts for other SID aficionados to write.

But as the years went by since my comeback, I have been repeatedly disappointed by the lack of buzz going on in this area. Considering how many really skilled composers there are hacking away at the SID chip these days, it’s astounding how little they actually talk about it.

In fact, it’s a tendency that eventually caused me to kill my WordPress plans entirely.

Playing PC Games

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Today I thought, why not let the first blog post of 2021 be sort of a rambling post. Some personal opinions, things going on in my life – you know, the purpose blogs actually served in the first place. In fact, I’ve been thinking about letting it become a regular series to take over the diminishing posts about PC games.

And then, what better place to start than with that – PC games.

Oh no, you might be thinking. This is going to be one of those blog posts where he denounces playing video games ever again. Well, not quite. Maybe. Sort of. It’s complicated.

The thing is, the past few couple of years it’s actually been a struggle for me to write these blog posts about PC games. Having to take abundant notes while playing, lots of screenshots, writing the blog post, inserting the right images. It’s not just playing a game as relaxation like watching a movie for me. I need to have this on the side to make PC games mean something special to me.

Recently, I’ve been asking myself a question. Have you actually enjoyed playing the latest five or ten games you played? I thought about that for a few days. At first I took a look at the blog posts I wrote about those games and admitted to myself that, why yes, I did get at least a little bit of joy out of playing these games. So, maybe it is still worth doing? Well, the problem is exactly the amount of work I just described in the previous paragraph. So what I needed to do was to ask myself the right question:

Does the joy I get out of a PC game match the work I have to prepare for its blog post?