So over the past few months I have spent less time with computer games. I played a lot of Tears of the Kingdom, but am now pretty far in exploring everything, for example I have 119 out of 120 lightroots unlocked; there is a limit to what I can still do without just doing the main quest, which I am a lot less interested in, having already done that once. I also started another game of Europa Universalis IV, while waiting for the release of EU5 in November. Not that I think anymore that it would help, but more experience some more countries and see how different EU5 will be.

Between all that, I had very little time for other computer games. The only negative point about that is that I am still paying for a XBox Game Pass for PC subscription every month, without actually using it. I should decide in the coming weeks to either play the most interesting games there, or cancel the subscription for a while.

One effect of age that I have to admit is that it isn't as easy anymore to get into a new game. And when I stop playing a game for too long, I also forget things, and am not as competent anymore. I am more often tempted these days to play a game I know well, rather than climbing the barrier to entry of learning a new game. Especially PC strategy games these days get a steady flow of patches and DLCs, so that it is often easier to try out the latest patch of a known game, rather than trying something completely different. For board games, I know that people get bored if I turn up with the same game more than twice on game night, so I am more often forcing myself to learn a new game.

While I hear a lot of people complaining about the computer games industry, one has to admit that the number of games on offer is phenomenal. Maybe one needs to be my age to remember a time where you played certain games because they were all you had, and you wouldn't get a new one before Christmas. Over 18,000 games got released on Steam last year, so I have long ago given up on the idea of "keeping up" with releases. And while my board game library contains fewer unplayed games than my Steam library, I still have a rather large collection and honestly more than I can play. I mostly stopped backing games on crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Gamefound this year, but I still regularly get parcels with the games I backed in previous years. And I will go to the Spiel 2025 in Essen in October. So, overall I live in an abundance of games, and even with retirement I can't keep up with everything new, and need to be rather selective.