Sad news, RPG fans!

In a relatively short (for him) blog post, gaming blogger The CRPG Addict has announced that he is, for now, hanging up his hat and giving blogging a rest for…well, a while, at least.

I finally have to face reality: my workload, plus the non-work goals that I want to accomplish, are not compatible with spending hundreds of hours a month playing computer games. Since I became self-employed last year, all this game-playing is directly affecting my financial security.

When I started the blog, it was because I felt an unnatural compulsion to play these games (I hit upon my plan to play every game in chronological order before I knew I was going to blog about it), and I wanted something positive and permanent to come out of it. Except for one or two weeks of Skyrim, I haven’t felt this compulsion for several months. Although I value your comments and our dialogue, I’m just not having any fun with it. I know that’s showing in both my postings and long absences.

I’m not definitively canceling the blog. It’s possible that at some point this year, my professional life will achieve a greater degree of stability and I’ll find myself with a lot of down time again. Or I may wake up in the middle of the night three weeks from now, and feel a mad desire to explore wireframe hallways, and you’ll seen an erratic posting here or there. In the meantime, I’ll leave the blog active for new readers who want to read my postings on older games.

I, for one, am sorry to see him go, even for a while, although the pressures he feels are certainly ones which I both understand and sympathize with. Balancing a heavily-trafficked website with a thriving commmunity of commentators is, in and of itself, at least a part-time job in terms of the amount of work one is required to invest in it. And since The Addict is working for himself, which means that every hour he spends gaming is an hour he isn’t spending billing a client (and therefore earning money to do things like eat and maintain his source of shelter with), it’s easy to see how it all became quite overwhelming.

Hopefully he’ll pick up and run with the blog again at some point, or maybe accept an offer by another like-minded person (or group of persons) to step in and continue in his footsteps and fine tradition. Time will tell. In the meantime, please join me in wishing him luck and all the best in his real-life endeavours.