It’s only been a month or so since he announced that he was hanging up his hat for the time being, but it looks like The CRPG Addict has returned to his blogging ways after having a bit of a “road to Damascus” moment. With him in the role of Saul, a snowless Bar Harbor, Maine, in the role of the Syrian countryside, and the ruins of an old house playing the role of the Almighty:

There was no house but rather the ruins of one: a couple of chimneys and a low stone foundation overlooking the rocky coast. It looked to have been abandoned for a good century or so. (I later found out there was, until recently, a modern house in the clearing next to the ruin, but it the land had been donated to the park and the house torn down. I haven’t been able to find anything on the older house whose ruins were still visible to us.)

…

As I gazed at the sad and overgrown ruin, a strong and inescapable feeling crept over me: I wanted to go back to the hotel room and play a CRPG.

I realize how pathetic that sounds, even to fellow gamers. I was looking at something fascinating — a piece of history in a place that I loved. But there was never going to be anything else to stoke the sparks of mystery about the place. I have no doubt that the “private road” sign had failed to deter hundreds, if not thousands, of other hikers every year, and there was no chance I was going to find anything in the ruins that hadn’t already been picked over by thousands of hands. I wasn’t going to open the ash trap of one of the old chimneys and discover a previous owner’s journal, detailing a horrific murder that had taken place decades earlier, but providing just enough mitigating clues to heal the heartbreak of a sad centenarian residing in some lonesome house in town. Orcs were not going to suddenly rise from behind the wall and snipe at me with bows. I was not going to find a chest nestled against the outer walls, containing a sword and helmet. The brambles tangled over the stone were not suitable for brewing into potions, nor did they conceal runic letters that, when absorbed, would bestow upon me some fantastic skill. I was not going to stumble upon a concealed trap door, leading me to treasure-filled depths.

While real life, and the real location, should have offered real rewards to compensate for these deficiencies, they were not, at the moment, enough. And so, after spending a respectable amount of time hiking the rest of the island, I used the promise of a fireplace, hot tea, and a good book from the store in town to persuade Irene to return with me to the confines of the bed-and-breakfast, where I spent the next four hours attempting to win Wizardry V. I failed, and I still don’t know exactly what I’m going to do with that game, but I do know that…well, I’m back.

There’s something to that, I think. It’s easy to dismiss us gamers as basement-dwelling schlubs who never get out and see the real world (and to be fair, there are gamers who would be guilty of that charge). But a lot of us don’t fit that easy-to-use stereotype. Many of us are well-traveled individuals who have seen our fair share of interesting places in the world, and many of us have been fortunate enough to return to some of the places we have enjoyed seeing in the past time and time again.

But that sense of mystery just isn’t there.

Most of us aren’t archaeologists; when we go poking around the various places we have been to, we’re not going to find the trappings of a long-forgotten civilization there, waiting for us to scoop them up and piece their ancient puzzle together. There may be places in the world where those little pieces of history yet persist, waiting to be found…but most of us lack the necessary time and resources to go and find them.

But in Britannia, in Amalur, in Thedas, and in a host of other fictional worlds, those hidden secrets are ours to find. And we crave to find them. We have, to wit, the yearning for mystery at the very core of our being, and the real world is just not the sort of place anymore that is able to satisfy that desire.

But I digress.

…this is what I discovered in the intervening month: I’m apparently going to spend a certain percentage of my time screwing around, whether said screwing around involves playing video games or watching Babylon 5 for the seventh time. I’ve made fair progress on my goals in February, but I’ve also spent a lot of time on Reddit, reading old articles on Cracked.com, reading the Mistborn trilogy again, and playing Boggle on my iPhone. None of these things are what I stopped playing CRPGs to do, and playing games, and writing this blog, while overall about as useful as anything else I’ve been doing, at least lets me document my experiences and interact with interesting people.

Let’s all welcome The CRPG Addict back to the big wide world of the Internet, and wish him renewed and continued good fortune in his endeavour to play through a truly mind-boggling number of RPGs.