I tend to look at many of the programs installed on my hard drive, as potential resources for the future. Also, I like to think that I have the brains to use those resources ultimately. But the fact is that I'm 46 years old, and I don't think that I have the time left in my life, to use all the resources installed on my computerS. I have spent more than half my life, involved with computers in some way.
What this means, is that if my characters in "ToME" were to get stuck in a corner of a dungeon level, I might have the first impulse to suspect it's a bug, followed by the learning process to discover that it's truly a puzzle meant to be solved...
And I suppose that one thing which I could do would be just to spend hours and hours each day playing certain games - just 'in order to get good at' those games. But I'm not convinced that such a course of action would actually be a good thing to do.
But then one activity which I find wholesome, is to get together with some of my friends, who are roughly of similar age to me, and then to play games as part of a group. This at least qualifies as a type of socializing. But then in that group I'm also probably not the most serious gamer. I'm the kind who fails to study my character sheets until the next time we meet.
But in spite of everything I've just admitted to, I tend to feel that the whole adventure, of computers and gaming - and game creation - were probably worth it in the end.
Dirk
P.S. And what ToME 4.x.y represents to me, is a kind of next-generation Roguelike, which is more worthy of my more powerful computers, than earlier examples such as 'NetHack' were.
I.e. I might have some older laptops whose CPUs aren't powerful enough to run ToME, in which case it might be better just to leave those equipped with NetHack...
