I remember when I was young, when the only source of PC-gaming I had was the family computer. It had about 100 Mb or space or whatever, and the only games actually on it was Doom 2, Chips Challenge and Secret Agent. But I played those game for months. Then my dad started buying gaming magazines. I can't remember if it was PC Gamer or some other magazine, but it was the one where the demo discs eventually turned into 3D basements where you browsed the demoes and videos. Despite only being demos, I played them for hours. Until the next magazine came out a month after.

Eventually I started to know of more about games, and I wanted to play full games. Birthday money, allowance and money from odd jobs for neighbours. Suddenly I found another use for it than candy. But I still only got a game now and then. Our family PC kept getting upgrades, or switched out with a newer model altogether. Thus I always had space for games. I also had time to really play games. I must have played the original GTA for hundreds of hours, and I most likely did every mission in that game at least once.

But this has changed now, and I don't know when the change happened. I realized today that I have to start finishing games I have installed because my hard-drive is more or less full. That is the 200 Gb hard-drive I have solely for games. My first thought was "Damn, where did all that space go?" But more important, when the hell did I stop having time to beat games? It's not like I don't have time to play games. I play a lot of games all the time, yet there are so many games I haven't finished. So I thought "I have to start finishing these games so I can delete them."

I now need to finish games to make space for more games. Great.

There's this weird software creep that seems to outstrip capacity at every turn. Memory management was always an issue with our PCs, but games seemed to last longer, in part because they were a bit less user friendly. You actually had to spend time figuring out a lot of them. People didn't like that, so now games are a lot more welcoming and straightforward, but that also reduces the time it takes to play them. I like discovering systems and having faith that the game will open up for me, rather than having it display itself fully right off the bat, letting me have a go at it before charging me and kicking me out the...  analogy went too far, but you get the point.

Of course, growing older means a change in the time we can take to really tear through a game, and since there are so many more games out there on the market at any given time than there used to be, there's always a chance you'll buy more than you consume in a given period, especially since you're not scraping pennies together anymore.  I'm behind the gaming curve enough that it takes a while for this thing to fill up, but yeah, I've had to shuffle around a bunch of unfinished games and prioritize.  I think it was about the time I started doing that that I realized that games aren't the be-all, end-all for me.