Quote from: Shipyard Locked;710277And thus we become frozen in generational amber, protected from future disappointment, but also stripped of relevance and growth through risk.

Personally I'm going to try and beat my brain's desire for that as long as I can, for better or worse. Doing ok so far.

You're taking comics WAY too seriously.  What you read in comics is not relevant or risky.  Nor is it a matter of growth.  It's just entertainment.  Nobody is watching you and judging your tastes in comics entertainment, and your brain is not being starved for not reading the newest Fantastic Four rather than 1978 Fantastic Four.

Modern comics have taken a grim and gritty trend to heart, while earlier ones had a stronger tone of innocence and simplicity to the story.  You can like that, or not, but it's really not a matter of risk or growth, just taste.

Quote from: golan2072;711079The greatest thing about being 15 years old (when I started to game) was having no sense of self-criticism and no sense of shame about gaming stuff I ran for my friends. In retrospect, a lot of it was cheesy as hell, and a lot more blatantly derivative from various sources, and we misinterpreted the rules horribly, but back then, it was FUN!

Oh yeah.  Like Kiero, I couldn't play the stuff I played when I was a tween - it's like watching The A-Team at age 40; some things are better off as nostalgia.  At the same time, the simple joy I took in gaming at the time is something I miss.  I agree with others in the thread that my gaming nowadays is better in many ways than it was when I was 12, but as in many other areas of life, there's a yearning for lost youth, I suppose.

Quote from: Erstwhile;711136Oh yeah.  Like Kiero, I couldn't play the stuff I played when I was a tween - it's like watching The A-Team at age 40; some things are better off as nostalgia.  At the same time, the simple joy I took in gaming at the time is something I miss.  I agree with others in the thread that my gaming nowadays is better in many ways than it was when I was 12, but as in many other areas of life, there's a yearning for lost youth, I suppose.

I actually think I was far less reserved in my creativity back then, and so were my friends. No much need for internal consistency in stuff, no being critical on what we created. We used the rules very badly, we fudged the dice all the time, our stories lacked depth and were sometimes badly constructed, but it was FUN! We didn't worry too much about things back then.

We also had only the three AD&D 2E core-books in Hebrew. A few years before that (we started gaming in 1997), the only company publishing D&D in Israel went bankrupt, so our books were third-hand and in bad shape, and our DMG was a pile of photocopied pages (as you were unable to buy a new one and there was no easy internet ordering to Israel back then). About miniatures we didn't even hear in peripheral Israel (I hear that people in Tel-Aviv sometimes had them even then); we used pencil markings on paper or dice on the table instead. Then, around 1999, we ordered The Babylon Project (we were into Babylon 5 back then) from Amazon (this was the first thing I ever bought from the net), and enjoyed the hell out of it, despite the fact that, in retrospect, that ruleset was quite badly designed. Oh, and then I got the Hebrew version of Shadowrun 2E, which was FUN! but not very well translated in retrospect... But we didn't care.

Also, back then we could play THREE TIMES A WEEK, 3-5 hours each time!

I wish I could enjoy gaming as much as I enjoyed it back then. I still enjoy gaming very much now at the age of 31, but I don't think adults can easily experience the amount of sheer gaming joy and excitement adolescents can feel. Playing AD&D 2E with my friends 3 times a week, playing Talisman 2E all night long on weekends and vacations, playing Doom and Descent by dial-up modem... So much fun!

Quote from: 1989;710164Back when I was a youth, I could more easily suspend disbelief and enter into, and enjoy, "living" in a fantasy world. Now, decades later, having lost innocence and seen/experienced the tragedies/suffering of this world, I am not so easily able to lose myself in a fantasy world . . . because the fantasy world has all the same problems and suffering of this world.

For me, the golden age of creativity is now (with 50 stalking me and ready to pounce). Like others have mentioned, I have more tools available now than back in the 70s, experienced living abroad, work with people all over the world every day, and seen (and participated in) not just the suffering but amazingly good stuff I couldn't imagine then.

What I do miss is the time and energy (at the end of the day) to play more and generally get all the stuff done I want to do.