My Gaming Memoirs Part 26 - 2008

So... this was the year in which I never gamed. At all. Not once.

The entire year went by and I never gamed, bought any gaming material or even sat down with anyone and just talked about games. Nothing at all.

So that's pretty much it for this year.

Oh... except for the time I started my own gaming company. Okay, that's probably a bit misleading - I never started up a huge enterprise with shedloads of money and stuff. I started a small company I called 'Farsight Games', I designed a dead simple game system called the SKETCH system and I published a free e-zine called 'ODDS' magazine. I was pleased with the work I did - I know I only spent time doing it due to the fact that I wasn't gaming and I needed to get a gaming fix somehow, but I also felt - probably wrongly - that I had spent so much time in the hobby that I wanted to kind of give something back, put my experience to use and put my own work out there. And start small, too, after the disaster that was The League of Seven.

My e-zine 'ODDS' did well - I managed to secure interviews with business names such as Bill Coffin and Eric Gibson, covered events, did competitions and generally had a high circulation. Sadly, lack of material forced it to cease and I do miss it.

My SKETCH system got some good reviews and di the rounds but only for a short while. Already established free games such as Risus were all that gamers needed and a small, simple and free system wasn;t worth that much time. I experimented with some settings, some established and some of my own design, and let the system rest.

What did I learn from all this? That editing an e-zine and developing and promoting a game, even a free one, is hard work. It was satisfying, though, and given a little more time I'd do it all again.

By Christmas I had exhausted myself and just wanted to rest, so my wife suggested we have a go at World of Warcraft.

Damn.