From tomorrow I'm taking two weeks off for some holiday time away from the office. Unfortunately, Alison and I won't be going anywhere this year - her time off work was a few months ago. So, apart from using this time to catch up with some friends I haven't seen all year and some that are just in town, I'm going to be de-cluttering my life. Starting with the video games. It took me so long to quit smoking. There were so many failed stop-and-starts that I wouldn't care to count. And that was only for a habit that I'd picked up when I was a teenager. I was finally able to quit cold-turkey a few months ago using nothing but will-power and reason. For the first time, I was able to get through two annual projects without the aid or dependency of social drugs (yeah, I quit drinking too, but that's for another post), and it was actually easier to manage and complete. So I'm already able to see the benefits in terms of productivity, while I slowly gain some health back too. I've been playing video games from a very young age:

• Colecovision, 1982, 5 years old
• Atari 5200, 1983-4, 6-7 years old
• Nintendo Entertainment System, 1985, 8-9 years old
• Nintendo Game Boy, 1989, 12 years old
• Sega Game Gear, 1991, 14 years old
• Sega Mega Drive, 1992, 15 years old
• Sony PlayStation, 1995, 18 years old
• GameBoy Pocket, 1996, 19 years old
• Nintendo 64, 1997, 20 years old
• NeoGeo Pocket, 1998, 21 years old
• Sony PlayStation 2, 2002, 25 years old
• GameBoy Advance SP, 2004, 27 years old
• Sony PSP, 2005, 28 years old
• Nintendo DS, 2005, 28 years old
• Nintendo DS Lite, 2006, 28 years old

I'm turning 30 in a couple of months time, and a few things have occurred to me:

1. I've pretty much had a screen environment for my main form of entertainment for most of my life
2. As much as the concept of games like Wii Sports is entertaining, the concept is ludicrous and people need to get off their asses and go out and exercise. People and asses meaning me, specifically
3. When Alison and I eventually have kids, I don't want to have video games in the house. There should be an outdoors to get acquainted with. I also don't want the games to be a distraction to me when there are more important things going on.
4. Besides playing guitar, I have no “analog” hobbies that keep me going, and I haven't really learned anything new that hasn't had something to do with computers. So I'm turning my interests back towards sleight-of-hand magic, something that I've been interested in for about 15 years now
It's not been easy to come to this decision. I keep making excuses in my head to keep one of the systems. But I keep coming back to my original realisation that this is what I want to do, and have been putting it off for a long time now. Humans are such masters at self-deception! Wish me luck.