My mom came over with a box of my old forgotten belongings the other day. It was from my role playing game era and it was packed with the RPG rule books, magazines, adventures etc. that are exampled above.

Two things struck me. Playing RPG was a very intelectual, and social (collective fantasising) but beureucratic endeveour. You need to fill in forms, interpret some situation according a set of rules, role dices and look-up results in tables etc. Thus RPG as a phenomena was bound to fail in competition to computerized versions. (Furhtermore, even the poorest graphics in computer games was a hard-to-beat advantage.)

The other thing that struck me is the AMOUNT of time that I and others put into it. I found sketches, notes, and adventures that we made and played... I guess that is totally lost with the computer version of RPG.