“All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal or fattening.”
Alexander Woollcott
New Expansions
Games come with new expansions. This means that you still have the base game and then a lot of new content is built on top of the foundation. So, while you face new horizons, you are still in familiar clothes; or armor, depending on the game.
Typically designers will build in hooks to bring in players who have left, especially games with long life spans. It can be lore with an old familiar bad guy that players remember or it can be mechanics like flying or vehicles or player housing.
One keeps trying to compare it to a new football season. The excitement arcs up, everyone wants to see the new stuff with their favorite team, fantasy leagues form and there is chat around the water cooler. But, ultimately, when you watch football it is with beer, buffalo wings and a ever widening butt.
With games, the widening butt is the common thread, but one interacts and is involved and is not passive in the least. The game runs twenty-four hours a day, the late night crowd is not a rowdy bunch but instead people squeezing in a few hours after or before a busy day at work.
I do watch television. It can blur three hours easily. Numb with a laugh track, it is designed to roll one thing into the next and keep you sitting there. Because of that, I’ll take gaming any day.
The Profound Bartender 