Personal experiences, the bit I missed last week

What first drew me into gaming was a mixture of curiosity and boredom. I remember playing elite at work when I was working at a money broker in 1989. My boss introduced me to the game, and we would play occasionally. Things took off in 1994 when I bought my first pc, a Pentium60, for £2000!
I went through the shootem games, like Hexen, Doom etc., and got bored with them, so now I play strategy God games, such as the Anno series, Civilisation, etc. Firstly, because I can play for any length of time, 10mins, an hour or two, get up and just pause and leave the game and then come back and pick up where I left off. Now you can do the same in action type games but then you have to try remembering where the hazards/enemies are.
I spend most time playing alone, except when at Uni where there is a shared environment. I rarely play online because to do so requires you to be able to have sufficient time to complete a game or you end up disappointing the other player. The only exceptions would be a turn-based online game such as Astronest, sadly defunct.
Ideal game? Not sure there is one. All games have good and bad points, some have goals that are too difficult, or take too long to attain. Others are too limited in that there don't seem to be any goals at all, bar just playing the game. SimCity is one. the first version of Cossacks came with a bunch of maps but no scenarios or campaigns, so apart from playing out loads of battles the whole thing seemed pointless.
Currently I have just the pc at home, other consoles I have bought for the children include most of the Gameboy series, Gamecube, Xbox, Xbox2, and a Wii. Unfortunately they do not live with me so I rarely use any of them. My wife says I spend too much time playing but the time is actually divided between me, my wife and my four year old daughter, who will spend as many hours playing online games from Nickjunior and CBeebies as possible.
I don't know how many games I have but a rough guess would be around a hundred. Many are not playable on new operating systems so they mostly sit gathering dust.