My condolences Nowhere Man. I take it you're a 1966 kid, I'm a 1965 kid so you, me and Paul (as well as others here!) are at that time where older family members are in the later stages of their lives. Knowing that and mentally accepting it doesn't make it any easier to deal with though.
As for the gaming side of things, I originally thought to myself this was just one of those typical "I'm getting older" moments but the more people I've met while trying to pitch my new timeline for a T2k style game, the more I think that it's a phenomena of the mid-late 2000s and it's not simply a generational thing. There's 40-somethings who have the same attitudes/ideas about gaming as some of the 20-somethings I've met (see below).
There's been a massive push by some gaming companies to make RPGs as much like a computer game as possible so as to capture the computer players (who don't actually want to play tabletop games, if they did, they would already be doing it). This seems to have presented RPGs as one of only two genres - fantasy or sci-fi - but it also seems to have focused the games on "faster, more intense" action so they can finish a complete episode in a single session and also to a focus on episode of the week rather than long-term campaigns. The companies want to grab a bigger market share but it seems they don't realize the market isn't going to be like the computer/tablet/phone game market
To me it seems that they have not made RPGs simple and more accessible, they've made them simplistic, shallow and generic. There seemed to be a renaissance of gaming in the early 2000s, now it's like a corporate fast food chain, they're everywhere but they all taste the same and you only get what they serve but the audience is still lapping it up and thinking it's great instead of seeing it for the bland, mass-produced, very-average stuff that it really is.
I do miss TR's Wapahani site, Paul has it archived on pdf (so I grabbed a copy from there) but it's obviously not like having Tim update it every so often. And I really miss Antenna's site, I haven't been able to find any archive of that anywhere I've looked
