I think there tends to be an imposter-syndrome thing, where a lot of people think of Real Games™ as some kind(s) of games they don't play, and meanwhile the people who play *those* games think of Real Games as being some *other* genre that *they* don't play.

I came across a blog post once from a guy who fit my usual stereotype of Real Gamer pretty well: experienced with and skilled at a wide variety of RPGs and FPSs, that sort of thing.

And in this post he was like "I'm not *that* intense of a gamer. You know who is? *Roguelike* players. *Those* people are hardcore. I can only aspire to be as much of a gamer as those people."

And I was like "*looks at post*...*looks at several Crawl wins plus a dormant Nethack savefile of a late-game extinctionist†*...huh."

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As for grinding, there's the opportunity-to-listen-to-podcasts aspect (that I see we were both in a conversation about earlier, though we did not directly interact), and in any case I sometimes find grinding soothing.

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And hey, reading is an excellent thing. :)

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†winning is pretty much a formality at that point, as long as you don't misclick or make some particularly stupid mistake