At adulthood, my purchases and gaming drops until I leave the hobby permanently. It sure didn't work out that way. I began creating my own worlds, I started altering the timelines of games to fit what I thought was a better timeline. These worlds remained only in notecard and scribble form, but in hindsight, you can see a change in how I viewed gaming. With retrospect, I think this is completely natural.
Every body has ideas how to make a product better.
As a history teacher, I tend to see much of the industrial revolution and modern era not as an age of invention, but as an age of refinement. Constant, ruthless refinement. Gaming is the same way. So we have a whole decade of time where I tinkered with games, worked on improving them, and generally becoming curious about the mechanics involved with game design. That was the point I started edging towards becoming a game designer.