Trying to build story collections

I had plans to look up chords for a few more songs, refine some other songs in my notebooks.  I think I spent 20 minutes playing guitar the whole weekend, which I suppose is better than zero.  Ugh.  I had plans to dig up my two best series of short stories (Micro Bob and Tenisin Willow) and flesh out those worlds for possibly new stories, but I didn't.  It's hard to try and be away from computers for a while when every damn thing is ON the computer.

Let's see, I had 3 Micro Bob stories: The Claim Pusher, In the Hole and Not Alone, and Taking Down YNOS-11, 3-5k each, from roughly 1988 to 1993.  Was The Voyager another one?  I think it was Bob who found the famous artifact in that one.  I had an intermediate story ("Salvage Party") planned to bridge the gap from story two to three.  But it was always just the one character, alone on a ship, going places.  I wonder how it could be expanded into a bigger set of locations of interest, places with histories of their own.

The Tenisin Willow stories were mysteries set in a fantasy world: The Body in the Field, Looking Behind a Feud and The Spirit Collector.  These ran 5k to 9k each and had a lot of potential, though the world slipped a lot from the first to the third story.  In the third, I was an inch away from saying the main character landed in a spaceship.  But why go there?  What if these could take place in that huge game world of mine (World of Aarn), the world of archipelagos with different magic/tech levels in each region ... yeah, yet another thing I never finished writing up; I just kept flip-flopping on which game system was worth supporting (Fudge? Microlite20?, argh!).

It feels like the things I could write these days are realistic sci-fi or just roll with some worldbuilding and do fantasy tales, not believing in any of the hocus pocus, but that's what sells.  All we've got these days are copies of copies of copies (10 to 50 levels deep) of worlds and myths and ideas, all filtered through decades of TV shows.  I guess if I write something, I just have to focus on completing the task and not caring about the pointlessness of it all, the absolute drowning ocean of the internet or whether anything will ever bring in a dime.

I have been thinking of a new series based inside a game world, but can those have sufficient motivation or actual jeopardy to be of interest to anyone?  Or is it just going to sound like a bunch of kids gathering "stuff" for "some reason"?