My nieces and nephews are older though, and they play Roblox on an iPad. Three kids, one charger. The diplomacy around that charger is more intricate than any Kingdom Crusaders campaign I’ve ever run. Someone is always low on battery. Someone is always negotiating. It’s funny until you remember that iPads are running Roblox. Which I don’t like.

For the unfamiliar: Roblox is a free-to-play platform of thousands of user-made games, aimed mostly at kids and running on whatever device they can get their hands on - iPads, phones, the family laptop. Inside it, players spend a currency called Robux that the platform is happy to sell them for real money. It’s massive. I haven’t played it, because I play big boy games like Minecraft.

It’s impossible to find non-copyrighted screenshots of Roblox gameplay, and the Roblox press kit is very… vague, and is aimed at shareholders. Gameplay looks a lot more like a student project from early 2000s.

And I want my kid to hate Roblox (when she’s older).

Look, I know how that reads. I’m not wishing misery on children, and I’m not running for best uncle on the Internets. What I mean is closer to taste, the boring grown-up version of it. I want her to grow up with enough exposure to better things that Roblox eventually feels thin. I want her to bounce off it the way you bounce off a snack that looked great in the moment and left you feeling empty.

The reason this is on my mind isn’t really Roblox specifically, though. It’s money.

Games keep getting more expensive. Consoles too. The base PlayStation 5 used to be $500, and now it’s $600. A decent gaming PC is still a few thousand dollars - I know mine is, and it’s getting old. Nintendo Switch 2 games broke the $80 ceiling, which still fills me with a bit of dread as I type it out. All Freedom dollars, of course - your local prices may be politer or worse, mostly worse.

You know who can afford that? Grown-ups. You know who can’t? Kids.

So the hobby keeps quietly optimizing for people with jobs and credit cards. Our kids are playing free-to-play games on whatever devices are around the house. iPads and stuff. The only thing that fits an iPad without anyone having to spend $80 up front is Roblox-shaped, or Fortnite-shaped (yeah, there’s a beat-up Nintendo Switch in the household too - and of course a free game’s on that), or some other free-to-play thing built around getting you to spend later anyway. Free isn’t free. Adults pay in cash. Kids pay in time and attention - the only currency they’ve got plenty of, and the one F2P bills against.

And here’s what gets me. The grown-ups are buying remakes. Constant remakes. I’ll happily drop $70 on a game I already played in 2003 - because it looks pretty now and I can - while my nieces and nephews are stuck with Roblox on a hand-me-down iPad. I’m reliving my childhood. They’re being sold theirs.

I love games, and my annual video game budget probably (easily) crosses a thousand dollar threshold. As a grown up, I get to prioritize how I spend my income, and if I want to drop $60 on Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, or maybe drop $25 on a DLC which lets me play as even angrier dwarfs in Total Warhammer III - I’m free to do that. Hell, I even buy a console or two here and there - from Nintendo Switch to a Steam Deck to a nifty little Anbernic handheld.

I took my nieces and nephews to the mall, they stared at games at a GameStop for over an hour, and went home empty handed because they already went through their allowance. Okay, that’s not entirely true - I did buy them a copy of Skyrim for the Switch so they have something to play besides Fortnite - but the point stands.

I also haven’t played Fortnite, but I’ve played through my fair share of battle royale games, and I’ve talked to enough teens and preteens to get the gist.

That’s all I can really do, though. They aren’t my kids. I get to show up, play cool uncle for an afternoon, and peace out for months or years at a time. Buy them a game. Talk excitedly about whatever I’m currently into. Boot up a console with them for a weekend. Then their parents pick up the slack. Their parents are great people. They also care about games very little and know about them less. Eh, it is what it is.

Funny enough, I followed Fortnite back when it released in 2017. I remember when battle royale got bolted onto what was then a PvE monster-horde shooter. The thing the game is now mostly known for arrived in a later update, almost like an experiment that ate the whole building. Weird in hindsight, but also: that’s the moment “free” became the default genre for a generation, and the rest of the medium quietly became the expensive option.

And it’s not even just about money. The kids whose parents did spring for a Switch still end up on Roblox eventually, because that’s where their schoolmates are. F2P doesn’t compete with paid games on quality. It competes on attendance. Nobody plays Skyrim with you at lunch in 4th grade. Roblox is where the chatter lives, and that gravity is bigger than the price tag.

Let me also say the simpler version. I just fucking hate blatant monetization targeted at kids. Not the taste version of hate I opened with. The plain angry one.

Roblox sucks for many reasons - from predatory monetization to the way it treats the kids making things on it (see this fantastic hbomberguy video). But my angle here is narrower.

And look, I should be honest about the limits of my angle. My daughter is not even two yet. I haven’t watched a kid navigate a Roblox chat. I haven’t been begged for Robux (apples, I get begged for apples a lot though - this kid loves apples). This is all guesswork and early anxiety. But the iPad my niece carries around isn’t just a game console: it’s a chat client, an ad surface, a slot-machine. Even if the games on it were great - and they aren’t - that combination is doing something to kids that nobody fully understands yet, and it makes me twitchy.

I grew up on games that didn’t try to bill me every time I logged in. They had a beginning, a middle, and an end - sometimes a credits screen so abrupt it felt rude. I played Resident Evil 2 on my uncle’s PlayStation 1, and while I didn’t understand much and didn’t get far, it informed my taste in survival horror. I loved getting lost in Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind lore - exploring the world for hours - without anyone trying to sell me anything mid-quest. I want my daughter to get that, eventually. Not because every game has to be high art, but because there’s a difference between a game and content that’s mindlessly consumed.

Now that’s quality entertainment. No microtransactions, just good ol’ trauma from playing horror games when you’re too young. Just like dad. Actually, maybe let’s hold off on Resident Evil.

When I picture her at seven or eight, I’m not picturing a tiny critic. I’m picturing her with a controller and a save file that belongs to her - one she can leave alone for a month and come back to without missing a season pass. Maybe it’s Minecraft creative. Maybe it’s some weird indie thing I’ve never heard of. I don’t know yet. I just know I want her to have something with edges that aren’t designed to keep her in the room forever.

Minecraft creative is the obvious good answer, by the way. Building stuff is great fun, and creative mode is essentially LEGOs without the price tag and without the pain of stepping on a piece at 2 a.m. Although don’t get me started on modern Minecraft - I yearn for the beta days when the game was smaller and there was less to keep track of. I’m a believer in constraints supporting creativity, and beta-era Minecraft had constraints almost by accident, ones modern Minecraft keeps trying to bulldoze in the name of more.

And even Minecraft has been catching the bug. Skin packs. A marketplace. Realms subscriptions. The monetization gravity doesn’t spare the games I’d actually recommend - which, I think, is the whole point. This isn’t a Roblox problem. It’s an industry problem, and even my obvious good answer is being slowly shaped toward the same fate.

Right now our focus is all on stacking blocks and naming colors. Video games aren’t in her vocabulary, and I don’t have to change how I approach the medium around her yet. But I will, and I’m really excited to see how - she’s a curious kid who likes to patiently figure out how things work. Maybe dear reader could have a recommendation for me?

I’m already keeping my Switch in tip-top shape for her. Charged, updated, sitting on a shelf for whenever she’s ready. It’s a small concrete thing - one console, no manifesto - but it’s something I’m actually doing instead of just having opinions about.

I don’t have a tidy policy here. I’m not going to pretend I’ll never hand her a tablet on an airplane, and I’m not going to build a perfect childhood out of principles and USB-C cables.

I think earlier Minecraft was awesome in supporting creativity without the predatory monetization practices. It was easy to get bored.

My wife and I are aligned on intentional screen time, at least for now. We haven’t crossed the “whatever keeps her quiet” threshold, and we don’t intend to. I don’t judge parents who have - it just doesn’t align with our values.

What I don’t know is what happens later. We aren’t the only influences here. There will be classmates. There will be cousins. There will be whatever Roblox-Fortnite-fast-food-entertainment thing gen beta inherits next. I don’t know if I’ll be able to say no, or if I even should.

Here’s the thing about boredom, since that’s where this is landing. Boredom is where taste forms. Kids who get bored try weird stuff. They put down a game because it stopped being interesting, pick up another, and notice they actually preferred the second one. That’s how taste works. Games with a clear end support that, eventually - they finish, they let you go. Always-on games don’t. They’re engineered to keep the moment of boredom from arriving, because the moment of boredom is when you’d leave and find out what else is out there.

I just know what I want her Tuesday-afternoon boredom to look like when the free stuff shows up to become her whole taste. I want there to be room for hate that’s actually just preference - earned the slow way, by knowing what better feels like.

Oh, and if any of this resonated, you might enjoy gaming identity, parenting, and handhelds and rediscovering gaming as a new parent - same brain working the same knot from a different angle.

P.S. Lots of travel coming up - see you all in June! I won’t lie - I’m excited to pause writing every week for a short while - no matter how rewarding it feels.

Take this week. I’ve been playing Total Warhammer III (as I always do), as Greasus Goldtooth (I promise this is not yet another Warhammer essay). Big fat ogre. It’s pretty fun watching a bunch of massive Golden-Horde-inspired men smash through imperial infantry with ease. Ogres are cool. They feel impactful, they feel fun to play. They’re surrounded by little gnoblars, who are almost certainly just sillier looking goblins - and it’s fun mixing up chaff and elite infantry. It works well.

But 20-30 turns in I got in my way. As always, I played optimally - there’s a strategy where I could narrowly scrape by with a really basic army, leaning into the economics 100%. It worked. Every fight was a nailbiter. And I was stressed out about it. And I was stuck with boring, obsolete basic units as I saw my coffers grow.

This is Greasus Goldtooth. You don’t need to know anything else about Greasus.

When I’m playing Greasus, I already know what my next X turns are. I know how to move efficiently, what my build order is, how to defeat enemies with chaff without losing momentum. That’s how I end up with 12 settlements by turn 20 - aggressive, calculated expansion. But that’s not particularly fun. The best case scenario is that Grimgor Ironhide (who is a big angry orc) comes from the North too early and ruins my plans, forcing me to give up some territory before modernizing my army or pushing back. I already know about this. It’s a little annoying, if anything.

At this point I wasn’t really playing - just going through the motions, executing a plan. And when the plan starts to wobble, I know what I do. I restart. Fresh save, fresh Greasus, try again, do it cleaner this time.

Executing a plan is what I’m good at. It’s what I reach for. And when I reach for it in a game, I have a worse time.

Here’s the thing: I do this everywhere.

I got to the airport almost an hour before my flight because missing a flight - or even rushing for one - would be a failure. I’m writing this between sessions at a summit for my day job, and last night I stayed up late with colleagues hashing out project plans because I don’t want the project to fail. And more than that - I want it to succeed and be great. That’s how this works. That’s how I work.

There’s a desire for control somewhere in there. But there’s also the need for optimization. I love optimization - optimization is awesome. Most of the time I prefer focusing on the process more than on the outcome. Processes are awesome. Optimized processes are the best. There’s nothing like having a well-thought-out plan succeed.

Failure, on the other hand, sucks in real life. It isn’t fun. It hurts. So I spend a lot of energy preventing it. I get to the airport early. I stay up late on project plans. I rehearse conversations, I double-check calendars. And in games - I reload the save, I restart the campaign, I begin again from a cleaner starting point.

Which is the problem. Because in games, failure is where the memories are. Every time I optimize a game into submission, I’m doing the thing I’m best at - and getting the thing I want least out of the hobby I love most.

Let me introduce RimWorld. A story generator. Not a strategy game - and it’s very explicit about that. Despite the fact that you effectively have to build and defend a small colony of survivors, despite the fact that you have to navigate a tech tree and trade deals and all of the strategy shebang, RimWorld is most fun when things don’t go as planned.

Colonies in RimWorld have a tendency to consistently go up in flames (Ron’s isn’t in this picture - I’m traveling and don’t have access to my screenshots).

Meet Ron. A pawn - that’s what the little colonists are called - who decides he’s had enough. He just barely survived a raid, soaking wet from the rain, the gunshot from earlier is probably getting infected. And then he gets to eat. Without a table. On the ground. Like an animal.

All hell breaks loose. Ron starts a firestarting spree. Another colonist gets caught in the crossfire - Purple. Ron’s her nemesis. Instead of firefighting, Purple starts fistfighting Ron. Inside a burning building. They both go down with the building. Third colonist, Kate, is pushed to the brink, runs into the freezer and starts binging on food. The freezer burns down too. There are no more colonists left.

That sounds terrible, right? No. The best part is that it makes a story. A story I still remember. And I remember every time my Dwarf Fortress got flooded by lava, and every futile struggle for survival after getting bit in Project Zomboid.

That’s why I play games. To have great memories to think back to.

I wouldn’t remember Ron if I’d played well. If I’d caught the mood debuff in time, built the dining table earlier, treated the infection before it got bad - Ron would be just another pawn. One of dozens I’ve had over the years. He’s only Ron because everything went wrong. The catastrophe made him a character. The catastrophe made it a story.

Instead of yet another save file, the disaster gave me Ron.

The games I love most are the ones that refuse to let me optimize.

Daurama Daura is definitely among more challenging and rewarding starts in Crusader Kings 3 – the last matriarch in a rapidly changing world.

Crusader Kings rewards letting your dynasty collapse into chaos - your careful plans ruined by a bad heir, a peasant revolt, a cousin with a better claim. One of my favorite starts is Daurama Daura, the last matriarch of the West African Hausa. She’s an extremely skilled diplomat, able to expand quickly, and she’s great at managing internal affairs to stay in power. You start strong. You can feel the empire forming.

So of course I play her the way I play everything. I carefully build up the empire, marry into the right neighbors, pick my wars. I groom the oldest daughter for the throne from age zero - tutors, the right guardians, the right education focus, all of it. And then, right as Daurama dies of old age, the perfect successor gets assassinated. The empire passes to the good-for-nothing sadistic, greedy, petty middle child. A lifetime of alliances crumbling, replaced by fighting arenas and secret torture chambers. The empire fell apart, and I still think about what a wild ride that was.

Dwarf Fortress literally has “losing is fun” as its motto. These games aren’t built to be solved. They’re built to make stories, and stories need things to go wrong.

I didn’t notice the pattern for a long time. I thought I just liked strategy games, or simulation games, or whatever you want to call the genre. But looking back at what I actually remember - the stories I tell friends about, the sessions that stuck - it’s never the clean runs. It’s the Rons. It’s when the dwarfs betrayed me that one time. It’s the Crusader Kings heir who turned out to be a lunatic and ruined three generations of careful marriage planning.

Which is a weird thing to realize about yourself when you spend most of your waking life avoiding failure.

Building next to lava in Dwarf Fortress has many benefits: heat, steampower, magma forges. And spectacular ways for the colony to go up in flames.

I’ve changed how I play. I’m more okay with failure now - spectacular failure, spectacular outcomes. I don’t mind if Grimgor takes out half my empire. That’s part of the fun. It makes a story, even if I could’ve predicted it. In fact, he did invade early, and it was genuinely great to have a minor dwarf faction act like treacherous rats and refuse to back me up in a war with Grimgor - right after I came to their help when the Chaos Dwarfs attacked them. Bastards.

As I play games these days, I let things happen more often. I don’t reload saves as much. I don’t replay the turn when I realize I made a bad trade. I sit with the bad trade and see where that decision takes me.

I don’t know if any of this has crossed over into real life. I’d like to say yes - that I’ve learned to let the bad trade happen there too, that I’m softer on my own mistakes. I don’t think I have, really. I still got to the airport an hour early. I’m still going to stay up late tonight working on the project plan. Last weekend I caught myself timing snacks and tracking energy levels during what was supposed to be play with my toddler, running the session like a build order so we’d hit bedtime clean. She didn’t notice. I did.

But the next time I boot it up, I’m not starting over. The Greasus save is still there. Grimgor is already in my territory. My army is still obsolete. My dwarf allies are still treacherous rats. Normally this is where I’d scrap it and roll a fresh campaign with everything I’ve learned - cleaner build order, better neighbors, no Grimgor surprises this time.

Not this time. I’m going to log back in and see what happens.

I ran across Deus Ex as one of the few games installed on my uncle’s PC. I didn’t read any of the dialog, and the plot went over my head. I think I made it through the first few levels by brute force alone, methodically exterminating everyone in my path.

My most vivid memory is running around Battery Park at night. I didn’t know it was a real place. I’d never played a game that made a space feel so real - the subway stations, the monuments, the rats. I think there were terrorists too, but I don’t remember those. What I remember is how responsive the world felt. I could pick up anything that wasn’t nailed down. Crawl through unmarked ventilation shafts. Stack boxes to get into places I wasn’t supposed to be.

This is The East Coast Memorial in New York’s Battery Park. It’s the game’s second level. Probably as far as I’ve gotten when I was a kid.

And I could kill everyone in my path, and the game would let me, and it wouldn’t really judge me for it. Was 9-year-old me a psychopath? Not really - killing in games is an engaging mechanic, and there’s a healthy disconnect between what’s on screen and an impressionable young mind. But it was incredible that the game let me, and somehow still let me finish each level.

I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since. After a good decade of stumbling around, the first game that hit similar beats was Dishonored. Dishonored is just like Deus Ex - it has stealth, it has a conspiracy, and lots of gadgets (aight, aight - it got magic too).

Dishonored has lots of ways to play. You can be a stealthy, quiet, merciful hero. You kill no one, come up with creative punishments for the villains (arguably much more horrifying than murder), blink around the rooftops and crawl through the tiniest openings. Or you can be a complete menace and rain destruction on everyone in your path: grenades, whirlwinds, swarms of rats under your control. One time, a guard pulls a trigger, I slow time, possess him, walk in front of the bullet - and let go. Overkill? Yeah. But sure as hell satisfying.

Dishonored is much more fun to play with full mayhem - you get to use Corvo’s enormous arsenal of murder gadgets and devastating spells. Pacifist playthrough is… fine, I guess.

Chaotic aggressive playthroughs are where Dishonored truly shines. 90% of the game’s toolkit is built around lethal improvisation.

And then the judgment kicks in. The world becomes bleaker. You lose friends, the plague consumes the city. Your actions are a miasma on this world - and you feel terrible. The game is reacting to how you played, sure, but it’s also very clearly telling you there’s a “right” way to play. Unless you’re a terrible human being, that is.

I played through Dishonored twice. Peaceful first, chaotic second. The second run was much more fun - and I would’ve hated how the story turned out if I hadn’t already gotten the “good” ending on the first go. The game punishes you for the fun playthrough.

Deus Ex didn’t judge me for being a murder hobo (and murdering hobos). Dishonored hands me all these fun tools, and then grades me on their use. Either see the “good” ending, or have more fun playing a thinner game.

You might be wondering why I went straight to Dishonored when Deus Ex: Human Revolution came out the year before. Yes, I’m sure you have an eidetic memory for game release dates and this is your top question.

Sometimes Deus Ex: Human Revolution feels like a corridor shooter. With lots of yellow tint, of course.

I played Human Revolution. It just didn’t connect the same way. It felt streamlined in a way the original never did. Every ventilation shaft meticulously placed and marked. Every ledge with a smidge of yellow paint so I know where to jump. The original felt messy, inconsistent - like a real place that happened to react to my presence. Human Revolution and Mankind Divided felt like corridor shooters with a lot of options.

They’re good games, both of them. I enjoyed the gameplay, and Jensen’s voice acting was top notch, even if I didn’t much care for the yellow filter on the whole world. But the sense of wonder isn’t there, and I think I know why.

In Battery Park, I felt like I was trespassing. In Detroit and Prague, I felt like the developers kindly prepared signposts for me.

Which is the other thing I want to say about Battery Park. Battery Park rewired how I look at game spaces. It also rewired how I look at rooms. Hotel hallways. Office buildings. The backs of grocery stores. I catch myself, still, clocking vents and stacked crates and the angles security cameras don’t cover. A useless permanent skill (and no, I’m probably not very perceptive anyway).

I enjoyed Weird West - it plays with a different perspective, but it’s a true immersive sim at heart. The game lets you do everything you can think of.

It feels less useless in games. I check everything. I stack things. I try to jump onto things the game clearly does not want me jumping onto. I spent the first two hours of Prey opening every drawer in the Talos I lobby because I remembered, somewhere in the back of my brain, that in Deus Ex there was a reason to open every drawer. Prey rewarded me for it. So did Weird West. So do the small handful of games that still believe the player might, unprompted, look.

I don’t think those games are trying to be Deus Ex. They don’t need to. They just have to trust that someone’s going to walk into a room and start looking, and put something there for them to find. That’s it. That’s the whole contract.

Give me an unmarked vent and a drawer that might have nothing in it. I’ll be there for hours.

Oh wait, I know this feeling! Just last night I was sitting at my computer, as my toddler’s asleep in another room and my wife’s working on an art project next to me. I booted up my trusty Total Warhammer III. Spent good ten minutes clicking through every faction and legendary lord, imagining what would the playthrough look like, what it would make me feel - the possibilities!

Faction selection screen in Total Warhammer III - I spend way too much time here.

I’d start a new game, play through a few turns, get my fill - and go back to the main course - the starting screen.

I’m at a point in life where I need my comfort titles and I want to feel specific things when I play games. We’ve already established that when I wasted my gaming day chasing a feeling last month, and when games asked too much of me only last week. Staring at a start screen as I fantasise about playing a game (instead of, you know, playing it) is yet another symptom of the same problem.

I’ve been circling around this for weeks, and I think I know what it is: I find it more fun to engage with the potential of games rather than their execution. At least today, or at least I hope it’s just today. Really hoping this is a phase I’ll grow out of, please let it be that. I miss just playing games.

There are probably a dozen reasons for this - comfort, fatigue, age, having played too many games - but I’m less interested in why it happens than in how deep it goes.

It’s the same reason I have no plans to replay the incredible Baldur’s Gate III any time soon, but I do love fiddling with the character creator - imagining what kind of story I could create, what would go differently, and how unique the playthrough would be.

Okay, I’m not the only one guilty of idling in the character selection screen, am I? And I don’t just mean giving my character the perfect nose.

Do I want to replay Baldur’s Gate III? No. Do I want to experience the way it felt to replay it? Yes, and the character creator lets me do that with a fresh coat of daydreaming paint on top. I’ve played these games before, I remember how it felt. Because of my history with these games, character customization in Baldur’s Gate III or faction selection in Total Warhammer III is a form of play on their own - a play-pretend or a what-if.

And I think I know the exact moment the what-if dies.

In Total Warhammer III, it usually happens around Turn 3 or 4. On the start screen, the campaign is an epic saga. The intro cinematic of Karl Franz - the near-god-king of mankind - parading through the streets followed by a column of steam tanks (you didn’t know Total Warhammer has tanks, did you?). I imagine the heroic defense of the Empire, the shifting alliances, the final climactic battle in the Chaos Wastes. In theory, the campaign is clean. It’s this sweeping narrative arc I can see from end to end, and it’s beautiful.

Then I click “start.” I move my first army. I fight the first trivial battle against a rebel faction. I look at my province capital and realize I need to wait four turns for a tier-two building just so I can recruit slightly better archers. Maybe I put in another turn or two and complete my starting province. Set up a few alliances and stumble into a new war. But I’ve been here before, I’ve done this. It’s no longer an epic saga but a series of little, sometimes mundane steps toward the long victory.

All the possibilities collapsed into a single, narrow path.

That’s the moment. That exact moment. The campaign goes from everything it could be to everything it actually is, and “actually is” can’t compete. On the faction select screen, I’m holding every possible version of this campaign in my head at once. Karl Franz could unite the Empire through diplomacy. He could burn it all down fighting Chaos. He could lose everything and make a desperate last stand at Altdorf. Every version exists simultaneously, and they’re all perfect because none of them have had to survive contact with the game’s actual systems.

That’s Karl Franz. He’s an all-around decent emperor. He’s kind of a big deal - spoiler alert - he eventually ascends into godhood.

The moment I click “start,” all of those campaigns die except one. And that one has to deal with building timers, limited recruitment pools, and the fact that the Elector Counts are going to declare war on me for no reason around Turn 15 no matter what I do.

It’s the same thing at Costco, right? Standing in the meat aisle, I’m holding every possible version of the week ahead. I’m the guy who slow roasts a brisket on Sunday, who has beautifully portioned meals in the fridge by Monday. I’m also, in a different possibility branch, the guy who makes an incredible stir-fry from scratch using that massive bag of vegetables. Both of those guys exist while I’m standing in the aisle. The moment I put the brisket in the cart, one of them dies, and the other one has to actually go home and figure out how to use the oven’s timer again.

So I just… keep standing in the aisle. Keep browsing. Keep the possibilities alive a little longer.

I think there’s something going on here that’s bigger than indecision, though. I’ve been thinking about why the start screen feels better than playing, and part of it is that I might be losing my tolerance for boredom. And that scares me more than anything else in this piece.

I spent more time planning my Solaire cosplay build - perfect armor, stats, even gestures - than I spent actually playing it. That probably should have been my first clue.

Real play requires boredom. It does. The slow bits of a game - the travel time, the resource gathering, moments of respite - those are what make the high moments earn their keep. The reason it feels incredible to finally breach the Chaos Wastes in Total Warhammer III is because you spent 80 turns doing infrastructure work to get there. The reason the final act of Baldur’s Gate III hits as hard as it does is because you spent hours managing your camp, sorting your inventory, talking to companions who are acting like a bunch of spoiled toddlers (with knives).

But when my free time is this scarce - genuinely scarce, not “I should be more productive” scarce but “my toddler wakes up in 45 minutes and this is all I get” scarce - the slow bits feel like a cost I can’t pay. I want the emotional payoff without the investment. I want the highs without the lows. And the start screen offers exactly that: a concentrated hit of possibility and anticipation with zero boredom attached.

The problem is that’s not how any of this works. The highs are only high because the lows are low. The payoff only means something because of the investment. I know this. I’ve written about this. And yet here I am, clicking through faction screens, getting my little dopamine hit of “what if,” and calling it a night.

There’s a part of me that is terrified this is just what gaming looks like now that I’m in my mid-thirties (you can laugh at my naivete if you’re past your 50s, or think I’m an old fart if you’re in your early 20s). Having real strong opinions on what experiences I want to have, living those out in my head from the main menu, and deciding that’s enough. Treating games like a gallery of ideas rather than things to actually be played. And look, maybe that’s fine. If I enjoy the ten minutes of browsing factions more than the ten minutes of playing, who’s to say I’m doing it wrong? I am engaging with the game. I’m appreciating the world-building, the faction design, the what-ifs. That’s not nothing.

I chose to play through yet again as Balthasar Gelt - the Empire’s chief Golden Wizard. I imagined all the chaos and destruction his spells would cause, had a great time mopping up the initial few provinces, and abandoned a playthrough to write this piece.

But I don’t fully believe myself when I say that. Because I remember what it felt like to actually play. To be 40 turns deep into a campaign, exhausted, with half my empire on fire, making desperate decisions that mattered because I’d earned my way into them. The start screen can’t give me that. It can only give me the fantasy of that. And the fantasy, however pleasant, is getting thinner every time I go back to it.

I left Costco today with a much smaller haul than my imagination promised. I didn’t get the brisket. I didn’t get the 48-pack of artisan water. I bought some eggs, a few snacks for my toddler, and a rotisserie chicken - the comfort titles of the grocery world.

I got home and booted up Total Warhammer III. Clicked on Karl Franz. Watched the intro cinematic. Hovered over the “start” button for a while.

I picked Balthasar Gelt instead. Fresh start. New possibilities. I made it to Turn 13 this time, and I’m real proud.

If you enjoyed this piece, also consider reading Becoming a game critic who doesn’t play games. It’s kind of relevant.

And I understood that this game would be about perseverance, about overcoming a towering mountain ahead of you, one tiny step at a time. I could tell the game’s narrative would match the mechanical gameplay - I could see it in the setup and the care the developer put into some of the early dialog.

But I just don’t have the energy. I can’t persevere. I’m tired. So I give myself permission to abandon the game early on, and do so with much respect for the title.

I love everything about Cairn - the climbing mechanics, the tactility, the protagonist Aava… And yet, I just can’t play it today.

This experience is not limited to Cairn. Lots of great, highly acclaimed, love-filled titles - titles which I want to enjoy - are not meeting me where I am in life.

I could see the storytelling potential of Unpacking - a game about navigating a person’s life from teenage years into adulthood through unpacking their belongings - but I just didn’t have the patience to sit through its flavor of slow-paced gameplay. I’ve read incredible things about Pathologic 2 - which seems like my type of weird, attrition-driven, survival-ish narrative game. It’s a game which should be made for me - but every time I tried booting it up, I just couldn’t push through.

Unpacking asked for my patience when I didn’t have it. Pathologic 2 asked me to suffer at a time in my life where I didn’t want to. Cairn asked for perseverance - and I’m somewhat at my limit at the moment.

At first I thought this was a “I have a kid, so I don’t have energy” issue. I have a toddler with whom I want to spend more time, and same goes for my wife - with whom I haven’t connected as much since my kiddo was born. I have a job, too, and that takes up energy. But Pathologic 2 and Unpacking were both before my kid was born.

Pathologic 2 is tense, depressing, thoughtful, messy… There are hard, meaningful choices at every step. That’s everything I love, and yet - it wasn’t the right time in my life.

Now you might think my thesis is that games shouldn’t be asking for too much. And that’s not true at all. I love when games ask me to invest - these truly are the best, most impactful games I’ve ever played. The fault doesn’t lie with the games.

I can guess that without pushing through every step in Cairn, I wouldn’t get the deep satisfaction of conquering the mountain - and overcoming or coming to terms with whatever haunts the protagonist Aava. Without patiently sorting through every sock in Unpacking, you wouldn’t get fantastic narrative moments - like finding out that there’s nowhere to put your university diploma after moving in with a boyfriend. I’m sure there was more to come. And Pathologic 2… Well, I don’t quite understand what it’s about, and I’m pretty sure people who played it don’t understand much either - but I’m sure suffering and attrition is instrumental to exploring whichever themes Pathologic explores.

I have my own attrition war going. My toddler licks shoes sometimes. And then shares her food with me. That she already chewed. While I’m not paying attention. My daughter’s winning: I don’t exactly have the perseverance or patience to spare, and I have plenty of suffering thank you very much. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a torture of my own choosing - and I have the cutest toddler on the block (sorry, Katie), and I wouldn’t trade this for anything else - but the energy I have for engaging with games is… different.

Unpacking’s flavor of environmental storytelling was so clever - not a single word of exposition, not a line of dialogue. Yet, because you unpack the protagonist’s every possession, every time they move - you learn everything about them.

So what did I do instead of playing Cairn? I went through a few runs of Barony - a first-person roguelike dungeon crawler - all of which ended by me getting crushed by a boulder. It was familiar, simple, and demanded nothing from me other than acceptance of the impermanence of each run. I booted up my old favorite Risen - an older RPG from the studio behind Gothic. I played through the opening hours of a Total Warhammer campaign. Comfort - I went to my comfort titles.

And that’s fine, and I’m pretty damn proud of myself for not forcing these games upon myself, despite how much I want to experience all the genre-defining and pop-culture-driving goodness. Barony didn’t redefine dungeon crawlers. Risen didn’t push the RPG genre forward. Total Warhammer is pretty awesome, but I did play it for hundreds and hundreds of hours. These are good games, and these games don’t ask much from me - and they’re meeting me where I am - without much to give.

Well, turns out the demo started with episode two. What I had to sit through with the full game is episode one - lots of exposition, some pretty generic superhero cutscenes, and the somewhat uninspired origin story for our hero - Robert Robertson. I sat through episode one because the demo got me invested, and I think I would’ve refunded the game in 30 minutes if I hadn’t played the demo first.

That’s Robert, facing his coworkers in Dispatch. In the demo, I didn’t know his backstory. But it didn’t matter, because I could see what kind of person Robert is through his interactions.

Which makes me wonder. Why the hell did the game not start at episode 2?

It’s an age-old writing problem - authors fall in love with the lore, reasons, motivations, backgrounds - and decide that they must lead with that. And I get it. These things truly matter. They separate surface level fiction from deeply engaging and thought provoking work. I like that the characters lived a full life before being in the main frame. I love that the world doesn’t feel like it popped into existence for me to engage with. But when I’m just beginning to engage with your work - I don’t have the motivation to sit through all of that. Not yet.

Connect your game to things I immediately understand. Need to get food? Yeah, happens to me several times a day - I’m motivated. Shelter? Yes, please. Protecting family? Humans are social creatures. Simple, deeply human things don’t need lore or much setup to pull me in. Or just give me a controller and let me hit things with a rock and find my own motivations.

Bad openings do neither. They ask you to care about things that only matter with context you don’t have yet. A deity monologuing in a void? A superhero origin story for a character I haven’t met? These are context-dependent stakes - and I don’t have the context.

I’m sure there’s much significance here - but I eventually bounced off the first game, and it’s been long enough that I don’t remember why the purple void must be so important and why the exposition is worth sitting through.

I’m somewhat ashamed to admit I’m yet to play through Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire. I’ve heard it’s incredible, and for a CRPG fan it’s surely a must play. But I sat through 30 minutes of its introduction - a boring, sitting in the void, answering questions from a deity introduction - powered off the game, and decided “some other day.” I know it’ll get good, and I’ve read somewhere that it’s a lot less in love with its lore than the first game - but nothing hooked me in 30 minutes. The thing about empty void is that it’s a tad bit boring.

Put down your pitchforks, I just reinstalled it and will power through the beginning sometime soon. I know deep in my heart it’s an awesome game, the Internet told me so.

I get it, you have to teach a player how to play your game. No matter how much game reviewers like to riff on “press A to jump” or “use your mouse to look around”, we need those. This could be somebody’s first game in the genre. Hell, this could be somebody’s first game altogether. We need more people playing games, so more people end up loving games, and more people end up making games.

But man, intros suck. Tutorials suck. I find myself skipping tutorials more and more these days. I felt weird at first - like disrespecting the developer-intended path. You put your love into this game, you wrote this little guide for how to play - and I’m just throwing it out.

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon sports the best tutorial I’ve ever seen. Other notable quotes include “Running is like walking, only faster”, and “Press Enter to make patronizing screens go away”, as the protagonist keeps getting more and more frustrated by the lack of meaningful gameplay.

But I’ve been having more fun engaging with systems and learning through failure. You don’t have to teach me that walking over a tripwire is a bad idea. I’ll do it once, reload, and won’t do it again. It’s how I play more open ended games these days - figure out the rules as my character starves, gets electrocuted, or eaten by a bear. Some of my favorite memories in strategy and management games are ruining my settlement because I didn’t yet understand a core mechanic.

You know what’s one of the worst offenders? JRPGs. That’s probably why I don’t love them as much as a genre. I played Xenoblade Chronicles 2 when I bought my Nintendo Switch - years ago. And I just kept feeling somewhat empty - 10, 20, 30, 40 hours in - but I kept reading that it eventually gets good. And I even understood how - but my man, why are you introducing core game mechanics so late into the game? Don’t do that please. It’s not just story that games front-load badly. Some withhold their own systems for dozens of hours, which might be worse.

I have less patience these days. I’ll use my toddler as an excuse - my time is limited. Give me a sword, or a gun, or a scanner - or whatever system-appropriate instrument to engage with your game’s systems, and let me run loose for a bit. Let me connect with the story on my own terms.

So what games do this right?

The Last of Us - Ellie and Riley having a bit of fun. Nothing bad’s going to happen here, I’m sure.

In the Dispatch demo, you’re dropped into a workspace that already exists. It’s 8 am, you’re working the shift. There’s no fluff - you’re navigating relationships in real time, not reading a lore dump on Invisigal’s origin story. In Baldur’s Gate III, the character creator is the game - given you’re familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, that is. And if you’re not, there are plenty of options to speed through and get to the action - the game starts with action, as you’re escaping a crashing nautiloid ship.

Outer Wilds gives you full controls right away - go figure things out, you should probably head down that way. I’m in the driver’s seat. Subnautica - crash, swim, survive. Game starts from moment one. And it works on both levels - you have agency AND you need to not drown. Breath of the Wild - even the tutorial island lets you play around with the game’s many systems from the get-go.

You know what else I barely have patience for? Cutscenes. If your game’s frontloaded by a 30 minute cutscene - I’m probably gone these days. Unless you’re Kojima, but then I’m coming in knowing that the man has zero respect for my time - or conventions, or storytelling. Hideo Kojima gets a pass, because I know I’m in for a ride. I don’t go into a movie theater expecting to be handed a controller after all. Many games don’t get that luxury from me though. Make me care, then make me sit through your two hour cutscene.

And then there’s The Last of Us. Its opening is basically a 20 minute cutscene. Barely any real agency. But you know what - there’s damn good storytelling. You don’t need to explain to me why a parent cares about protecting their kid. I’m a dad, I’m invested, I get it. So yeah, you can pull that off - but the narrative has to hit something I already carry with me. The game didn’t build that investment. I brought it.

If your game’s intro is not hitting something primal, if your lore requires context I don’t have yet - just let me play. I’ll find ways to get motivated. And if I don’t, at least I had fun hitting things with a rock.

The Dispatch developers proved this. Their demo - which starts at episode two - is a better opening than the game’s “actual” opening. AdHoc Studio knew this when putting up a demo, and should’ve done the same with the main game.

I don’t have a particular attachment to beavers, especially anthropomorphised ones. The way they build dams is cool, I guess. I consider myself somewhat of a city builder veteran - I’m not particularly great at these games, but I’ve played many, many titles, and I’m quick to pick up and master the core themes. Timberborn is many things - a survival city builder, a terraforming puzzle, and a factory automation game. And it’s been out for a while, through a lengthy Early Access period, so I’m late to the party. But the 1.0 release caught my eye, and I figured - sure, beavers.

I never thought I’d care about beavers, but I do. A discerning viewer (and a seasoned Timberborn player) might notice that there are no beavers here. They’re all dead, because I didn’t pay attention.

Either the older I get, or the more games I play, I put more emphasis on singular, focused experiences. I like when games do one thing, and do it well. Throughout the typical Timberborn run, I’ll play 3 or 4 different games. I start off with a basic survival city builder, ensuring everyone’s sheltered and fed. Then it becomes a terraforming puzzle. Then a factory automation game. Timberborn has been the opposite of a focused experience - and it’s helped me figure out what actually works at each phase of a city builder.

Timberborn is a good game that I’m about to be unfair to.

Survival without teeth

Timberborn starts you off with the basics - thirst, hunger, shelter. There’s some food planning and water management, but the food doesn’t spoil, and pumped water doesn’t evaporate. Large stockpiles are the answer to every question. Survival elements feel a little wooden, it’s fine enough.

I’ve killed my first two beaver colonies. I actually love when city builders do this - failure is an effective teaching tool, and “everyone died” is a good story.

In contrast, I like how Farthest Frontier, inspired by the excellent Banished, handles survival mechanics. Food spoils, so you can’t overproduce. You can overhunt, overfish, and overlog - so you have to keep a careful balance when extracting resources to avoid starving. There’s a real puzzle in the early game, not just a number to grow.

My first Farthest Frontier run ended because I annihilated the local deer population and ran out of food. My second run ground to a halt after I completely chopped down the only forest on the map. Those failures taught me something about the systems.

In Timberborn, I never failed in a way that made me rethink my approach. 100% of the time I needed to scale production. The factory must grow, as they say - although the beavers here starve to death and the game grinds to a halt. The punishment for not paying attention is steep (which I’m all for), but waiting for population to bounce back is just… boring.

Mid-game is complicated, but not complex

Timberborn’s main shtick is water infrastructure. You divert rivers, create reservoirs, purify water, and manage droughts. It’s a fun optimization challenge, and it’s extremely satisfying once you successfully divert a river in time for a badtide - which would have killed your trees and poisoned your crops. That’s what the mid-game is made up from - lots of one-off, map-specific puzzles with immediate, satisfying payoff.

This is where I have lots of fun, but have to keep pausing to get back to survival. Do I have enough farms? I might need to flood another valley and throw a farming district on a newly formed shore. Running low on wood? Flood another valley, plant some trees, wait for them to grow. I’ve figured out all those puzzles once, and doing so for the first time was fun, but now I’m just going through the motions. And I have to keep pausing the terraforming projects I’m interested in to set up yet another tree farm, with all the infrastructure.

Flooding a valley never gets old - what was a narrow river expands to fill up the whole basin. Seeing the map completely change just because of the few well placed dams downstream feels magical.

And how extensive the infrastructure is. As of 1.0, beavers have 76 various needs to be fulfilled. 76! Different types of food, effects of various decorations, types of recreation… Your beavers get productivity bonuses for each amenity type you provide - a new food type, a campfire, a theater (yeah, these are some cultured beavers). And there are no trade-offs here. The higher the number goes, the more productive your beavers are. Timberborn’s design here is complicated, but not complex. There are lots of systems, but they all say the same thing: more is better.

Dwarf Fortress is complex. Every dwarf has preferences, moods, relationships, vices. Needs conflict with each other and with the situation. I had a guard posted to pull up a drawbridge during a goblin siege throw a tantrum - because he didn’t like that he kept eating the same food. In his defense, he was also dangerously sober and his cat had died the day before. Three compounding frustrations, none of which I caused directly, all of which I could have prevented if I’d been paying attention. That whole fortress got slaughtered by the goblin horde, too.

Timberborn’s 76 needs feel like a long checklist.

Automation and megaproject bloat

Then comes the late game, with its Early Access graduation bloat. Automation is fun, in theory. It’s rewarding to not need to manually control the water flow, or to have a backup reservoir supply water when the water evaporates during a drought. But it feels like a different game bolted on - I’m suddenly playing Factorio, except in Factorio I get in the zone setting up a uranium processing outpost protected by a wall of flamethrowers. In Timberborn I keep getting interrupted to ensure my beavers have enough showers.

And then there are robots. Yup, robo-beavers, who don’t need to eat or sleep but gradually wear out over time. It gives you a singular goal to slowly replace your beavers with the robotic workforce while (hopefully) increasing the quality of life for your shrinking population. But going full automation removes the need for all that complicated need management - which makes you wonder why you spent the mid-game building it.

Look at this little guy - the beavers get to rest while the robo-beavers are doing the work. What happens to the 76 needs we should be fulfilling though?

There are self-driven megaprojects too - massive dams, terraforming efforts. The systems here are solid enough, but they’re plagued by the same problems as the mid-game. Every big project means more beavers, and more beavers means more showers, more theaters, more of the same infrastructure you’ve already built three times. All the systems scale linearly, in lock step.

Anno 1800 has a similar late game on paper - increasingly demanding populations, sprawling production chains across multiple islands. But that’s the point of Anno. Citizen tiers are how progress is gated. Every new tier of residents unlocks new resources, new buildings, new trade routes, and demands direct access to goods you don’t have yet. Timberborn’s late game asks you to care about three different games at once, and none of them reinforce each other.

I’ve been picking on Timberborn for a while now, but I should repeat - I did enjoy my time with it. The water management is a genuinely fun puzzle, and diverting rivers just doesn’t get old. Any new city builder is a win in my book, and the developer passion shows through. Go support the developer and buy the game (non-affiliate link).

Oh, and I wish there were more dwarves in this than beavers. I like dwarves.

Well, I didn’t find it. I didn’t even look.

I finished the game, uninstalled it, and moved on. And I think that’s the best way I could have played it.

What a real secret feels like

Lunacid requires you to intimately learn its layouts. It can be confusing - there are no maps, and the layouts are rather confusing, forcing you to become intimately familiar with the areas until you’re actually able to navigate them. I was exploring an area - couldn’t even tell you which one - and I thought something felt wrong about a wall I kept walking by. I couldn’t even tell you what, just something. So I walked up to it, pressed the interact button, the wall disappeared. And in a locked chest behind the door, I found a VHS tape. In my dark fantasy game. That was weird and cool.

I thought this was a one-off moment, but as I continued exploring, I kept finding new pieces of the puzzle. Another odd wall, and now a CRT TV behind it, with a video player hooked up to it. Well, in the VHS tape goes, and I watch the video. It’s a hint at the next step in the puzzle, and yet another tape. A few tapes later, I learn some secrets about the world, although I’m more confused than enlightened. Yet, that experience felt like my own. This was a secret I found.

Now that I look at the title screen of Lunacid, I can definitely see the VHS tapes. I’m not an idiot, I swear.

The game never told me VHS tapes existed (although in hindsight, I should’ve paid attention to the title screen). There was no counter in a menu. No achievement notification telling me I’d found one of however many. I didn’t know if there were three or thirty. I just found one, and then later found another, and each time it felt like the game had slipped something into my pocket when I wasn’t looking.

Lunacid is stuffed with this kind of thing. Hidden areas inside hidden areas. Quests that don’t announce themselves as quests. Weapons tucked behind walls that have no visual tell. The game doesn’t surface any of it, and it’s perfectly fine with you never finding most of it.

Secrets versus collectibles

You know what doesn’t feel like a secret? A question mark on a map.

The Ubisoft school of open world design has trained an entire generation of players to think of hidden content as a checklist. Here are 123 chests. Here are 39 towers. Here’s a percentage ticking up every time you clear one. The content might technically be “hidden” in the sense that it’s spread across the map, but there’s nothing secret about it. The game has already told you it exists, told you how many there are, and is quietly judging you for sitting at 94%.

I think we can agree that these aren’t secrets. We’ve got to-do lists on our hands, and they suck.

A real secret doesn’t announce itself as a category. The game doesn’t even confirm there’s something to miss. You might walk right past a door that leads to an entire subplot, and the game will never clear its throat and say “You feel like you missed something important, are you sure you want to proceed?” You just… didn’t go that way. And the game is fine with it.

This section needed a screenshot to break up the text, so here’s Cuanacht - a second region of Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon. The game’s got style. And secrets, too.

Tainted Grail does something similar with its quest structures. What started off as an NPC saved from an unmarked camp turned out to be a long and rewarding hidden storyline - with plenty of decisions which would just make you miss out on the rest (if you know - you know, but it has something to do with the giant crows). It’s an RPG that’s dense with branching storylines, and the branches don’t label themselves. You make a choice, the story moves forward, and you have no idea if the road you didn’t take led to ten hours of content or a dead end. Was that NPC important? Was that location going to open up later if I’d done something differently? You can’t tell.

Old games hid things because they had to

There’s a lineage to all of this. The original dungeon crawlers (and first-person shooters for what it’s worth) were built under brutal space constraints. When your entire game has to fit on a cartridge, you can’t sprawl. You can’t just add more map. So designers squeezed every drop of value out of what they had. Secret rooms behind false walls. Hidden passages that rewarded players who pushed against every surface. Entire areas accessible only if you did something unintuitive and specific.

This is Wing’s Rest - Lunacid’s home base, the Firelink Shrine. Colorful characters love sharing their (usually tragic) stories, and hints for finding secrets often slip out.

Part of this was the arcade inheritance - games were supposed to resist you, supposed to hold things back, supposed to make you earn it. But part of it was also just who was making these things. Early game developers were hobbyists and obsessives. The kind of people who thought hiding a room behind a breakable wall with no visual indicator was just good game design. They were right, kind of.

Lunacid sits in direct conversation with this tradition, but there’s a key difference. Lunacid hides things, but it makes them relatively easy to find - you still feel really smart about uncovering the secrets, and there are layers upon layers here - but ultimately it’s all solvable. Kira, the developer, could have put those things on a map. Could have added quest markers. Could have surfaced the VHS tapes as a trackable collectible. Well, Kira’s a huge fan of the King’s Field games, and I’m glad Kira didn’t.

The two-way trust

When a game hides content without flagging it, it’s trusting you to be okay not finding everything. I kept walking past that wall in Lunacid - the one where something felt slightly off - and when I finally discovered it was an illusory wall, I realized the game was perfectly fine with me missing huge chunks of content.

Which conversely made me want to pay attention.

And when you don’t open a guide, you’re trusting the game right back. Trusting that the critical path is satisfying on its own, that the things you find will feel earned, and that the things you don’t find aren’t essential.

I love how Lunacid is perfectly content not letting you see whole areas of the game. Many areas aren’t required for completion, and it feels great to stumble into one “just because”. And yes, this book isn’t happy you’re in a forbidden library.

Both sides of this trust are eroding. Developers add percentage trackers and completionist achievements because players demand them. Players use guides because games are fifty, sixty, eighty hours long and who has time to replay something blind when your backlog is growing faster than you can make your way through it? I have a toddler. I optimize. Even before having a kid I optimized - that’s just how I play. I respect my time, so I look things up.

But the games that refuse this bargain - Lunacid, Tainted Grail, the Soulslikes - are asking you to accept gaps in your experience. To be comfortable with “what if?” as an answer. And they give something back for it: a version of the game that’s yours, gaps and all.

What happens when you break the trust

I know what happens because I did it recently.

My wife and I played through Dispatch together - her watching, me at the controls, our toddler asleep. If you haven’t heard of it, Dispatch is an office drama narrative game for superheroes. Turning our rag-tag team of villains into true heroes felt incredible, and camaraderie which developed within the group was just so… human? We finished it and I felt good about the experience.

And then I looked up the alternate endings.

Dispatch’s Z-team is made up of (eventually) lovable gang of misfits, and it feels like your choices alone led them to be a cohesive unit.

I wanted to know what we’d missed. What choices mattered. What would have gone differently. And what I found was that not many choices did. What seemed like my personal story, shaped by my decisions - the things Robert (the protagonist) did - turned out to be just different flavors of the same thing.

My relationship with the game changed. That feeling of having made meaningful choices, of having shaped something - it deflated. Not because the game had lied, exactly, but because I’d looked behind the curtain when nobody asked me to. The mystery was doing real work, and I took it apart with my own hands. I broke the contract.

Contrast that with Lunacid, where I walked away clean. I don’t know what I missed. I don’t know how much I missed. Maybe there’s a dozen other endings I haven’t seen, and maybe I’ve only engaged with a small portion of the game. Or maybe I’ve seen all there is to see. I’ll never know. On purpose.

The Moonlight Greatsword problem

In Elden Ring, I looked it up. The Moonlight Greatsword - or the Dark Moon Greatsword, as it’s called - requires a very specific questline that’s easy to miss or break. Ranni’s quest. I followed a guide for it, performing esoteric steps at the right time all throughout my hundred-something hour playthrough. Found the sword. Equipped it. Used it for a while, even built a whole character around it.

It felt okay-ish.

This is the coveted Dark Moon Greatsword, aka the Moonlight Greatsword. It’s really powerful - enough to trivialize much of the late game, and dressing up to complete the ice queen look is non-optional.

Not bad. Just… okay. I had the item, but I didn’t have the discovery. The moment I googled “how to get moonlight greatsword elden ring,” it went from a mystery to a set of instructions. Go here, talk to this person, go here, do that a dozen times across different hidden locations. Get the sword.

In Lunacid, the Moonlight Greatsword is in there somewhere. I know this. I could look up how to find it right now. I could probably have it in twenty minutes. But the version of the sword that exists in my head - the mystery of where it’s hidden, what it looks like in Lunacid’s low-poly aesthetic, what strange sequence of events leads to it - that version is more interesting than whatever the wiki says. I don’t want the answer. I want the question.

The save file I’ll never load again

I used to think not seeing everything in a game was a failure. A personal failure - like I hadn’t respected the developer’s work, hadn’t gotten my money’s worth, hadn’t really finished the game. The completionist impulse is strong, and I don’t think it comes from nowhere. Some of it is genuine respect for what someone built. Some of it is FOMO. And some of it is just conditioning - percentage goes up, percentage should reach 100, anything less means you left something on the table.

It’s been a long arc for me to get to the point where I can say “I’m done with this game” and mean it. To uninstall something knowing full well there’s content I never touched. I’m proud to say I don’t know what different decisions would’ve looked like in Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon. I’m not buying the DLC. I enjoyed the game, the chapter is closed. Goodbye.

But here’s the thing I keep coming back to. My Dispatch playthrough, the one where I looked everything up afterward, feels less complete than my Lunacid playthrough where I didn’t. Completionist logic says the opposite should be true - I know more about Dispatch, I’ve seen behind every curtain, I have the full picture. But the full picture turned out to be smaller than the partial one. The gaps in Lunacid are where the game still lives. The places I didn’t go, the sword I didn’t find, the VHS tapes I might have missed.

The save file I’ll never load again has a specific shape. My shape. The path I took through the game, the things I happened to find, the doors I opened and the ones I walked past. Nobody else played exactly that version of Lunacid.

Somewhere in there, there’s a Moonlight Greatsword I’ll never pick up. I think I’m okay with that.

I want to play something familiar today. Not quite sure what. I listened to this YouTube essay talking about survival mechanics in games, and I’ve had an itch to replay Farthest Frontier - a city builder about surviving on a, well, frontier. I boot it up, play for a few hours, but the itch isn’t scratched. It’s all too familiar. I’ve played this game before, I know how it ends, and I know what about this (overall fantastic) game frustrates me, too.

That’s fine. Maybe I just want to build a beautiful town in Foundation? So I boot that up. Start a new town, build up a small village, and get bored.

Oh, then maybe I want the survival crunch of Vintage Story? A few more hours and a dirt hut later - no, that ain’t it. Gritty darkness of Battle Brothers? Nah, I’ve played that to death. Maybe I want to survive against the looming dangers of Against the Storm? 40 minutes later - nope, I’m not quite satisfied.

Freezing winter, unending raider attacks, crop diseases… And yet, I know exactly what to do. Bye, Farthest Frontier, hello next game.

So off I go to Steam, to search for a game that’ll scratch that itch. I find remakes which tug on my nostalgia strings, early access games which generally frustrate me (finish your game before selling, maybe?), and millions of “Simulation Simulator” games. Another hour later, I dive into forums and stale Reddit threads for inspiration.

Wife and kiddo get home. My gaming day came to an end.

I wasted the whole thing chasing a feeling.

The feeling I remember

Here’s what I think happened. That YouTube essay talked about survival mechanics - the tension of not knowing whether you’ll make it, the improvisation, the stakes. And my brain immediately went: “Oh yeah. Farthest Frontier. I remember that.”

And I do remember it. I remember my first playthrough vividly. I didn’t know if I’d survive the first winter. I didn’t know if I had enough food, and if I did - whether it would spoil before my villagers could eat it. I didn’t know when the raiders would come, how many there were, or how to prepare, and I tried so many things. I put up towers, stashed food in different ways, figured out my villagers might need warm clothes before the cold hit. Some of my ideas worked. Some didn’t. Figuring things out - being right, and sometimes being spectacularly wrong - felt amazing.

That’s the feeling I was chasing. Not Farthest Frontier itself. The feeling of not knowing.

I know exactly what to do at this point in Farthest Frontier, even if I’m playing on a hardest difficulty and the “worst” map. I know to put barracks near the markets, and I know that walls are a waste of resources for quite some time.

So when I booted it up on my precious gaming day, I set it to the hardest difficulty, on the hardest map. And I did fine. I knew what I had to do. I knew when to stockpile firewood, when to build defenses, how to keep food from spoiling. A lot of it became going through the motions. The systems that once felt like puzzles now felt like checklists.

The YouTube essay described a feeling. My brain pattern-matched that feeling to a specific game. But the feeling didn’t live in the game anymore - it lived in the version of me who played it for the first time.

Familiar feels safe (until it doesn’t)

I think there’s something else going on, too. I’m a father to a toddler. I have a day job. Chores. Gym. I want to connect with my wife - and make time for talking about something other than diapers and appointments. I make time for gaming, but that time comes out of somewhere - often sleep, which is already at a premium.

When you don’t get many gaming days, the stakes feel high. A new game might be bad. It might take two hours just to figure out if I like it. A familiar game is a known quantity - I already know it’s good. Why risk the limited time I have?

Except the known quantity is “diminishing returns.” The safe choice is actually the one most likely to disappoint, because I already know what it has to offer. I’ve already mapped its systems, explored its edges, felt its highs. Going back is like rereading a mystery novel - I already know who did it.

And so I bounce. Farthest Frontier doesn’t scratch the itch, so maybe Foundation will. Foundation doesn’t, so maybe Vintage Story. Each game is familiar enough that I expect the feeling, and different enough that I think maybe this one will be the one. None of them are. The itch isn’t for a specific game - it’s for the experience of discovery within a genre I love. And discovery, by definition, can’t happen somewhere I’ve already been.

It’s always fun to build on a blank slate in any game, and Foundation is no exception. Yet, what I want isn’t here either. I know exactly how to score points with the merchants, the clergy, and the army, which will make the game much, much easier.

I wrote before about why I can’t replay games I love - how knowing a story’s ending drains the magic from revisiting it. This is the systems version of that same problem. I don’t replay games for story. I replay them because I love their mechanics. But once I’ve internalized those mechanics, there’s nothing left to explore. The thing I love about games - figuring out how they work - is the exact thing that makes replaying them hollow.

The YouTube pipeline to nostalgia

And it’s worth thinking about what triggered the whole spiral. It wasn’t a desire to play a game. It was a YouTube essay.

This happens to me more than I’d like to admit. Someone talks passionately about a genre or a mechanic, and they describe the feeling of engaging with it so well that I get this rush of recognition. “Yes, I know that feeling, I’ve felt that, I want to feel it again.” And my brain skips right past “find something new that might give you that feeling” and goes straight to “boot up the game where you last felt it.”

There’s a reason I always keep a copy of Heroes of Might and Magic III on my computer. There’s this hope that at some point, when I boot it up, I’ll feel the way I did when I booted the game up on my cousin’s computer in the year 2000.

External media doesn’t make me curious about new things nearly as often as it makes me nostalgic for old ones. An essay about survival mechanics doesn’t send me looking for a survival game I haven’t tried. It sends me back to Farthest Frontier and Vintage Story and Battle Brothers, because those are the games I associate with that feeling.

I’m not sure there’s a fix for this, other than noticing it. Noticing the moment where “that sounds exciting” becomes “I should replay X.” That’s the fork in the road, and I keep taking the wrong turn. Bleh.

The Boltgun exception

A few months back, I had a day with some free time (yeah, those are rare these days) and - for reasons I can’t fully reconstruct - picked up Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun. This is not a game I would normally care about. I don’t have much love for boomer shooters, I wouldn’t say I care about space marines all that much, and I don’t typically love the pixelated aesthetics. It was just… there. Different from what I’d been playing.

And I had a great time.

Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, in all of its pixel art gory glory. It does feel satisfying to use the chain sword, however impractical.

Not a life-changing, top-ten-of-all-time great time. But a genuinely good few hours with something I hadn’t experienced in ages. The speed, the absurdity of it, the simplicity. My palate felt expanded. Cleansed. I came away with more appreciation for gaming as a medium, not less - which is the opposite of what happens when I spend a day cycling through familiar titles.

I was discovering something, even if that something wasn’t exactly in my wheelhouse. And discovery - even small, imperfect discovery - scratches the itch that no amount of replaying ever will.

The itch

I know myself well enough to know I’ll probably do this again. Next time I get a full gaming day, some part of my brain will whisper that I should boot up something comfortable, something I already know is good. And the temptation will be strong, because time is scarce and the unfamiliar is risky.

But I wasted a whole day on that logic. Six, seven hours of bouncing between games I’ve already played, chasing a feeling none of them could give me. I could’ve spent that time with something I’d never tried. I could’ve had a Boltgun day.

It was my wife who first pointed out my love of dwarves. “Can you play as dwarves in your game?” - “Yes, why do you ask?” - “You’re playing as dwarves, aren’t you?” - “Yes, how did you know?”.

My favorite faction in Total Warhammer? Dwarfs. My character in World of Warcraft? A dwarf, naturally. Dragon Age: Origins? A dwarf, of course. And can’t even begin to estimate the number of hours I sunk into Dwarf Fortress in the past twenty years.

Meet Thorgrim Grudgebearer, the most dwarfen dwarf to ever dwarf in Total War: Warhammer III. He’s the current high king, and he carries the great book of grudges with him to make sure no slight gets unpunished.

Well, a few dwarf-themed gifts from a thoughtful partner, and a whole lot of reflecting later I have a better handle on why I fantasize of being a short, stout, beer loving bearded old man.

Dwarves are manly men

I’m a man. Growing up, I never particularly considered myself very “manly”. I liked Dungeons and Dragons and computer games. I grew up around lots of female cousins, and I was pulled into more dress-up games than I’d like to admit. I didn’t get in any semblance of physical shape until my mid-twenties.

All that to say, that as a young adult, I didn’t feel that brand of “manliness” on me, and maybe that contributes to a deep desire to roleplay as a dwarf. Dwarves are all muscle, arguably even dwarven women and children have beards, and they can drink a full keg without buckling. As I got older, I moved past insecurities around masculinity I’ve had growing up, but the attraction to the dwarven archetype remained.

Speaking of alcohol - I like drinking - beer, wine, and liquors taste good, and they do wonders as self-medication for anxiety, ADHD, mild OCD - and anything else that might come up. But drinking isn’t good for you, and as I’m getting older, I don’t like how even a single drink makes me feel these days. And the fantasy of a dwarf drinking beer over water with no consequences does make its way into my head sometimes.

I enjoyed the way Return to Moria portrayed dwarves. They sing, drink beer, and dig through the earth. If only it didn’t try to melt my computer down when running.

You see a dwarf - and you know exactly what to expect.

They’re not elves

Elves are graceful. Elves are wise. Elves live for thousands of years and spend them writing poetry and being insufferably sad about the passage of time. Elves are the protagonist’s best friend, or the protagonist themselves, or the ancient mentor who speaks in riddles. Elves are special, and think they’re better than you.

Pointy eared bastards.

There’s something about the elven fantasy that feels like a trap to me. You’re beautiful, immortal, magically gifted - and what do you do with it? You sit in a forest and feel melancholy. You look down on everyone else’s short lives and crude craftsmanship. Elves are the kid in class who got straight A’s without studying and made sure everyone knew it.

Dwarves are the opposite of that. Dwarves work hard. A dwarven kingdom exists because someone carved it out of solid rock with their hands. Dwarven armor is good because a smith spent eighty years getting better at making it. There’s no magical shortcut, no birthright elegance. Just work, and the pride that comes with work.

A line of dwarfs can withstand just about anything. And definitely they could withstand anything better than elves, who aren’t very good at withstanding things.

Games encode this divide right into the stats. In Dragon Age: Origins or World of Warcraft, dwarves can’t be mages - not as flavor text, as a hard mechanical lock. You pick a dwarf and an entire class is off the table. In World of Warcraft, dwarven racials are Stoneform and Might of the Mountain - toughness, endurance, raw physical resilience. Meanwhile elven racials tend to be about agility, perception, magical affinity. Before you even start playing, the character sheet is telling you what kind of fantasy you’re signing up for.

When I pick a dwarf in Dragon Age: Origins, I’m choosing to start in Orzammar - underground, politically tangled, cut off from the surface world. It’s a harder, stranger, less glamorous starting point than the Dalish elf prancing through mystical forests. And that’s exactly why I like it. The dwarf noble origin is messy. You’re betrayed by your own brother, stripped of your caste, left for dead.

When I play tabletop RPGs, I pick a dwarf as a declaration: I’m not here to be the chosen one, I’m here to hold the line.

Holes are cozy

I’ve written before about games you can nest in - stockpiling larders in Vintage Story, building a base in Subnautica, that impulse to dig in and make a space yours. Dwarves are the racial embodiment of that impulse.

And there’s something about underground spaces in games that just works for me. When I’m playing Dwarf Fortress and I carve out a dining hall three z-levels down, smooth the stone walls, place tables and chairs and a nice statue, I feel a specific kind of satisfaction that surface building never quite matches. It’s enclosed. It’s protected. The mountain is above me, around me, and nothing can get in unless I forget to raise the bridge over the lava moat again. I think about the first time I dug into a hillside in Minecraft and sealed the entrance behind me with a piece of dirt while zombies groaned outside, and how that felt safer than any castle I ever built above ground.

This maps onto real life more than I’d like to admit. I like small rooms. My desk is in a corner, looking out onto the rest of the room. When I was a kid I used to make pillow forts out of couch cushions, or as my grandpa called those - “the cities of Shaitan” - and would sit inside reading with a flashlight. If that isn’t dwarven behavior in miniature, I don’t know what is.

Dwarves are engineers

The other thing about dwarves - they make stuff. Not with magic (okay, we’re going to ignore dwarven runes for a moment here). With materials, with process, with expertise.

This dwarf fortress has everything a dwarf needs, especially lava for the lava moat. That never ends well.

I think this is why Dwarf Fortress grabbed me so completely and never let go. The game is essentially a giant systems engineering project disguised as a fantasy settlement sim. You’re managing water pressure, ventilation, traffic flow, material logistics. Your dwarves aren’t casting spells. They’re smelting ore and building pumps and, if you’re ambitious and slightly unhinged, flooding goblin sieges through elaborate flow and drainage systems you spent two in-game years constructing.

That same satisfaction shows up in Factorio, in Satisfactory, in Vintage Story’s metalworking chain - games where progress means understanding and mastering a process, not leveling up a skill tree. These aren’t dwarf games, obviously, but they scratch the same itch. The dwarf fantasy isn’t “I am powerful.” It’s “I built this, and it works, and I understand why it works.”

There’s a reason dwarves in most settings don’t use magic, barely tolerate it, or, in Warhammer lore, sap the magic out of the world. Magic is a shortcut. Magic says the rules don’t apply to you. Engineering says the rules are the whole point - you just need to be clever enough to work within them.

Loyalty and stubbornness

Dwarves hold grudges. This is, depending on the setting, either a character flaw or an entire system of governance. In Warhammer, the Dammaz Kron - the Great Book of Grudges - is a literal ledger of every wrong ever done to the dwarfen people, and grudges can only be settled through repayment or blood. It’s written in blood, too. It’s absurd.

You know how absurd it is? In Warhammer lore, dwarf master craftsmen were hired to build a fortress. Upon receiving the payment, they found that they were shorted two and a half pennies. A reasonable person would clearly consider this an honest mistake. The dwarfs razed the fortress to the ground to settle the debt.

I’m stubborn. I know this about myself. I hold onto things longer than I should - opinions, frustrations, loyalties.

But the flip side of stubbornness is loyalty, and dwarves have that in spades. When a dwarf says they’ll stand with you, they mean it. Not because it’s strategically smart, not because they expect something in return, but because they said they would and that’s the end of it. In Total Warhammer, the reliability of dwarfen alliances is almost a meme - they’re one of the few factions that won’t backstab you in diplomacy. And I love that. In a game full of scheming vampires and treacherous rats, the dwarfs just… keep their word.

I have to at least include a screenshot from Deep Rock Galactic. Many consider it to be the ultimate dwarf game. I don’t have a good reason to disagree, but I don’t play many multiplayer games these days.

Total Warhammer actually makes this a mechanic, not just flavor. The Grudge system gives your faction real debuffs - public order penalties, diplomatic hits - until you settle outstanding grudges. You can’t be pragmatic about it. An ork warlord bested you in battle? That’s a grudge. Humans settled in what you consider dwarfen land by right? In the grudge book it goes. Someone dares to share a border with you? They have wronged us!

Dwarfs in Total Warhammer are always upset at everyone for the stupidest reasons, and you can’t let a slight go because the timing is bad or because you need that alliance right now. The game forces you to play like a dwarf: stubborn, comically vindictive, bound by principle even when it’s strategically stupid. I like that when most strategy games reward flexibility, Total Warhammer’s dwarfs punish it.

Dwarf Fortress models the other side of this - loyalty that spirals out of control. When a dwarf dies, the dwarves who loved them grieve. If enough grief accumulates, a dwarf throws a tantrum. If a tantruming dwarf hurts someone, that causes more grief, more tantrums, more destruction. These are the loyalty cascades - your fortress falls to dwarven drama. Because your dwarves loved each other too much and couldn’t let go.

I’ve lost fortresses this way. Not to sieges, not to forgotten beasts, but to one dwarf’s death unraveling the entire social fabric of a community because every other dwarf cared too deeply to keep functioning. It’s devastating, and very thematic.

Games that fail dwarves

Not every game earns the archetype. In a lot of RPGs, picking a dwarf means you’re slightly shorter, you get a strength or constitution bonus, and that’s it. The world doesn’t change. The caves don’t feel different. You don’t interact with stone or metal or craft any differently than anyone else. “Dwarf” is just a skin stretched over a shorter and thicker model, with all of the systems unchanged.

Skyrim’s Dwemer ruins are visually impressive but they’re corridors - you pass through them, fight things, and leave. No one ever lived there, and you can tell. There’s no sense of habitation, no warmth, no trace of the daily routines of a real civilization. And yeah, don’t even tell me that the Dwemer aren’t exactly dwarves, I know my Elder Scrolls lore. I’m still salty, even if they aren’t short and stout. Compare that to Dwarf Fortress, where every room has a purpose, where your dwarves have preferences about what stone their bedroom floor is made of.

The difference comes down to whether the game’s systems actually care about what makes dwarves dwarves. Dwarf Fortress works because the entire simulation is built around dwarven priorities - craft, infrastructure, social bonds, grudges, alcohol. The game doesn’t have a dwarf mode and a non-dwarf mode. Every system exists because that’s what a dwarven society would need. When a game just gives you +2 Constitution and calls it a day, it’s telling you that dwarves are just short humans who can survive an extra hit. And that’s a waste.

Never the protagonist

Here’s something that’s been sitting with me: dwarves almost never get to be the main character. Gimli is comic relief. The Hobbit dwarves are Bilbo’s entourage. In Dragon Age, dwarves are a playable origin, sure, but the game’s lore clearly cares more about elves and mages and the big human political drama. In most D&D campaigns, the dwarf fighter is the backbone of the party, but the story belongs to whoever has the most complicated backstory and the biggest destiny.

Dwarf noble is arguably the best origin start in Dragon Age: Origins. Yet, their story fades after the prologue to make way for human centric drama.

Dwarves support. They hold the line so someone else can be the hero.

I think there’s a structural reason for this, and it goes beyond narrative bias. Dwarves, as an archetype, don’t change. That’s the whole point of them - they’re steadfast, traditional, immovable. But stories need characters who grow, who transform, who are different at the end than they were at the beginning. A dwarf who has a dramatic arc and learns to see the world differently and abandons old traditions - that’s not really a dwarf anymore. That’s just a short human.

This is why dwarves tend to work best in games where the story is emergent rather than authored. Dwarf Fortress doesn’t need its dwarves to have character arcs, because the story comes from the systems interacting - from loyalty cascades and flooded mines and a mason who insists on making artifacts out of cat bone. Total Warhammer doesn’t need Thorgrim Grudgebearer to grow as a person. He needs to settle grudges. The game gives him exactly the tools to do that and nothing else. Narrative RPGs struggle with dwarves because the form demands transformation, and transformation is the one thing the archetype resists.

And I keep choosing them anyway. There’s probably something in that. I mentioned earlier that I gravitate toward tanks and healers in multiplayer games - the roles that exist to make everyone else’s job possible. I don’t need the killing blow. I need to know the group survived because I was there.

P.S. - I can’t write about dwarves without mentioning the elephant in the mine. The dwarven archetype has uncomfortable roots. Tolkien acknowledged his dwarves were “reminiscent of Jews” - a displaced people with a secret language, driven from their homeland, defined by their relationship to gold and craft. The gold-hoarding, the clannishness, the long memory for slights - these overlap with old antisemitic stereotypes, and that overlap isn’t accidental. It’s baked into the fantasy lineage that every dwarf in every game since has inherited. If you want to read more about this, Rebecca Brackmann’s essay “Dwarves are not heroes” is a good starting point. I love this archetype. I’m also not going to pretend it arrived clean.