I wasted my gaming day chasing a feeling

Today’s my gaming day. Wife and kiddo are out adventuring, I’m up early, excited - I don’t get these days often.

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.