#05 Continue?

So what happened? Well, I didn’t die. Quite the contrary — what happened was life… along with other things. When you have too much on your shoulders, you prioritize, and this page apparently did not make the list for a few years. Other gaming activities did, however. And, in a way, they transformed my interest in games, making this comeback not only possible, but worthwhile.

One of the things I kept doing was attending various retro-computing events. Some were good, others not so much, but all of them — intentionally or otherwise — helped keep my interest in retro gaming alive, largely thanks to the interesting people I met there and their sometimes rather strange takes on the subject.

At one such event, I attended a talk by Simon Butler, the self-proclaimed world’s oldest kid, who said something that hit very close to home for me. His point was simple: there are new games being made all the time, offering new experiences, so why keep going back to the same old ones?

And as I sat there listening to this old chap saying wise things, I made a promise to myself: finally stop playing all those old titles I’d been returning to for… well, decades, really.

At the time, naturally, I was once again playing Jagged Alliance 2 with the legendary 1.13 patch.

I didn’t quite take his advice the way he intended, though. For me, a new game does not necessarily have to be newly released. It only has to be new to me. A game from 1987 that I’ve never played can offer just as much discovery as something released yesterday. What mattered was breaking out of the comfortable loop of replaying the same favourites and deliberately looking for experiences I hadn’t had before.

Of course, simply deciding to seek out new experiences was not going to be enough. Old habits are remarkably persistent, and my brain is particularly fond of staying on familiar rails. So, being the system-oriented person that I am, I had to turn the idea into a few rules.

The first was simple: unless a game is genuinely bad, I play it from start to finish. No more “I’ll come back to it later.” Let’s be frank — later rarely comes. And even when it does, I usually start over, effectively throwing away all the time I’d already invested. When I thought about it, the number of times I’d restarted Baldur’s Gate, Fallout and countless other games was frankly absurd — especially considering how many acknowledged classics I’d somehow never managed to finish at all.

The second rule concerned the games themselves: no more open-ended sandboxes that simply drop me into a world and expect me to make my own fun indefinitely. I had begun to realise that, for me, these experiences were increasingly addictive while offering diminishing returns. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in No Man’s Sky, yet I can recall only a handful of genuinely memorable moments from all that time — and most of those came near the beginning.

So now, if a game has no meaningful ending, I generally don’t want to start it. I want an experience I can enter, explore, finish, think about and then leave behind before moving on to the next one.

So far — and it has been months since I established this approach — it has been working surprisingly well. I’ve been discovering games I had never played before, many of which I’ve owned for decades without ever getting around to even installing them. Some were mysterious enough to make me stop and ask myself: where did I even get this one?

There is a peculiar joy in finally installing something bought from a cheap basket twenty years ago. Admittedly, that joy can be diminished somewhat by the gymnastics sometimes required to make old games run on modern systems. Fortunately, I still have plenty of old machines around, so I can always take the retro journey one step further and play the game on hardware closer to what it was originally meant for.

Most of my games, however, are now in digital form, which comes with one fundamental advantage: generally, they just work. And sometimes one simply wants to play a game rather than spend an evening fighting drivers on a Windows machine from the previous century.

One of the things that consistently did make it onto the list was writing for Pixel Addict, which fortunately did not end up being a one-off thing. I contributed an article to almost every issue over the past three years — a feat I honestly hadn’t thought myself capable of.

At the same time, it became a vehicle for methodical game discovery and analysis. While I often covered games I had already played extensively in the past, more and more frequently I found myself having to discover a game, complete it, analyse it, think it through and, in a way, form a judgement about it — all within two or three weeks.

For a mind accustomed to familiar experiences, that constant imperative to try something new was not easy at first. Well… it still isn’t. Even when it concerns a hobby, something we supposedly do for fun, there is — at least for me — always a certain friction involved in trying something unfamiliar. I had settled so comfortably into my comfort zone that leaving it, even for the sole purpose of enjoying myself, could be surprisingly difficult.

But not once have I regretted doing it.

I’ve enjoyed every one of those discoveries and all the games they led me to. Without Pixel Addict, I probably would never have tried many of them, and even if I had, I almost certainly would not have finished most of them.

And for some games I already knew from the past but had never completed, writing about them gave me the incentive to finally close those chapters — and experience that surprisingly pleasant feeling of closure.

The funny thing is that this writing about games not only continued, but eventually expanded. More recently, I’ve been contributing not to one magazine, but two. SteamOS Magazine focuses on newer games — another part of gaming I had largely neglected for many years.

So now, roughly once a month, I go through a long list of reasonably recent releases, pick something that looks promising, play it from start to finish, and then write about it. In a way, it has become yet another mechanism forcing me to keep discovering things I would otherwise probably never try.

Somewhere along the way, I also learned to appreciate shorter games.

One of the conclusions I’ve gradually reached about games and gaming is this: if a game cannot hook me within fifteen minutes and give me a reasonable amount of enjoyment within the first hour, it is increasingly unlikely that I will consider it worth investing many more hours in. I no longer particularly want long games. I want games that leave a mark — that give me joy, move me, surprise me, change the way I think about something, or simply do something memorable.

And no — giving me a sandbox, regardless of how enormous or beautifully constructed it may be, is no longer enough. I already live in the real world. That is enough of a sandbox for me. When I play a game, I want something else.