Wing Commander III
I&#x27;ve lost something.<p>When I was a kid, buying a new game was nearly impossible; If I was lucky, I&#x27;d get one for a birthday present or a Christmas gift. Occasionally a cool friend would lend me a copy of something. For a very short time, I lived about a mile away from a video game rental store and I&#x27;d sometimes be able to convince an adult I was responsible enough to return the game and spend my own money renting a game over a weekend.<p>As a result of this, I&#x27;d spend many, many hours on the same game. I&#x27;d &quot;beat&quot; the game, but I&#x27;d also have this sort of mental model of challenges or &#x27;perfect&#x27; gameplay that I&#x27;d try to achieve. It might be a score. It might be a time. It might be collecting all of a thing. It might be getting to a particular location that appeared to be &#x27;off limits.&#x27; It was basically &#x27;achievements&#x27; before there were achievement systems, but they were generally a lot harder and all the rewards for doing it where self-generated and internal. (I also spent a lot of time thinking about whether a thing was possible, and if it wasn&#x27;t, why not.) This also allowed me to spend a lot of time on games that weren&#x27;t very good and find some good within them.<p>This post reminded me of this, because Wing Commander (the original) was one of those games I played over and over again. (I can&#x27;t really recall what my goals were for the game, but I remember it being particularly difficult to achieve them.)<p>I don&#x27;t really do this with games anymore. Even in the case where I don&#x27;t have the next game chosen and already in my line-up, it&#x27;s easy to buy a game online and have it downloaded and playable within an hour. There aren&#x27;t any surprises: readily available game reviews tell me basically exactly what to expect. On a game I particularly enjoy, I might spend some more time on it by gathering the achievements, but achievements really pale in comparison (in terms of both difficulty and reward) to what I remember of doing this myself in my youth.<p>It&#x27;s like the difference between reading a novel and really understanding a novel at a deep level. I think I&#x27;d like to get back to those deeper dives; but with more money than time (versus more time than money that I used to have), so many excellent games available, and all kinds of other distractions, I&#x27;m not really sure how or where to begin. I&#x27;m also not sure it&#x27;s just me, or if games in general have lost a sort of magic they used to have.