There is no greater joy than playing the first couple of hours of a game. All of the unfinished games in my various libraries that have only a couple hours of playtime are a testament to this.
My favorite part of playing a game is the moment when everything clicks, when all the mechanics that have been slowly, slowly tutorialized lock into place, revealing a new whole. In my brain, it’s a physical sensation of pieces falling, one that shows me an elegance to a manufactured universe where before there was only chaos. There is only one way to experience that feeling of discovery: starting a new video game.
For instance, I remember the first time I truly Understood Dwarf Fortress, after only a few hours. The economic systems had finally settled themselves and I had a bustling fort, wondering if that was all there was to see. Then, a werelizard attacked, killing a dozen dwarves. I cleaned up the mess and went about my way. About a month later, the dwarves who had been bitten and not killed transformed into vicious werelizards. It was a complete bloodbath, no survivors. I understood the game in its totality in that moment—it is a game about inevitable and hilarious failure, and the stories you tell about those failures afterward.
That gut level understanding is such a delicious feeling for me. More recently, I’ve had that moment with Marathon as I’ve started playing its Vault Breaker mode, which is an experimental PVE mode that allows not very good players like me to get a look at the end game content. For me, it unveiled the way that Marathon is built on interlocking puzzles, both literal ones and social puzzles that you’ll have to learn to navigate as a player. I still absolutely suck shit at Marathon, but now I feel as if I’ve conquered it conceptually.
I’ve also had this experience when confronting the first big boss in a game. In Control, I don’t think I really understood how the game wanted me to play it until I figured out how to beat Tommasi, who spams the player with enemies and fucking throws rocks at you until you learn how to best use all the abilities available to you. Returnal’s first boss, Phrike, has a similar quality. You will end that fight understanding exactly how to use the game’s jump and air dash, or you will not complete the fight. Roguelikes in general are good at creating this kind of feeling within me because these games rely on repetition, on going out and gathering new knowledge until you know enough to defeat what has challenged you.
There is another reason why I love starting new games, though. It is because I have ADHD and I constantly crave novelty.
A new game presents new experiences. Sure, some of those experiences are going to be a tutorial, but learning something is the price you pay for something new. The clumsiness and trial and error that comes from learning new systems are a part of the fun for me, too. The older you get, the harder it is to do something you haven’t done before, just by the virtue of having lived a life. Microdosing newness—new things to learn and new ways to use my brain—in the form of a video game is a little bit like smoking the butt of a cigarette hoping for a hit, but it gets the job done, more or less.
Eventually, though, the contours of a new game become familiar. Its systems have been mastered. There’s no new understanding to be gained from continuing to play. I remember a moment in Cult of the Lamb where I realized that I had so aggressively min-maxed its resource management systems that I would never run out of resources and that I would handily unlock everything I needed to reach the boss. The game instantly became less interesting to me now that I could see the path to completion. There wasn’t anything left to figure out, only a short path to victory.
Whenever that happens to me in a video game, when it starts to feel boring because there’s nothing else for me to learn, I start a new game. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of video games I haven’t tried yet, all of them representing brand new things for me to experience. Isn’t that just a vision of heaven? Every day, a new thing to learn to love.
It’s Hater Week here on Aftermath. This week we’re letting the hate flow through us by examining what it means to be a hater (and… a lover?), venting about some of our biggest pet peeves in games and life, and giving others a space to do the same.
