No Man’s Sky - Finally lifting off the planet into space for the first time reignited my love of space and the cosmos. Made me feel awe and wonder

The Stanley Parable - never had a game make me laugh till I had tears in my eyes before. This game really fucks with your perception of what is real and just how common / predictable some gaming tropes have become

When i first killed someone in DayZ back in the day, when it was just the ArmA 2 mod and all the hype.

I finally found a gun and started to learn my way around the zombies, when i heard a player in a bush nearby the hospital in Elektrozavodsk. I thought he was probably out to get me, so i emptied my Makarov clip at the bush and shortly after heard the fly noise they had put to mark dead players.

As i searched his body with my heart pumping like crazy i found him to have nothing but a can of beans. I felt profoundly shitty in that moment because he was just like me at the time. Some new guy playing a tough sandbox multiplayer-game, where everything and everyone can kill you. He probably didnt even hear or see, where he got killed from, just like it happened half a dozen times to me before.

I showed cruelty to someone in whose shoes i’d had demanded mercy.

Fuck everyone pitching people to fight each other

Kind of feels disparate from it being a video game, but it’s difficult to really make this experience another way:

I wanted to play a healer in an MMO. It was a shitty MMO, so healers could only be female characters wearing skimpy armor.

Well, it took about half a minute until I had people walk up to me, to then just stop 3 meters away. From the way they were moving, I have to assume, they were working their cameras to look underneath my skirt, and probably doing so with only one hand.

Some of them were sending me “hello :)” messages, which I guess is basic decency, if you’re going to use my body, but it felt weird, too, since we had nothing to talk about.

All in all, it felt uncomfortable. And I did not even have to fear for them to start touching or even raping me. Plus, I was able to log out, delete my account and basically just leave all of that behind.

Well, except for one thing I did not leave behind: I do not want to be the other side in that experience either.

For me it was playing Life is Strange for the first time. I bought it because it had been listed on Steam as “Overwhelmingly Positive” for ages, and at the time I was really enjoying the story-based games that companies like Telltale were producing. So, knowing nothing about the game, I picked it up and started playing it.

The first act was slow. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the writers were establishing Arcadia Bay, a city in the Pacific Northwest, as a character. All the people in it needed to be recognizable, so it took time for them to teach the player about who they were, what mattered to them, how they fit in to the city, and what their flaws were. I actually stopped playing for a while after the first act. But, luckily, I picked it back up over the holiday season.

I still remember playing it in my living room. I was so thoroughly absorbed into the story that when something tense happened in the second act and I couldn’t stop it the way I normally could, I was literally crushing the controller as if I could make things work by pulling the triggers harder.

I am decidedly not the demographic that Life is Strange was written to appeal to, but they did such a good job writing a compelling story that it didn’t matter. I got sucked in, the characters became important to me, and I could not. put. it. down. I played straight through a night until I finished it.

(If you’ve played it and you’re wondering, I chose the town the first time I played it.)

I’ll never forget that game. I’ll also never forget the communities that spawned around it. I read the accounts of people who had just played it for the first time for about a year because it helped me relive the experience I had when I played it. It was incredible.

Playing Outer Wilds, spoilers ahead:

::: Minor Outer Wilds spoilers I was trying to see how far into space I could get before the time loop restarted. As I flew away, I aimed my signalscope back towards the solar system and listened to all the instruments play together. Then when the supernova hit, one by one, the instruments were silenced. :::

That game is full of so many great moments of discovery and realization in that game, I wish I could play it for the first time again.

That dragon, cancer.

A linear story about having a child and loving him and knowing you will lose him to a cancer he is too young to fend off. Based on the devs son.

Utterly heartbreaking, makes you hug your kids.

This is a great question, lots of interesting replies.

There’s so many points for me that were also turning points for gaming. Watching the pixels move on the TV because they were being told to by the console, from the original Pong, to Atari 2600 Space Invaders, were all events that left an impression. Playing a Williams licenced Defender on an Atari 400, and Donkey Kong.

I grew up with all this, it was part of my childhood.

Then, one day, some friends got a Playstation, the original. I went round and they were playing Die Hard. They had the gun controller that came with it. I watched for a bit and I couldn’t keep up, things happening so quickly it looked so intense and sort of real. It was fascinating but also terrifying.

Then it was my turn, I said no it’s not for me I can’t do that. Go on they said and pushed the gun at me. Alright, but I’ll be shit.

Some time passed and I found myself moving through an airport, my friends barking as each baddie appeared and going silent as I popped them and moved on. Slick, efficient, deadly.

I stopped and held the gun loosely, they turned protesting in dismay. I was shaking and sweating, I couldn’t go on. Something changed that day, I knew games were different now. There was no going back, from now on I would always be a First Person Shooter.

When I was younger, I had really only experienced console games and maybe a few basic PC games at school. My uncle showed my this FPS game on his computer called Redneck Rampage. Basically you’re running around farms trying to kill aliens. I don’t really remember playing very many FPS game before that and it opened up a whole new world for me. But the really crazy part was how “adult” the game was. You could drink beer in the game and your character would get drunk. I also remember some graffiti in the game of a naked woman with huge tits. At the time I could not believe something like that would be allowed in a video game! Blew my mind.

That moment in Papers, Please where they say they’re reassigning the guards, and issue you a rifle with three shots in a locked drawer in your desk. And you’re doing your paperwork, and there’s a siren, you look up and a guy is hopping the fence. You scramble to get the gun out and shoot him but he already threw the bomb.

It’s kind of amazing how immersive that moment was. The panicked scramble to take in what was going on, know what to do, scramble for the key, line up and shoot someone.

Look I’ve shot a lot of people in video games. Mowing down nazis, taking the gluon gun to HECU marines, I’ve probably shot Heavy Weapons Guy in the face 900,000 times over the decades, just him.

But that one got me. In that deliberately low res game about border crossing paperwork, that one made me feel like I actually just killed someone.

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura still remains my favourite to this day.

The world’s setting is centred around how capitalism and industry affects society, how it pushed aside feudalism, how racism remains endemic and easily seen as normal, how history is swept away to hide attitudes, all sorts of complex things. Early on in the story, you get involved with a strike by exploited half-orcs and the wealthy factory owner who would rather they all died. Thinking back, it was a big part of how young me started to realise industrial relations are fucked up in capitalism.

One moment (of the many cool things) that really hit me, is that there’s an entire sub-plot across the whole continent that’s never explicitly mentioned, but is entirely noticeable if you actually pay attention and listen, not to the quest-givers or the industrial leaders, but to the servants of the powerful men you meet. If you’re lucky, near the end, you suddenly realise you just… swept all these weird characters and remarks under the rug as you had ‘important’ people to talk to. I had relegated servants and whole in-game races to an ‘unimportant’ role, when actually their stories are key to a whole second sub-plot of their own that affects everything in the world.

I know a lot of that behaviour is because I’m playing to typical game design, but, I dunno, having a real moment where you think back and realise you’ve been ignoring what should have been an obvious pattern of so many exploited people, and I just glossed over it 'til that moment, it affected me.

Old-ass example: Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Waiting for the mooncrash with Anju, Kafei showing up at the last minute, and them telling Link to save himself and leave them to die together. It was the first time I saw tragic beauty in a medium I mostly knew for either childlike joy or gleeful violence (depending on if the game was E or M rated lmao)

Newish example: Towards the latter half of Supergiant Games’ Pyre, as it becomes clear that the stars are going out, and only a few will get to leave the Downside, and the entire team is looking downcast and they turn to you, their reader, the crippled scholar who would never be able to ascend due to being unable to partake in the games of magic basketball, but who had guided them this far, for guidance. And the game just lets you – Write the speech you’ll give to your friends. I had never seen a game do anything of the sort. My jaw was on the floor.

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I remember the first mission of hotline Miami. You take the phone call and learn that you are supposed to kill some people. You learn how to use your guns. You kill a bunch of baddies, quite badass. Then at the end of the mission, the screen starts swaying more than usually, and the protagonist vomits in an alley. Of course, he just killed for the first time, overwhelming. Makes him quite human, more than many other protagonists, despite the pixel art style.

This will date me, Missile Commander. When you lose the game doesn’t reset, you had to reset it. So if you don’t you just see dead cities on a screen, with silence. This was right about the same time I saw War Game. The only wining more is not to play.

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