— I love voice notes.
— I'm a detester.
— Yeah, texters are great too.
Ugh. Voice notes. We all know someone who loves sending them.
What is it you need to tell me, that we are meeting on Monday? And what better way to say it than 3 minutes and 25 seconds of audio?
Some of them I play at 2x, and I only stop there because there is no 3x and because my neurons are already getting around on a walker.
But then there are the other ones, the ones from the person who almost never sends audio, so you know that if one shows up it is because it is worth it.
Those I play at 1x, and sometimes with a glass of wine in my hand.
Living. Feeling. Enjoying. All of it works better at 1x.
Right. I spent seven years getting this wrong with video games.
My hobby. The thing I love most. And there I was, hitting 2x.
I checked how long it took before starting. I watched the ten things I wish I had known before playing. Which build is the best one. And the second I got stuck for four minutes, out came the phone.
The game did not break, no alarm went off, and the video game police definitely did not raid my house at three in the morning. Quite the opposite: I finished faster, ticked it off in Excel and moved on to the next one.
I played efficiently, to spend the least time possible and get to the next game in the backlog.
Efficient.
At my own hobby.
Getting stuck, wandering off, digging around, exploring, trying again, none of that is wasting time. All of that is what makes your run yours and nobody else's. Those are the bits that hand the game back to you years later.
That moment in Empire Earth where they wiped out 95% of your empire and you came back from nothing to take the world, that stupid puzzle in Prince of Persia you attacked in the most convoluted ways imaginable before working out how idiotically simple it was, all of those moments are yours.
If you follow the path someone else laid out for you, you are executing, not playing.
For when…
…you have not touched it in three weeks and you do not want to start over: Return of the Obra Dinn. You are an insurance inspector boarding a ship that is missing sixty crew members, and your job is to work out what happened to every one of them.
It treats you well where it counts here: everything you work out gets written down in the logbook. You come back a month later, open it, read two pages and you are in again. You do not have to remember anything, because the book does the remembering for you.
Not for you if you need something telling you that you are on the right track: here it only confirms you three at a time, never one by one, and that is on purpose. It's on PC and PlayStation.
Hit reply and tell me the last time you googled something in the middle of a game. I read every one.