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.

SOMA left me questioning my own consciousness, what it is to be human, and loneliness.

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.

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.

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.

When I was 13 a friend of mine and I spent the whole summer after swimming at the trailer park pool playing Super Mario 3 until we beat it. We did a deep study of the game together and beat it together. First platform I ever beat and first gay sex I ever had to help me out in the orientation department. 1988 was a nice year for me. I haven’t lived in a trailer park ever since, but the community swimming pool was nice.

WoW: ill never forget it. This was BC expansion and as a Druid I had just recently unlocked flight as part of a huge questline. I was hopping around mining nodes farming for my Jeweler profession when I encountered a Druid nightelf. They had the upgraded bird form (320% speed vs 60%). I must have pissed this guy off or he was bored but he was just stalking me. Eventually he starts fighting me and we had a substantial level difference. I think he was 70 and I was 60. He was going to kill me but eventually I escaped out of combat into bird form. Of course he’s several times faster than I am. I had a sliver of health and a single moonfire would’ve killed me. I am just holding down space bar… Climbing into the sky. He fires off his moon fire. It should have killed me, but as luck would have it my headpiece gem had a 1% chance to reflect a spell. I had to read the combat logs to figure out what happened, but the spell hit him. The damage caused him to lose bird form and as he was now in combat he plummeted to his death. I landed. Danced around his corpse and went on my way. I could not believe what had just happened.

Disco Elysium was full of such moments for me. Here’s one:

You spend a lot of time in the game basically talking to yourself and your inner voices, and one of these voices is volition. If you put enough points into it, it’ll chime in when you’re having an identity crisis or struggling to keep yourself together and it’ll try to cheer you up and keep you going. At the end of Day 1 in the game you, an amnesiac cop, stand on a balcony in an impoverished district reflecting on the day’s events and trying to make sense of the reality you’ve woken up into with barely any of your memories intact. If you pass a volition check, it’ll say the following line:

“No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it’s still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You’re still alive.”

This line in combination with the somewhat retro Euro setting, the faint lighting, and the sombre-yet-somewhat-upbeat music was very powerful. The image it painted was quite relatable for me. I just sat there for a minute staring at the scene and soaking it all in. Even though this is a predominantly text-based game with barely any cinematics/animations, I felt a level of immersion I had rarely, if ever, experienced before.

Oh, look at that. Someone actually made a volition compilation. 😀 This video will give you a better idea of what I’m describing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENSAbyGlij0 Minor spoilers alert!

I have a lot of these moments but I’ll pick my top ones.

Crystalis on the NES. When the town of Shyron gets destroyed and characters you know and care about are killed. Left me in shock as a 10 year old kid. And the temple music when you enter the pyramid is hauntingly beautiful too. I hum that tune to my kids as a lullaby.

Mass Effect 1. Exploring the planets left me in awe. For the time, the atmosphere and lore was detailed, rich, and very well thought out. Then facing down a reaper in the third game, it all made me feel so small.

FF7. Aerith getting killed took me by complete surprise. My brother and I were stunned for a while. Just sat there pondering wether it was real or not.

Minecraft back in beta. The world was just so impossibly huge and you’re all alone with your creations. Left me feeling very small. The more I built, the emptier it felt.

Finally, Mad Max on the PS4. The first time I got hit by a storm I was in awe. The world is just so well built and detailed. The whole game/movie universe is filled with amazing culture that’s just done really, really well.

Brothers: A tale of two sons. Not a unique experience, as it almost seems like the whole point of the game is this one moment. So, spoilers… Its control scheme is each analogue stick independently controls your two characters, two brothers. And it’s a fun puzzle game where you have to resolve moving two characters at once in this way, moving, balancing, timing. It’s all fun and games until a tragedy, the older brother dies. He was one of your control sticks, now for the rest of the game half your controller is dead also. And you walk back out of the cave past all the puzzles you did with your brother, which are made for two people. You’re useless, and the feeling of loss is staggering.

Subnautica…when I was so immersed that I went too deep…didn’t have enough time to return to the surface to breathe…and then looked up in anguish and saw that dreaded refraction “circle” hundreds of meters above you… THE DEEP HAS YOU, THERE IS NO ESCAPE

Outer Wilds, like all of it. Falling into the black hole made me actually scream in terror, then shiver for how small being away from the solar system makes you feel. Also the quantum moon, and that ending holy fuck

Dragon Age origins.

Exceptional writing and I walked right into it just expecting a cool fantasy game. I got hit with my first experience of in game romances, the shock of betrayal, the sacrifices… It was such a brilliant experience. Makes me really, really want to play it again now.

I tried a Satisfacfory playthrough while on drugs, and somewhere in the upgrade tiers I fixed my brain. I can just decide what I want to focus on now. I was never able to do that before.