Lately I’ve found that I’ve been doing something very strange that I’ve decided I need to curtail. I have pretty bad anxiety, and ever since taking steps to handle it, I’ve realized that it reveals itself in unexpected ways. One of those is starting a new game. Specifically, I have a lot of anxiety around even starting a game because I get somewhat obsessed about playing it “the right way” from the very beginning. I recently booted up **Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II**, and before even hitting “new game” I was looking up guides about what to look out for, what not to miss, how to properly build my character, and on and on and on. Young me never did anything like this. Hell, young me barely even read the manual before starting a new game, outside of flipping through it during the car ride home to keep occupied. In interrogating where this need to play a game “correctly,” I’ve deduced that besides my general anxiety, I think it also stems from the fact that I simply don’t have much time for the media I engage with, so I want to make sure the time I do spend isn’t “wasted.” As a kid, I could get through 4 playthroughs of **KOTOR II**, because it’d be one of three games I play that year and I’d have a whole summer to play it. Nowadays I know I only have time for a single run of the game, and in knowing this I want to make sure I get as much out of it as possible. However subsequently this approach to playing games sucks a lot of the fun out of them. If I go into a game already knowing everything I should do, then why play it at all? I may as well just watch a walkthrough on YouTube at that point. Ruminating over this reminds me of when I played **Pyre** for the first time. I made a choice in that game that led to an outcome I absolutely *loathed*. It was everything I didn’t want to happen to a character that I loved and felt sympathy for. For all intents and purposes, I had made the “wrong” choice. But that wrong choice is exactly what makes me remember the game — and that moment — so vividly. Would I hold on to **Pyre** so strongly if I knew what I should have picked to avoid that outcome in the first place? I doubt it. Lately I’ve tried to just take a step back and engage with a game as if it’s 2002 and I don’t have the entirety of human knowledge in my pocket anymore. I’m enjoying myself a lot more now that I’m taking away the pressure of playing a game the “right” way. I get to reclaim the sense of discovery that I had as a kid, and I also get to sort of give my anxiety the middle finger. Up to this point it’s often felt like I don’t have any control over the things that worry, so it’s nice to be able to note it and do away with it. Crazy what Wellbutrin can do for a guy, lol. But those are the brief thoughts I’ve been ruminating over this past week. Have you ever found yourself approaching games in this way, or are you, unlike me, normal, and thus pretty good about going in with zero knowledge and accepting it as is?