I can’t bring myself to say goodbye, even though I know it’s over. I could play again but that wouldn’t be the same experience at all. The install is no longer just the mountain of bytes that comprise code and visuals and sound but personal investment.

What drives you to finish? Is it the FOMO, the concern that something important is right around the corner? Is it the importance of completing a game and leaving no loose ends? Is it the feeling of achievement, of climbing that hill to the top?

The Hytale trailer from December now has 47 million views. I’ve shown it to my children and their reactions were halfway between the Keanu Reeves ‘whoa’ and the Stargate ‘what a rush’. If you haven’t seen it, you’ll quickly get the idea if I tell you a bunch of react videos are called ‘Minecraft 2 announced!?!!???!!??!!!!!?!??!’

Hi, I’m the Into the Black guy. I ask why people want achievements and shiny things to reward exploration in games. It’s all BALONEY. Rewards kill the JOY. They invite DISAPPOINTMENT. I will keep on using CAPITAL LETTERS to distract you from my hypocrisy.

And I can’t help but suspect that something like this happens in game worlds; the more real they become, the more people find it unacceptable that a rocket launcher won’t blow up a wooden door. We are diverted from abstract or symbolic representation towards the mental models we use in real life. Doors are for opening and rocket launchers are for obliterating wooden ones.

Following my wife's example, I decided to use Christmas as camouflage - I bought three board games I was interested in and pretended they were presents for everyone else.

Thief came out in the same year as Half-Life and one the latter’s qualities I gravitated towards is that you weren’t Big Shooting Dude - just some scientist who is just trying to survive a disaster and accidentally discovers a talent for sowing death. Thief is even better than that.

Crunch and burnout are staples of a career in big box games. Telltale, EA, Team Bondi... studios have been named and shamed before. Has it made any difference to the wider industry picture? My dismissal of the latest AAA death march team story might be mistaken for apathy. It’s not.

I wrote about a similar issue in Mafia quite a few years ago when I had to trawl across an area to find an unassuming switch, the FPS equivalent of a point-and-click pixel hunt. Today, developers make totes sure this is painfully obvious using verbal direction, NPC demonstration, visual contrast and - my absolute favourite, readers - augmented reality markers.

First collect blue di-hydrogen crystals and craft them into jelly. Next, gather a ton of ferrite dust and set down your portable refiner which will turn them into pure ferrite after a short wait. Now don’t forget to fuel up your refiner with carbon - oh, you don’t have enough? Right, so off you go and kill some trees. Ohhhh, your mining laser is out of juice? You’ll need to collect carbon for that too… er, by punching trees.