During the halcyon days of FPS mods, not a week seemed to go by without someone showing off a cool gun render. That was the most boring thing about a mod I could imagine. I understood it was helpful to distance themselves from the source material but a hunger for weapon renders, particularly the more realistic, was baffling.

I didn’t finish the demo, unwilling to risk the wrath of whatever stalked the dank and uninspiring Gloomsewers. I felt I had been toiling within its systems rather than dancing with them - and the demo was graveyarded.

Many of the 1,700 items were tools (Hex Kit), assets (Kenney Game Assets 1) and PDFs outlining paper-and-pen RPG systems (The Colors of Magic). However, the strangest aspect of the bundle, which was unlikely to fly for any other bundle, was the inclusion of free games.

You might want to set a limit of a couple of hours for your child, but apparently her friends are allowed to play four hours of Animal Crossing: New Horizons straight. Then there’s the kid who seemingly plays whenever he wants. When he wakes up. When it’s time for lunch. When it’s time for bed. When it’s morning in Tokyo.

This is anecdotal but it seems, at least in my local middle-class suburbo-bunker, kids are satisfied with a monogame experience that muscles everything else out of the spotlight. These games have successfully harvested the attention of young children and won’t let them go. This makes me sad.

But as there are infinite floors in the museum you can keep on deleting forever, falling from one floor to another, again and again, haunted by the same, repeating artworks. You can try throwing yourself out a window but there’s nothing out there to escape to but the infinite white.

Now picture the scene. The Depressurizer window is open. It lists every game I own. Each entry is enriched with yummy data like how long I’ve played that game. We’re almost there - all we need to do is copy and paste the data into something else. And this lovely open source project… doesn’t support it.

I’m reminded of a short discussion I had with Jake Birkett at Rezzed when I mentioned how exciting it had been to see so much local multiplayer on show. Birkett couldn’t understand the surge of local multiplayer games because it was such a tricky commercial prospect. If you wanted to forge a successful indie business, why would you get into local multiplayer?

In a strange moment of synchronicity, this troubling thought came to me while I was on a business trip to New York. I realised, unusually, that I could hear the world.