Unfulfilled Aspirations

Sometimes it’s enough to know that something is possible, even if you never achieve it. I’m drawn back to playing Frontier as a kid. I played a lot of that game in a very shallow way. I travelled between stars, trading for a modest profit, trying not to get killed by pirates.I barely ever managed to upgrade my ship. I didn’t find the weird space-jousting combat fun, so never engaged with the bounty hunting missions. I read in the manual that you can set up a mining rig on a planet and come back later to collect the spoils, which sounds like a good excuse to go land on remote planets, but I don’t think I ever actually did it. But knowing I could land anywhere, knowing those planets weren’t just scenery but were made of rock that I could extract and sell as ore. Now they were real. I’d also browse the shipyard for craft I could never afford, and peruse the starmap’s far frontiers that I’d never visit.Yes, striving for that goal creates an experience of its own, but its presence as a…