“Woohoo, overtime!” –Starcraft 2

                Well, it’s happening again. I want to reinstall Starcraft 2. The thing is, I never really want to be playing it…but when I’m not playing, sometimes I feel this building wish to start.
                I think it works like this.
                Even when I was 12 and 13 and 14, the part that drew me to a lot of games (Age of Empires II, Starcraft, Warcraft III, Age of Mythology) was “base building.” You’re dropped on an island, or an alien planet, or in a forest. You have a few villagers or SCVs. There are resources around, waiting to be stripped, and so you expand your little settlement to include more workers, then more refineries and other buildings to help with resource extraction, then a new command center to make new workers to gather more resources on another part of the map. The goal was to create an army, but honestly, that wasn’t the part I wanted. I wanted the workers. The town centers. The ever-growing pile or resources. The controllable world in which I knew the steps to take toward more and more, and therefore toward enough. Toward safety. Toward plenty. Toward something, which was always actually out of reach, outside of the code, as the game gears for war and the erasure of some constructed Other. And finally a dead world stripped of all its minerals and vehicle-powering gases.