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 path-not-taken is still important even if you brush the option aside. That part of the world is real. You believe it, even if you never see it for yourself. 

Unfulfilled aspirations still affect the experience. The shadow still cools the skin.

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