It’s 2002 and I’ve just unstuck my legs from the school bus seat, run through the front door and up the stairs using all four limbs, and rocketed into the computer room. I push the power button in, listen for the static hum, and when that blue sky and open field load up, my buffet of computer game icons invites me in.
In 2024, sitting down to play PC games is a bit less romantic. For one, there’s no computer room — it’s all computer everywhere all the time now, which is a nightmare my 2002 self thought would be a dream. I’m also no longer 7 years old, so I spend my day working, in the same room and at the same computer that I transform into my gaming den in the evening. But one thing is the same as back then: When it’s time to game, I close all my programs out and peruse that smorgasbord of colorful shortcuts on my desktop.
There’s no real reason to use desktop icons at this point. I use search to find everything I need on all of my devices, and Steam’s library is a perfectly fine place to launch games from. But it’s not fun. I want to look at my pretty collection of games lined up and organized; I want to try to figure out what items or characters the designers chose for the icons. Just a sweet, nostalgic double-click and I’m in Baldur’s Gate or Arranger or Sims 4 — and what a nice reminder, too, that we don’t have to keep CD-ROMs nearby to run certain games anymore.
I think there’s something more tangible to all of this, though, and that’s the reality that game platforms are constantly trying to sell you on new games and DLC. I occasionally browse my Steam discovery queue or check out what folks are saying on forums, but when I’m really just sitting down to play, my gaming time can get eaten into by worldly context and big red sales and game updates and other alluring titles to check out.
Using marketplaces like Itch.io, which has almost exclusively digital rights management-free games, and GOG, which is entirely DRM-free, makes it easier to separate the video game shopping from the video game playing. When you truly own your games, you typically don’t have to contend with advertising before you start playing the game — or, at the very least, you likely won’t see ads that push you to download other games. My desktop shortcuts mean I can take away those distractions, because the publishers and studios — as well as players like me — have a vested interest in exclusively immersing you in the game you want to play when you want to play it.
Launching games right from the desktop makes me feel like my games are the escape I like them to be, away from the ironically banal promise of more, new, better. So if you find yourself spending the first 10 minutes of your gaming time scrolling through your platform’s marketplace, give the old desktop shortcut another go and remember with me the simplicity of those CD-ROM years.
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