Occasionally in a game I’ll look up and I’ll notice the clouds. I’ll be shooting someone, or collecting something, or just walking over the crest of a hill as I follow a waypoint marker, and my gaze will drift upwards, entirely unmotivated, and-
-And suddenly I’ll see the huge bowl of the sky overhead. Maybe there will be thunderheads, those towering stormclouds that turn to anvils at their summits, lurking on the horizon. Maybe there will be a lacy veil of high atmosphere clouds dithering away to an iridescent nothing. Whatever’s there, it’s always a moment to stop and to marvel. It’s an intrinsic pleasure, pure unnatural natural beauty, suspended above a landscape that sometimes foregrounds extrinsic pleasures: map icons, quest-givers, the kind of loot that comes in treasure chests.
Then what? Then I’ll move on, caught up once more in the map, the quest, the endless hunt for treasure, and I’ll forget what I saw in the sky.
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