Life on Locodigital

Fog of war: how you make decisions without seeing the full map

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0300

The first time I played Age of Empires II, I spent the first twenty minutes building in the base without sending a single scout. I knew where I was, I knew what was nearby — and the rest of the map was grey fog. When the enemy arrived, they came from a direction I'd never seen. I was wiped out in ten minutes.

Fog of war is the technical name for the mechanic: the portion of the map that stays hidden because you haven't explored it yet. It's a classic of strategy games — Civilization, StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War — but it appears in less obvious forms in almost every game. And in a completely obvious form in real life.

Cooldown: why even your best move needs a pause

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 09:00:00 -0300

You've just used the ability. The animation was perfect, the damage came out the way it should, and now it's time to use it again — but the icon is gray with a countdown on it. Three seconds. Two. One. The game isn't going to let you use the same move twice in a row without waiting.

Cooldown. Recharge time. The game literally forbidding you from pushing it.

Why this exists

Cooldown isn't punishment. It's balance design.

Checkpoint: why you wait for the game to save before moving on

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0300

You're in a dark corridor. There's no bonfire in sight. The soundtrack has changed and you know what that means. And the first thought that shows up isn't "let's take it on" — it's did it save here?

That reflex is so automatic that it stops being about the game. It's about how you deal with the possibility of losing progress.

What a checkpoint actually does

Technically, a checkpoint is a restore point: the game writes your state to disk so a failure doesn't cost you everything. But that's the mechanic, not the function. The real function of a checkpoint is permission to take risks.

Side quest: the detours are worth more than the main mission

Fri, 22 May 2026 10:00:00 -0300

I've done this more than once: I open The Witcher 3 with the clear intention of pushing the main story forward, and three hours later I'm in the middle of a side quest involving a drunk ghost in a village that doesn't even appear on the main map. By the time I notice, it's midnight. I don't regret a second of it.

The logic of the detour

In an RPG, the main quest is what the game wants you to do. It's the marked path, the fixed destination, the "official" narrative. Side quests are everything that falls outside it — smaller missions, parallel stories, characters the game could have ignored and put in anyway.

Fast travel: why you want to skip life's boring parts

Sun, 17 May 2026 16:00:00 -0300

I was in the middle of a quest in Skyrim last week when I realised I had fast travelled about forty times in the previous hour of play. Clicked a point on the map, loading screen, new point, loading screen again. I reached the objective without seeing a forest, without crossing a single road, without meeting one NPC along the way. I had "played" for an hour and remembered nothing beyond the inventory menus. I sat staring at the screen thinking: this behaviour has a name, and it isn't confined to the game.

Loading screen: what to do with the time nobody asked for

Sun, 10 May 2026 16:00:00 -0300

There's one specific moment in games I never learned to handle properly: the loading screen right after dying to a hard boss. You slip up, the screen goes black, that percentage crawls upwards, and there you are with nothing to do but think about the mistake you've just made. There's no button to skip it. There's no combo to practise. It's you, the dark background and that cursed bar. Over time I started noticing that life has its equivalents — and that my relationship with them is just as bad.

If life had a difficulty setting, would you pick Easy?

Sun, 10 May 2026 10:00:00 -0300

Every time I start a new game, I spend about three minutes frozen on the difficulty selection screen. Easy, Normal, Hard — sometimes with names the studio invented, like Adventurer, Hero, Legendary. I sit there wondering which version of the experience I want to have. And one ordinary day that question escaped the monitor and lodged itself in my head in an uncomfortable way: if life had that screen, what would you choose?

Protagonist or NPC: do you drive your life or just exist in it?

Sat, 09 May 2026 14:00:00 -0300

Have you ever stopped in front of an NPC in an RPG and stared at them for a bit too long? One of those background characters who are always in the same spot, with the same line of dialogue as always, waiting for the protagonist to walk past. The town might have been destroyed, the villain might have come back from the dead, the world might be on fire — and there they are, perfectly serene: "Good morning, traveller. Careful on the roads out there." The other day I found myself wondering whether I'm that NPC in some story that isn't mine.

The infinite backlog: why you never finish what you start

Sat, 09 May 2026 10:00:00 -0300

Count how many open tabs you have right now. Could be on your phone, your laptop, doesn't matter. Of all those tabs, how many are you actually going to read all the way through? That simple question left me staring at the ceiling for about ten minutes last week — and I figured it deserved a proper barstool conversation.

The digital graveyard called Steam

I have 87 games on Steam. I've finished maybe twelve. On the PS4 there are thirty more with a platinum trophy abandoned at some embarrassing completion percentage. People call this a backlog — that fancy word for the fact that we buy things we'll probably never use. Black Friday, flash sales, that irresistible humble bundle with four games you "will love" but have no idea what they are.

New Game+: what if you could start everything over?

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 14:00:00 -0300

Every time I finish a long game, there's one screen that makes me pause longer than the ending itself: the one that appears after the credits with the "New Game+" option. The playthrough you just lived starts again from zero — except this time you take everything with you. Levels, equipment, the memory of what worked and what didn't. I found myself thinking the other day: what if life had that button?