You haven't truly experienced PC gaming until you've done these 8 things

When I look back on my years of PC gaming, I realize they're punctuated by a bunch of you had to be there kind of moments. It's the type of experience that, for better or worse, makes it an instant PC gaming classic.

I'm immediately reminded of my early days in Rust, back when I naively wandered into open structures and fell victim to trap bases. It took several embarrassing deaths, but eventually I realized there's a whole strategy around building fully-furnished fake shelters to bait, trap, and kill rival players. Sometimes they run out of the basement and blow you up, sometimes they just leave you to starve. Either way, I can't mind my business and I'm paying for it.

It's the perfect encapsulation of the creative antagonism that both infuriates me and makes me cry with laughter, but so quintessentially Rust. And the more I try to explain it, the more I realize it's a scheme so diabolically goofy that you just have to see it.

It's the type of absurd PC gaming phenomenon that makes you fast friends with thousands of other poor souls who instantly relate, and something you have to experience to get it. As I reflect on my poor sense of danger and how that fared in Rust, I've asked my colleagues to recall similar scenarios that cemented an experience as a PC gaming classic, and they delivered.

Spent hours modding a game and then not played it

Joshua Wolens, News Writer: Everything is in perfect balance. Your game is a tottering assemblage of upscaled textures, overhauled levelling systems, user-created quests, and fan patch after fan patch after fan patch. Getting everything just right has taken the better part of a weekend and multiple instances where you simply had to wipe your entire install and start over. You hit launch, get to the main menu, then… all desire to play evaporates.

This is PC gaming, baby. A wise man once said, "You know for me, the action is the juice." The same thing applies here, but you have to understand "action" as 'the process of spending many hours painstakingly installing mods' and "the juice" as 'the enjoyable part of a videogame.'

This hobby attracts tinkerers like a magnet draws iron filings, and sometimes we realise that what we actually wanted to do, when the urge struck us to fire up Skyrim playthrough #16, was give ourselves an excuse to download Mod Organiser 2 and see what the state of the game's Nexus Mods page is. Embrace it. It's part of what makes us what we are.

Rory Norris, Guides Writer: Hell, even in the rare event that you somehow manage to sustain interest in playing your newly modded game, there's a high chance it doesn't actually work anymore.

I've totally never completely borked my copy of Skyrim, The Witcher 3, and Stardew Valley because I installed so many mods in one go that I'd lost any sense of what each one did or checked if they were even compatible with each other. Naturally, I then spent the rest of my day trying to fix said issue, only for that spark to fizzle out.

Yep, I guess in these cases the urge to download mods I'll never play just has a delayed reaction, and it really is the inevitable result whether they work right away or not. There's still no breaking the cycle, though, and we all know it.

Been the victim of an incorrigible griefer

Tyler Wilde, US Editor-in-Chief: Being bullied by a teenager may be the ultimate PC gaming rite of passage, though ever since they started making games like DayZ where that's the point, it feels like "griefing" has started to fall out of the gaming lexicon.

The phenomenon really peaked for me in Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike, the latter being the home of the famous "door stuck" video as one example, although that's probably just my perspective as someone who doesn't solo queue in competitive games much anymore—I'm under no illusion that people stopped being antisocial on the internet.

There's a fine line between jovial pranking and genuine cruelty, but unfortunately for the victims of griefing, there's often a positive correlation between the pettiness and persistence of the transgressor and how funny it is for the rest of us. The Team Fortress 2 wiki has a whole page dedicated to defining what is or isn't griefing, and just reading about all the documented techniques makes me laugh. Here are some of them:

• Intentionally pushing teammates off ledges in order to kill them or force them to waste time getting back up.
• Pushing teammates out of a Teleporter to make way for yourself, especially if you're a generally less important class. (e.g. a Sniper pushing a Medic out)
• Continuously obstructing a Sniper's view by standing in front of them or using particle effects (e.g. flames/smoke from disguising) to obscure their vision.
• Attacking your own teammates for long stretches of time for no reason besides to annoy them, especially with the Frying Pan.
• Following the same teammate around for no reason.
• Impersonating a server admin.
• Calling useless votes.
• Constantly passing the intelligence to each other, causing spam in the killfeed about picking up the intelligence, and constantly playing the Administrator's voice lines stating the intelligence has been picked up, also potentially causing lag on low-end machines.

Spent three hours troubleshooting

Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor: Search the issue you're having with your new desktop build. Google's AI summary: "You can actually eat a daddy longlegs every now and then and not run into any health complications."

Scroll past that. Windows help forum link from 2019. The issue described actually doesn't sound much like what you're seeing. Read the thread anyway. "Most helpful" answer: "Hi MarkMan7, I'm a Microsoft-approved third party tech support specialist. I'm sorry to hear you're going through that. Have you considered turning your computer off and on again?"

New Google search: "[issue you're experiencing]" but with "Reddit" appended. Third result, r/WindowsHelp, post dated January 19, 2017. User FlibbertiGibbet69: "[describes the exact issue you're having]." Three unhelpful comments. One really lame joke. Under a deleted comment: "Thanks, that fixed it!"

Unplug your monitor, plug it back in. Swap DisplayPort for HDMI. Connect to your motherboard instead. Boot in safe mode. Reseat graphics card. Remove RAM sticks and put them back in one by one. Unplug your hard drive.

Whoops, turns out your motherboard needed a BIOS update to recognize NVMe drives, even though it was manufactured with the damn slots. Welcome to a universal fraternity that spans decades, continents, income levels, race, creed, gender, and inverted mouselook preference.

Teamed up with strangers and somehow clicked

Andrea Shearon, Evergreen Editor: There's nothing quite like throwing yourself at a difficult MMO fight for hours and clearing with friends, but doing that with a bunch of strangers just hits different. Venturing into the wilds of Final Fantasy 14's Party Finder—a system for finding players with common goals—is probably my favorite pastime in the MMO.

One of my earliest feel-good examples goes all the way back to 2014, when the stormy primal Ramuh's extreme trial arrived in Eorzea. It was nightmarishly hard compared to earlier trials, but I spent days using in-game text and sound macros trying to guide strangers through the fight's hardest mechanics. I was miserable, but determined.

Eventually I found my saving grace, and some players I never met appreciated my messy text instructions, so they stuck around. We cleared the fight, and it's a core FF14 memory since it was my first time successfully shotcalling. It seems most of my in-game buddies have similar fights where it all came together and clicked, giving us the confidence we needed to regularly brave Party Finder.

Went down the flavor text rabbit hole

Lincoln Carpenter, News Writer: The traditional, tile-based roguelike is already a canonical PC gaming experience on its own; none of us are truly alive until we experience a ritual death at the hands of some sort of vicious hieroglyph. While Caves of Qud, our favorite roguelike of 2024, shares the genre's penchant for existential precarity—celebrated by its Steam achievement for getting stoned to death by a baboon outside of an early-game dungeon—it's doubly crucial for its ability to conjure an incomparable atmosphere through sheer text-based indulgence.

PC gaming, to me, is commitment to the bit, and few things commit as hard as the flavor text of Qud's deep future. Creature anatomy, item characteristics, and procedural conversations are a rich tapestry of gratuitously florid prose and inscrutable reference, reading as emanations from a time so distant from our own that language itself has been warped and rewoven along mesmerizing contours. Salt scars form comet tails along the blades of carbide daggers; chitinous pumas are girt with "plates of firm and mingled fungus"; a canvas chair is "a movable wharf for the ass."

In Qud, inspecting objects is a game in itself.

Bonded with squadmates as everything goes FUBAR

Evan Lahti, Strategic Director: In an age where every game releases on every platform and the consoles resemble PCs more each passing year, Arma remains one of the bastions of PC gaming's spirit. The milsim is unapologetically intricate, one of those experiences where a veteran will hand you a list of 12 must-have mods to install before you boot it up for the first time. And yet, its main appeal is as a relatively relaxed, roleplay-friendly hangout with friends, an excuse to goof around in a massive military sandbox.

Being in a helo under fire embodies the way in which Arma's realism manufactures fun. Individual rotors can be knocked out by AA fire. The engine is a discrete component that can be damaged or destroyed. Door guns can run dry of ammo. Which specific seat you're in might dictate if you catch a stray small arms shot. All the while you're at the mercy of the pilot, whose feel for the flight model will dictate life or death. Other than "RPG!" there's no more satisfying military cliche to call out than "We're going down!" before leaping out, hoping there's enough space between you and the ground for your parachute to deploy.

Tyler Wilde: It's not quite the hardcore simulation that Arma is, but there's something very enjoyable about telling your squadmates "time to go" as you leap out of the spiraling Battlefield 6 helicopter you were piloting. Sea of Thieves is also great for this kind of experience: One time we spent ages trying to put out an inferno in the bowels of our pirate ship, only to later discover—as our ship sank—that someone had left dinner on the stove.

Not played a game because it was on one of those… other… launchers

Christopher Livingston, Senior Editor: I have a bunch of DVDs and blu-rays but I pretty much never watch them because it would mean getting my butt off the couch and digging through the shelf to find it and, oh yeah, also finding the remote control for the disc player, which could literally be in any one of maybe three different places. Oh, here it is. But the batteries are dead. Now I have to walk to the junk drawer for fresh batteries? All that to watch The Departed again? Screw it, I'll just watch YouTube.

That extreme laziness means I'll sometimes get a hankering to play a game I own, but bafflingly it doesn't appear in my Steam library. That's weird, I know I own it, what the… oh no. Oh, no. The horrible, horrible truth comes to light: I own it on another launcher.

Will the Epic Games launcher still remember my login credentials? Not a fucking chance. Do I even have Ubisoft Connect installed on this PC? I sincerely doubt it. Does Origin even exist anymore? I can't honestly remember. Suddenly playing this game means dealing with the backbreaking effort of trying to remember a password because the "remember me" checkbox apparently doesn't actually function and maybe guessing it right on the third or fourth try but mostly likely having to reset it. Oh wait, now it's sending me an email with a code I have to put in even though it just sent me an email to reset my password? Oh, and the launcher itself needs an update and a restart. Of course.

Screw it, I'll just watch YouTube.

'Gotten gud' at a game barely anyone plays

Morgan Park, Staff Writer: If you have ever instantly bonded with a multiplayer game that seemingly nobody else sees the magic in, you're in good company. I was a diehard Gotham City Impostors fan for a number of months in 2012. We all remember that one, right? The Monolith-developed FPS that pitted dorks in Batman and Joker cosplay against each other in faux-Team Fortress 2 arena antics? Well it was damn good, OK, and if it'd ever gotten a sequel or expansion, I'd still be playing it.

For a few weeks in 2021, I also reached an absurdly high rank in competitive dodgeball game Knockout City—a debunked brawler with timing and fakeout mechanics so specific to the playground sport that it was genuinely brilliant. Was it all that impressive to be good at a game that boasted a sustainable playerbase for like 10 days? Not really, but Knockout City's dwindling pool of dodgebrawlers (that's what your characters were called) meant that I got to experience a rarity in our modern age of matchmaking algorithms: meeting the same players over and over again until we either developed a mutual respect or fiery disdain.