My thumb is slick with 3-in-1 oil, and the scent of aged brass is beginning to settle into the pores of my skin. I am currently staring at the escapement of a grandfather clock built in 1793, trying to understand why the rhythm feels heavy. It is a slow, methodical frustration that mirrors the 23 minutes I spent earlier today suspended between floors in the workshop elevator. There is a specific kind of clarity that comes from being trapped in a metal box with nothing but the hum of failing hydraulics. You start to build things in your mind. You start to fix the world because you cannot fix the lift. For me, that building usually takes the form of a digital ghost-a game that has haunted my periphery for at least 13 years, a masterpiece of code and light that will never, ever be installed on a hard drive.

Diana V. would tell you that time is not a straight line; it is a series of overlapping cycles that only feel linear because we are too small to see the curves. As I manipulate the tiny gears of this 233-year-old timepiece, I find myself sketching the UI of my impossible game in the dust on the workbench. It is a sprawling, tactile simulation of 19th-century horology mixed with a high-stakes espionage thriller. In this dream, the physics of every screw and spring are calculated to 13 decimal places. You aren’t just a player; you are a restorer who accidentally uncovers coded messages hidden within the chime sequences of aristocratic clocks. It sounds niche. It sounds perfect. It is, by definition, a total impossibility.

The Solitary Confinement of Design

I often think about the 103 failed prototypes that must exist in the graveyards of the industry-games that tried to be everything to someone and ended up being nothing to everyone. The contradiction is inherent. To make a game, you need a team. To have a team, you need a budget. To have a budget, you need a market of at least 300,003 people willing to buy in. But the dream game is a solitary confinement of the soul. It is a game designed for a market of one. The second you add a second player, or a second opinion in the design room, the edges are sanded down. The peculiar, sharp corners that you loved… are labeled as ‘bugs’ or ‘bad UX.’

[The tragedy of the ideal is that it requires total isolation to remain pure.]

Earlier today, when the elevator gave that sickening 3-inch lurch and stopped, I didn’t feel panic at first. I felt a strange sense of relief. In that space, I was the only person who existed. My internal world-state was the only one that mattered. I started thinking about the procedural generation systems I would implement for the clock gears in my dream game. There would be 133 distinct types of patina, each affecting the friction of the mechanism in a different way. I would link the game’s internal clock to the player’s actual heartbeat via a wearable sensor, so that if your pulse quickened, the game’s time would dilate. It is a ridiculous idea. It is a mechanical nightmare. And yet, in that 23-minute vacuum, it was the most important thing in the universe.

The Philosophical Divide

There is a profound arrogance in this, isn’t there? To believe that the thousands of brilliant minds working in the gaming industry are somehow missing the mark because they aren’t catering to your specific obsession with 18th-century metallurgy. I admit my error. I am a restorer of clocks; I am used to things having a singular, objective ‘right’ way to function. If a gear is missing a tooth, the clock is wrong. In game design, there is no ‘wrong’ gear, only different ways to build the machine. Yet, I cannot shake the feeling that modern gaming is a series of beautifully polished boxes that are mostly empty inside. They have the 503-person credits roll, the 4K textures, and the 63-hour campaigns, but they lack the specific weight of a lived experience.

Diana V. once told me that the most beautiful clocks are the ones that lose 3 seconds every day. They have character. They reflect the imperfections of the hands that forged the balance wheel. Digital games are too perfect in their mathematics and too hollow in their philosophy. They offer us worlds where we can be gods, but I don’t want to be a god. I want to be a person who is stuck in an elevator for 23 minutes. I want a game that captures the exquisite boredom of waiting, the tactile joy of fixing a broken spring, and the quiet melancholy of a room where the only sound is the passage of time. I want a game that feels like 1763.

The Protection of Unfulfillment

There is a certain irony in the fact that the more I work on these physical machines, the less I care about the digital ones. The digital world is too clean. It doesn’t have the smell of 3-in-one oil or the way the light catches the dust at 5:03 PM in a quiet workshop. I still get that pang of longing, though. I check the patch notes. I read the developer blogs. I search for the word ‘horology’ and find nothing but 0 results. It’s a recurring 23-minute loop of hope and disappointment.

[We protect our dreams by never realizing them.]

But the doors did open. Eventually, the janitor and the building manager pried the secondary gate back, and I stepped out into the hallway. The world hadn’t changed. The clocks were still ticking, all slightly out of sync with one another. I realized then that a game with 333 perfectly synchronized clocks would be a boring game. It is the slight drift, the 3-second error, and the mismatched gears that make the world worth inhabiting. My dream game is a fantasy because it is too perfect to be alive. It is a static image of a desire that is constantly shifting.