I’ve been thinking about how I approach video games, and it’s led me to realize something important about technology in general. Let me start with the games, because that’s where this insight really crystallized for me.

August begins my favorite quarter of the year, when summer starts to transition into fall. The nights remain long, and the heat still reminds me how wonderful air conditioning can be. School hasn’t yet started. There are still dragonflies and bumblebees dancing among the grass. This is when we hit peak cricketsong at night, and the once tiny rabbit in our yard has become a big, beautiful, and extremely fluffy adult.

An old woman stepped closer to the small circle that had formed around the musicians. She listened for a moment to the haunting melody of the khan floating through the dusty street, then turned to someone nearby. She hadn’t heard a sound like this since childhood, she said.

In Battambang’s central square stands a statue of Ta Dambong, a figure whose legend captures something I’ve been wrestling with this year. The story goes that he was a peasant who rose to become a protector of his people, wielding a magical stick to defeat the king and rule the land. But power corrupted him, and he began using that same stick to oppress those he he saw as a potential threat. Eventually, he threw his magical stick at the king’s son, who came to confront him. It missed, and he lost it forever. Powerless, he left and never returned. The name Battambang literally means “The Lost Stick.”