The moment that inspired this question:
A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.
The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.
One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”
I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.
… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.
I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.
Two come to mind. The first was when I was about 6 years old and walked in on my older brother playing Sim City 2000 on our family computer. It was the first time I had seen a video game of any kind. Before that, I thought computers were just boring machines for doing adult work. Seeing him playing a game on there changed my life, I’ve been a PC gamer ever since.
The second was when I beat Super Mario Bros on GameBoy. It was the first game I’ve ever beat fully and it was an incredible feeling. Took me almost a year to do, incredible grind at that age.
I had that feeling when I beat snake, it took me so long and when I did it I was both ecstatic and devestated.