These are just a few of the glitches I’ve encountered in Fallout 3: dead ghouls randomly falling out of the sky, returning to an area only to find the bodies of enemies I had previously killed there laid out in neat rows with their guns hovering above their heads, and characters who had been reduced to abstract geometry which stretched infinitely into space. At first, I was surprised by just how buggy the game was. Eventually, though, I started to look forward to encountering the next bizarre glitch, so much so that I came to think of them as part of the game experience. At that point, Fallout 3’s narrative took a turn for the surreal, becoming the tale of the protagonist’s slow descent into madness after being chased out of his or her childhood home in Vault 101. Of course, Bethesda didn’t intend for Fallout 3 to be told through the eyes of an unreliable narrator but, for me, that ceased to matter. They shipped the game they shipped, and that game’s bugs ended up subverting its developer’s intentions in a fascinating way.

What I want to see is a game where that comfort zone is forcibly taken away, where the horror elements aren’t just one-shot jump scares that are quickly forgotten. I want to see a character react as the game world around them slowly becomes more and more degraded due to some unknown force. I want the player to be able to question whether they’re really playing a game, or actually having some influence on an unknown universe separated from our own.

Sometimes, when the character you’re talking to randomly spawns from the sky and falls to his death, well, that can be a mood breaker in a game like Fallout 3. But it’s also a special sort of fun. The problem is when you go looking for it: You can wait endlessly for lightning to strike twice at the same spot. Sure, Garry’s Mod and Crysis‘ dev tools allow us to manipulate the game to do things we wouldn’t see otherwise, but there is something special about these scenarios happening naturally, without any player input.