“Look Room.”

If like me you grew up playing the early Sierra adventure games of the 1980s, you may now have a specific emotional complex you should speak to your therapist about, which for lack of the proper clinical term I am going to refer to as “Inventory Anxiety.”

Some of you already know the trauma that first gave rise to this condition; the first time you arrived at a point late in your character’s quest and discovered that you needed to have picked up something small and seemingly unimportant from a cell in a dungeon that you last explored days ago and can no longer access because when you escaped through that secret tunnel in the eastern wall it was sealed behind you by an angry hobgoblin.

And since you didn’t pick up the long-dead prisoner’s femur when you had the chance, you cannot unlock the door to the game’s conclusion, which requires “a key carved of stolen bones” and now you’re faced with a choice of being stuck here forever or restoring the appropriate saved game file and replaying everything from that cell back to this moment.

Eventually game designers would shift to crafting their puzzles and narratives in ways that avoided these sorts of dead ends. By then it was too late for you: Like the first time you understood you were mortal and would one day die, you now understood the reality that you might make a choice or overlook an inventory item that would leave you stranded, would leave you doomed, and that you did not even have the option to Restore.

The good news, of course, is that you have options beyond the boundaries of a world that fit within a small stack of 3 and 1/2-inch floppies.

But it can be easy to forget that, sometimes, while you’re playing the decidedly different game of trying to match your Education and Professional experiences with the lists of Requirements and Preferences.