A game someone should make
I've been deep in a bunch of stress holes lately and I've found myself watching a lot of retro tech repair YouTube in the process. I've found that partially because I have no idea what the fuck they are doing, it is quite satisfying to watch people rebuild or modify old computers and game consoles. The shit is broken... then it is not! How nice!
I used to read a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction - my sophomore year of college, I went a whole year only reading fiction from this subgenre. In a lot of these stories you'll run into the idea of people rebuilding or harvesting old technology. Riddley Walker, perhaps my favorite one of these books, features a couple scenes where the slightly-mutant peasant Englishmen of the irradiated future are harvesting steel from old construction equipment, or wandering into rooms full of old computers, and having no idea what to do with them.
Furthermore, the whole book is written in a warped English full of phonetic misspellings... and of secret historical and cultural truths, hidden in the protagonist's religious mantras and common idioms. Reading his train-of-thought monologues as he tries to explain a room full of technology provides both the delight of knowing more than he does, and the delight of seeing the world through his alien eyes. It's a lot kinder and humble than some of the stuff in A Canticle for Leibowitz, where the techno-monk main characters are often confidently wrong about the science they're looking at, and the story is occasionally smug about how foolish they are.
Caves of Qud appealed to me instantly when I first played it specifically because it evokes the particular wide-eyed wonder of Riddley Walker so sharply. The idea of being a simpleton surrounded by the wonders of an earlier age is quite a lot easier to embrace when you, the player, know only about as much as your character "knows."
What I'm saying is: I would absolutely buy and play a videogame which takes the "techno-monk of the future" trope and marries it to actual electronics engineering simulation gameplay. Someone should make a game where people who understand a circuit board the way a space alien does are trying to mod a mobile phone motherboard with better heat sinks so that they can overclock it to access the ancient texts. Someone should make a game where you have to harvest cables out of a ruined machine to repair the computer in the abbot's quarters using a massive crude soldering iron. Forget PC Building Simulator games: give me a PC building game where you are living in the basement of a ruined church and you have to buy shattered point-of-sale computer systems from a guy who loots bombed-out McDonaldses.
Put me face to face with Bad Electronics Engineering and make me learn how to do things Wrong, using the wrong vocabulary, and the wrong tools, in pursuit of the wrong goals.
I can't make this game because I am the rube who watches this stuff on YouTube specifically to see people do shit I do not understand, so that I can disassociate from my life as if I am a confused, irradiated future creature. I would be great at playing this game, but not making it. Or maybe someone who understands this shit could hire me to write baffled peasant dialogue for it? I don't know. It should exist, though.