Elite: Dangerous and the art of the galactic grind

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Elite was the first game I ever dreamed about. It was a recurring dream, the sort of woozy loop of mental debris that stubbornly lodges in your mind for nights on end. In the dream, I was forever spiralling slowly towards the rotating white outline of a rectangle in an ink black void.
Every time, as I got within touching distance of the rectangle, I'd be out of sync with its rotation and the dream would reset, starting the whole claustrophobic descent all over again.
You may not have had the same dream, but if you played Elite back in 1984 you'll certainly have shared the same problem. I was dreaming about docking with one of the geometrically shaped space stations on David Braben and Ian Bell's seminal space simulation, a basic manoeuvre that immediately separated those doomed to remain ranked Harmless from those who might one day attain the illustrious ranking of the game's title.
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