Serepax

Because the world needs more overwrought candour.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

When is a game not a game?

I used to play a lot of video games as a gangly teen and it dawned on me this morning that the appeal of gaming to me is that games represent how we think life ought to be. When you're stuck in situation in game that you don't know how to get out of, you never get depressed because you know that the game has a purpose and that it has been designed to be finished. This is in stark contrast to the meandering, ambiguous, make-what-you-like-of-it nature of life, with few clear divides, few real, constant needs, and a hell of a lot of making it up as you go along. Games always appealed to me because of the system, of the sense of a designer watching benevolently. Wherever you are, you know that it's ok - there is a way out. There is always an exit, always a new entry. I took a lot of pleasure in games when I was younger because I was fearful of that open-ended pile of uncertainties and half-judgements and interactions that is real life. Is it any wonder that people are increasingly choosing gaming over real life? Certainty over uncertainty? Is it a heretical notion to suggest that if God did exist, He would have designed the world like a game - with real moral choices around every corner; with distinct beginnings and ends; with the gamer's egalitarian sense of fairness (all start with the same weapon and make it under their own steam); with fewer toilet stops and diseases and mucus and ambiguities? Where you aren't stuck with what you're born with but can recreate yourself again as you want to? And isn't it interesting that now we have the power to make games that can nearly compete with life, that so many people - millions upon millions - are opting out of this life for the promised better life that is the game?