Almost always, the answer is to just say, “yes." I endorse all manner of recreational, educational, pharmaceutical, ceremonial, universe-amplifying and boredom-dissolving, pseudo-religious, mind-body and stat-stimulating substance experimentation. You name it, I’ve taken it. Any drug a designer has put in front of me, I’ve put inside of me: Plasmids, Pentazemin, Skooma, steroids, Nanosuit, Magic Cake, mushrooms, Mentats, Med-X, Jet, Buffout, and booze (according to D.A.R.E.). 

Most of the in-game drugs I’ve encountered are narcotic breadcrumb trails, cute little cereal prizes, or candy payouts dispensed by vending machines. Their depictions are similar to a sugar rush or caffeine high (the taste kids can see). Less acid freakout and more performance-enhancing steroid, self-medication in video games is a benign pastime, or even an essential indulgence pushed by the peer-pressure of game design, algorithmically synthesized to improve or augment the player’s stamina, agility, and other physical faculties.

All drug symptoms are experienced in-character and within the established space of the game’s world. Rarely have I seen, however, a virtual drug that changed gamespace, positively or negatively, and subverted the player’s perception of the “reality” established at the game’s onset. My physical high administered by video game drugs is waning. I’m much more interested in the psychosis of drugs, the dramatized headspace of a user and the process of addiction being richly drawn onto interactive space.

Many games smuggle some form of drug within their code, but almost none of them contain any interactive drug culture. As for the preferred fix, uppers are ubiquitous, but downers and hallucinogens are nearly non-existent.

Take BioShock, for instance, a game with a central narrative and gameplay conceit predicated on a fictional city and its fictional populace torn apart by a fictional drug. The country club of Rapture has been dismantled and debased by its own upper-crust -- comfortable aristocrats metamorphosed into rabid junkies, marauding to score that next fix of, umm … a substance that grafts hornet hives onto your skin, and isn’t a medicated mirage (oh yeah, that’s the good shit).

Evidence of the Rapturians’ deteriorating minds is everywhere. Their drug-addled neuroses, violent procurements, and savage, determined appetites are painted onto the surfaces of Rapture with blood, debris, and graffiti. Their pangs of addiction are audible in discarded voice memos. The ruinous cycle of dependence is made manifest with ghosts and NPCs who lament in terse asides the drugs’ damage.

So, why can’t I -- an addict with a heavy habit, enabled by the game’s designers -- fall victim to their tragic trajectory of consumption? In a dystopian world where a narcotic commodity is its currency, why is dope everywhere and untouched, seemingly waiting for only me? In short, why am I immune from the perils of continued Plasmid use; the distortions of reality, the mania, the delusions, the long drug-sniffing hunts demanded by supposed resource scarcity, and the crippling dependency?

Choose life. Choose Plasmids! Keeps you high and never lets you down.

By creating a double standard where drugs are pure benefit for the player, and a debilitating, yet empowering, necessary poison for Rapture’s citizens, it’s not only disingenuous, it’s interactively shallow. My time in Rapture was essentially one mammoth bender, of which the absence of psychological effects and a gameplay arc made getting high a boring chore. Addiction mechanics would have been a welcome blight to complicate the monotonous conquest of a high-tolerance, overly indulged mutant who shoots things out his palm, like the daydream hallucinations of a little boy. This is the all too familiar story of narcotics in video games; The indomitable power addict whose drug-induced vigor and otherworldly strongman routine is not a convincing illusion, it is a perverse and gratuitous in-game reality.

Where drugs are present in games, you will never find truly colorful and surreal, beneficial and detrimental interactivity that results from their mechanical abuse. There is no downward spiral, just chemically fueled upward mobility.

Symptoms of real drug use may include:

Dynamic hallucinatory visitations, unannounced flashbacks, paranoia, sensations of temporal displacement, autonomic dysfunction, episodes of delirium and euphoria, epiphanies of various magnitude, changes in disposition, addiction and withdrawal symptoms.

Symptoms of current game drug use may include:

A swelling sense of superiority, kickass superhuman powers, increased aptitude for discrete disciplines, benign addiction, transient autonomic dysfunction, and blurry or distorted vision.

Parenting's hard, but how hard can it be when little tots just love their cocaine? Buy today and be merry!

Of course video games cannot be chemical analogues that create 1:1 emulations of drugs. But, that doesn’t mean they can’t contain engaging and perceptive mechanical simulacra of drug use.