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“Video games give us the ability to control and do something which we would never be able to do in real life. The majority of us have little control over our lives, this is just the way the world works, so having the power, for once, to be something different and to have some power over what happens is one of the reasons why so many people around the world play video games.” - Joshua Temblett, Editor-in-Chief of Candlelight-Studios.com.
Imagine, if you do not, that you hold the view just described. You spend your youth going to school, possibly your young adulthood in college, and eventually the rest of your life working. You expend the vast majority of your energy and creativity first learning and then putting to use what you have learned in order to make a living.
Countless long days are capped by your staggering through the front door, listlessly powering on your console or computer, and letting a shallow and vaguely guilty sigh of relief escape you as your latest jester attempts to behave spasmodically enough to distract you from your fraudulent and incomprehensible life.
For a person who indulges in this kind of abdication of responsibility, the only value, if it can be called that, a game can promise is that of seeing what he has given up, what he could have but refuses. In order to unlock the real value of a game, one must hold it as consonant with one's own life, not opposed to it. It must represent a parallel track, a dramatization of what one actually experiences in real life, not a clashing perpendicular force assaulting the player with a view of the impossible.
Video games are only fun insofar as their proper place is respected. They must be subordinate to a higher goal, which is properly one's career. This is why, if you have ever done so and possess and a healthy psychology, playing video games endlessly with no thought of productive work becomes empty and boring.
If you introspect when you have this feeling, you will realize that the reason for the boredom is your growing disconnection with the protagonist or heroes of the game. As it becomes harder and harder to evade the fact that you are not successfully living in reality, it becomes harder and harder to feel admiration for a character who isachieving his goals in his fictional reality.
Video games, like art, provide what Ayn Rand called “emotional fuel.” This presupposes a “vehicle,” however, one that is going somewhere and not forever parked at a gas station, endlessly filling up with fuel that it will never use. As a person comes to realize he is not doing anything that requires emotional fuel, he ceases feeling the emotion of admiration for his avatar and its companions, and sacrifices the pleasure he derives therefrom.
Someone who does nothing but play video games cannot possibly identify with heroes like Solid Snake or Master Chief. These characters fight for success and pursue their values. If someone does not think he is capable of achieving success, then characters like these are cut down, and one sees the disgusting adulation of and crying foranti-heroes, for characters who represent the downtrodden, flawed and beaten.
A man who believes his successes and failures are sheer chance does not want and cannot get the enjoyment that comes to the man who knows his life is the same as Master Chief's in principle. He knows that just as Master Chief can defeat the Covenant and the Flood, he can ace his exam or design a stellar project at the office.
So long as video games are viewed as escapes, they will never reach their potential. To fully appreciate them, a man has to see them as reflections of his own real-world pursuits.
(Republished from TheGameSaver)
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