Life in RL
Part Two: Interactive Discourse
Mar. 7th, 2010
By stealth_toilet

There are many observations I have made since I’ve given up videogames which I feel are essential to modern day gamers, both in and out of virtual landscapes, but I find it difficult to transmit all of them to you, the reader, in an expedient fashion. I’ve already attempted, several times, to sit down and write comparisons between real life situations and common videogame tropes. I’ve written extensively comprehensive analogies of real life situations that can be reduced to grinding for experience in World of Warcraft, performing tedious min/maxing in single player RPGs, and embarking on a variety of unrelated fetch quests. It is a shame I will not be showing you the product of those analogies because, well, real life can be a lot like a bad RPG in many ways, but I do not believe relating any of that to you is essential in any way. As gamers we already know life is tedious, repetitive, and full of mindless busywork, which is why many of us enjoy the fantastic and unreal qualities of videogames. I don’t need to prove that to you, because as a gamer you already know real life can be kind of boring. What I can tell you, that I believe is essential for you to know as a gamer, is what it is like to not be a gamer.

When I stepped out of my gaming shoes and began finding ways to spend my time that didn’t involve gaming, I looked at what other non-gamers did. More often then not people who don’t play videogames do a lot more socializing than those who do. I have come to realize that many people who play videogames are more anti-social than their non-videogame playing peers. This is not because people who play games are social outcasts or socially inept, even though videogames do have a lot to offer to those who are. One can play videogames and be a very socially involved person, the two are not in opposition and, in fact, I believe are complimentary. What I mean when I say non-gamers socialize more than gamers is that not being a gamer necessitates becoming socially active, because playing a videogame is a substitute for social interaction, and a rather effective one at that. But it’s not merely a substitute in the sense that it replaces social interaction with something completely different. I have come to realize that videogames actually stand in for social interaction; they are equal in their endeavor to engage someone in back and forth dialogue. The language is different, and the presentation makes it almost unrecognizable, but when we say we’re “playing” a videogame, we really mean we’re talking with it. I say with, because they talk back. It’s complicated.

Until I quit playing videogames cold turkey I never realized just how much my perception of games has affected my perception of real life. I instinctively made comparisons between stratagems for puzzle solving in virtual realities with stratagems for problem solving in real life. I have visualized conversations as robust dialogue trees. I have rationalized performing menial tasks in real life as I have rationalized performing underwhelming actions in a videogame. It has been many years since I lived a life that was not influenced by videogames, not shaped by them in any way. Now, I am experiencing a life that is without a videogame meta-narrative. I am no longer drawing analogies and parallels between real life situations and the fantastic metaphors found within game worlds. I am living real life in real life, which is in itself a substantially different form of existence. Whether or not we are willing to put any stock in what various studies continually “prove” and “disprove,” we know for a fact that the ineffectual application of modern psychology and artistic theory to videogames and videogame players in effect proves that we simply don’t know what the relationship between a human being and a videogame is. We do not have the tools to measure it, the words to explain it, or the approach to interpret it. To put it more bluntly, my current situation is such that I have now ceased to enter a virtual world for the better part of a week, and it has caused me to feel and think differently than I would have if I had continued to enter virtual worlds and engage in virtual actions. Yet despite the fact that I’m thinking and feeling differently, the physical spaces I inhabit have remained utterly the same. A change outside of my physical environment has caused me to think about my physical environment differently. In fact, a lack of virtual environments is directly responsible for my physical change of state. This change has caused me to wonder, what really happens to someone when they play a videogame? Where do they go? Physically, nothing changes. The couch I sit on in my living room is the same couch I sit on when I write for egameaddiction. My posture is similar, the lighting is the same, my occupation of space and time is more or less identical, but the experience is completely different. What happens to me when I play a videogame? Where do they take me? The following is my best guess at the answers for these questions.