I have often heard it said that video games were going to cause people to hide away and just play video games their whole lives. Every year for decades now, you hear about some new study or article related to the psychological effects of video games on today’s youth, from the pitfalls of Mario, to nightmares of Five Nights at Freddy’s “Purple Guy”. The root cause of these fears stems from the power of simulations. The fear that bothers me the most however, is the first mentioned, that people will immerse themselves too deeply into their simulated reality and will no longer wish to return to “the real world”. I however, have good reason to believe that while there will always be some for whom that will ring true, that it will never become wholly true, and that is, the power of storytelling.
First, I would like to dispel the notion that such a fear is at all a new phenomenon. People have said the same thing about movies, TV, books, and I am sure that it’s been said even about the theater in the past. After all, are they nothing more than less immersive simulations? The ability to interact with video games though, put them into a class of their own. It provides the ability to re-experience the game in a different way, with the ability for the player to set for themselves arbitrary goals within the game, with whole communities being formed around some of them, such as the speed-running community, with subcommunities formed around specific games, series of games, or even around a particularly popular runner. Video games themselves though, as a medium, have gotten better over the years, contributing to this fear. Games get more addicting, and you hear about kids who refuse to do anything other than play Fortnite, or Minecraft, or whatever their particular game of choice is, with no sign that games will get less immersive, or less designed to consume players’ time and money in the future.
There are however, a few reasons why I believe that this will not come to pass. The first of these reasons is our love of telling stories as humans. It is not enough for us to merely experience these simulated worlds, but as natural storytellers, we cannot help but to return from our adventures, to tell others of our journeys and mishaps. Open-world gaming has become increasingly popular in recent years, with the staples of this genre of games being Bethesda games, The Elder Scrolls, and Fallout, the increasing complexity of the newer releases of Dwarf Fortress, and of course, as anyone can guess, yes, Minecraft. The expansiveness of these worlds, along with elements of randomness, along with individualized objectives, gives seemingly infinite possibilities for storytelling. Much of my high school experience with my nerdy friends, was recounting our latest exploits from the weekend, or late into the night. More recently, this kind of desire for unique and more challenging experiences with old favorites has led to the creation of “randomizers”, which hack ROMs for old games, particularly Pokemon and Zelda games, and randomize certain elements within that game to provide a new, perhaps more or less challenging experience. The meteoric rise in the number of people on YouTube uploading these kinds of videos is testament to the desire for these fresh, unique experiences, in this case by recycling old content, and adding the missing piece.
This also shows the other side, of this, and that’s, people want to hear those stories as well. They don’t want to just experience a game vicariously through another person, but they want to hear and see that person’s own stories too. We want to listen to stories, perhaps more than we want to tell them.
Some people became couch potatoes after the advent of television, and some became gamer hermits after the creation of video games. Further in the future still, there will be those lost to the more immersive worlds we create in the future, but, even if all of our needs are met while within those worlds, there will still be reasons to return to reality, to share our experiences in those worlds, whether that experience is educational, enlightening, terrifying, comedic, or just generally unpleasant. The final stage of the hero’s journey, is the return home where the hero is changed in some way, and I think that for the moment in our evolution, that this is inescapable for all but a few whose natural obsessiveness will just need an outlet for.
/rant
/rant 