Our culture is fond of creating virtual realities (make-believe worlds) and then spending much of our time in these alternative worlds. In fact, modernity itself is a type of virtual reality, in that it cannot be a long-lasting way of living on the planet: a temporary retreat from a deeper, broader, and more ancient reality.
In the context of virtual realities, this post compares loathsome modernity to loathsome video games, and the mental miscues they share in common. While brought up on video games and modernity, I have developed allergic reactions to both, and only now made the connection. It’s a single root cause.
Both modernity and video games offer addictive rewards that prove to be empty where it really counts. We can do better.
My Video Game History
Despite their popularity—even perhaps among some of my readers—video games strike me as a waste of more than just time. Before writing me off as a typical cranky Boomer, I’m a solid Gen-Xer (1970) who witnessed and excitedly embraced the introduction of video games to the world—even programming some of my own on a Commodore 64.
I was right there at the beginning: an early-adopter. As a kid, we had (and often played) the first commercially successful video game console (Pong). Video game arcades burst onto the scene when I was about ten years old, introducing us to Pac-Man, Asteroids, Defender, Centipede, and many more. I played all of them, going through an embarrassing multitude of quarters (I wasn’t particularly good at them). Joust was a favorite—probably because of the less-constrained richness of flying/flapping through a 2-D space with obstacles. One Christmas during this craze, I got the Intellivision console. I was so obsessed and eager that in the months leading up I cobbled together—in cargo-cult fashion—a home-made controller paddle out of cardboard and colored by crayon. It sported a spring-loaded directional disk, and even made realistic tactile clicks when pressing the buttons due to some unintentional feature of the way I folded tape in small loops to make a double-stick surface underneath the “keypad.” In my first quarter at Georgia Tech, I probably spent more time in a dorm room down the hall playing Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers than I did on classwork. Tetris also gobbled loads of time and invaded my dreams.
So, I’ve been there. While video games were not a large part of my life after age 20—I think in large part because I was finding greater fulfillment elsewhere—my breaking point didn’t come until about ten years later while playing the game of Myst. My wife and I were playing it together, and doing pretty well at unlocking clues and exploring the various visually-rich worlds. But I suddenly had an epiphany: I was just finding artificial and arbitrary breadcrumbs left by some (other) nerd. It all seemed rather empty.
Fake Skills
Once when visiting family, an eleven-year-old excitedly informed me that she had become really good at bowling. I was impressed. That’s a real-world game requiring mastery of attentiveness and many motor skills. Then I found out she was talking about a Wii game. So the computer liked the way the accelerometers were moved, which isn’t nothing, but a lot of the real elements were totally missing: imperfect shoes and floor making grabby spots; a honking big weight off to one side, straining various muscles; too much or too little friction between fingers and holes that are never sized perfectly; thumb soreness after a few games; the full dynamics of pins whirling around; the occasional teetering pin. The list goes on. The wrist motion sensed by accelerometers is the palest shadow of the real thing.
Video games fill in a lot of the fizix (fake physics) in order to steer results into “interesting” (intended) territory. All the user does is supply the merest suggestion of intent, and the computer does the rest. Granted, timing of button presses can make the difference between hitting your target and not, but it’s seldom more than a single-parameter filter, while the real world unavoidably executes many in parallel.
The virtual reality of video games inverts/perverts the relative probability of something going “right” (as intended) vs. going sideways. Put an eight-year-old behind the “wheel” of a formula-one racing car, and chances are they’ll not only make it to the finish line alive, but in respectable time. No number of collisions with the walls or other cars result in fiery death, debilitating damage to the car, or lawsuits. That’s fizix, and for many people it’s more entertaining (more fun) then reality. A crushing blow (or even many) from a sword might reduce strength points, rather than leaving an arm on the floor and its previous owner bleeding out, not to mention psychological trauma. Movies and television shows also bend the rules far beyond the breaking point, to increasingly absurd levels.
Impoverished Worlds
My poor friends. I love them dearly, but when they finally succeed in getting me to pick up the controller, nobody has any fun. I’m busy trying to understand the rules of the fake world. I’m a robot wandering around. Can I fall off this catwalk? No. If I run at this wall, do I get knocked down? No. Can I shoot my own leg with my laser blaster? No. The guard rails are extreme, and I feel like I’m wrapped in thirty layers of bubble-wrap and diapers. Yet, I did once manage to get tangled up in scaffolding or something where no button presses—even by my baffled friends—could wiggle me free. But in general, it’s such a pared-down fake world with almost none of the richness and complexity of our magnificent real world. It’s a world stripped of unintended consequences, providing only a tiny parameter space of the designer’s limited vision and capability. It seems people (i.e., their brains) have been conditioned by our culture to be attracted to these depleted, dumbed-down worlds.
Similar statements can be made about games like Dungeons and Dragons. The menu of possibilities may be more impressively open than in video games, which themselves are more open than scripted forms of virtual-reality entertainment (movies, television, plays). But the world that is invoked is still extremely tidy and limited to what pops into the meat-brains of the master and players. Sure, randomness is thrown in to grant or thwart success. But notice how the game tends to go on, not straying terribly far from what the design prescribes. Half or all the characters aren’t wiped out by a sudden unexpected avalanche, a falling stone from the wizard’s blast, virulent disease, a wild boar out of nowhere, etc. Serious guard rails. A pampered “life.”
I’ve never been attracted to D&D, which broke out when I was in sixth-grade. Many of my friends played it, and I tried a few times, but it just could never hold my interest. I now have more insight as to why.
Worthy Entertainment
If this train of thought was taken to its logical extreme, I would not enjoy any game, movie, or story. That’s not the case at all. I can most easily get on board with games requiring physical skill and contending with uncontrollable elements. Darts, billiards, bowling, archery, and golf come to mind—though I don’t spend much time on any of these.
It occurs to me that a good example is Bocce. I have a bocce set (8 balls and a pallino) that weighs in at 13 kg (29 lbs). I absolutely love playing it with friends. On its carrying-case is a drawing of a dimensioned Bocce court. Yeah, maybe if I had a stick up my… Who needs a confined, rectilinear court, when the whole world is out there, waiting to be explored? The beach is great: lots of variety from soft sand to hard sand, with a challenging slope and the danger of losing the heavy balls in the waves. Many back yards offer obstacles, hazards, bounce opportunities, various textures and speeds. We’ve played “extreme mountain bocce” (rocks, shrubs, all sorts of surfaces). Forests work; parks; campgrounds. And in all cases, my friends and I play with the rule that the winner of the last round gets to toss the pallino and establish whatever rules they want. Many rounds are pretty straightforward, letting the varied terrain supply the creative angle, but twists are not rare. Maybe eyes closed. Maybe backwards over the head. Sub-dominant hand, through the legs. Maybe you’re all in a circle with the pallino somewhere in the middle (hint: it won’t stay there!). It’s sort-of like Calvinball, and hundreds of inventive twists have been tried. While it’s still constrained by rules, those rules (and the external environment) can vary all over the place and lead to unpredictable results. Keeping score is secondary, and we usually loose track—it’s hard when laughing hysterically. The fun is in the playing and in the creativity and in the wild interactions. The bocce purists can keep their tidy, rigid courts.
In terms of on-screen entertainment, I tend to gravitate to productions that edge toward unpredictable, messy, complex, non-formulaic patterns. They feel more like the world I live in, and therefore seem to be capable of teaching me something. If the “creative talent” behind a show can’t capture this realistic feel, I am skeptical I can learn anything from the artificial world and shallow relationships they construct.
When the real world is allowed to write the script, the result tends to be far more rich and believable. And fewer cars explode. I have a standard. Any story that is more incredible than that of Shackleton’s Endurance saga is, well, not credible. Another extreme is painted by the 117 Days Adrift story.
This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy entertainment that requires suspension of disbelief. Some of my favorite movies and shows are outright goofy (but share in common unexpected twists and unintended consequences, like real life).
Modernity’s Turn
Just as in video games, I would say modernity creates a similarly impoverished virtual reality. It’s a make-believe world wherein all the focus is on a narrow set of intended consequences, pretending the far-more-numerous and mounting unintended consequences either don’t exist or can be tamed by the same techniques that concentrate only on intended results. When will we learn? It’s a form of built-in mental incapacity (of every human), and not a surprising one or a curable one. Our brains are simply not up to the task. The best we can do is recognize this truth and limit its damages, via a culture of deliberate restraint.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t use our brains. That can’t be stopped, anyway. Our brains are marvelously well-adapted to some tasks. But we run into trouble when we use our brains to conjure a virtual reality (modernity) divorced from ecological complexity and the time-tested ways of the community of life.
Modernity—whose definition I extend to the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago—differs radically from ecological practices that have been vetted by evolution to work in the intermediate-to-long term. Modernity is more an amalgam of “look what we can do” stunts of both accidental and cerebral origin. Brains have never taken the wheel to this extent in the more-than-human world, and that fact alone puts us on shaky ground. Like a video game, modernity piles on one artificial (not vetted by evolution/ecology) construct after another—reminiscent of plate spinning—in pursuit of some narrow goal while ignoring a nearly infinite raft of real-world context.
Video games get away with it because they’re isolated from the real world in a small, closed system. They create a sort of fantasy safe-space where the possible outcomes are narrowed to a graspable set. Importantly, video games are constructed to make it possible to “win” if everything is executed well. Some players “win” by employing “hacks,” and this reward strategy is carried over into “life hacks” as if real life, too, is a game to be manipulated.
We pretend that modernity is winnable if we play the game just right, but it truly is not. This belief requires ignorance of ecological context and a sense of “safe space” separation from the community of life. Life carries no such guarantees, and modernity is on its face not constructed to win in the long run, as what looks like winning in a narrow sense turns out to be losing big-time where it counts. Modernity’s run-time is exceedingly brief on ecological timescales. In this short time, it has rapidly racked up an accumulating toll that is coming due, to the tune of a sixth mass extinction.
When a video game says “game over,” it’s as empty as the rest of the game: no consequences, and one can start over any time. The real world won’t be so forgiving when it pronounces “game over” for modernity. This sloppy and comparatively-sudden creation of the human brain is no match for life, which has spent millions—and even billions—of years patiently testing and honing a community of life that is selected to work in the long term. Modernity has no place.
Let’s Stop Pretending
Just as I walked away from the emptiness of video games decades ago, I am now advocating that we set down the controls of modernity—stop spinning the plates—recognizing it as a fool’s game that can’t be won, and whose continuance drives the irreplaceable community of life over a cliff.
Fantasies are fun, and the rewards can be intoxicating/addictive. But it’s time that we grow up and stop playing the empty, escapist game of modernity: we need to learn to live in the real world again.
