In the rare moments of self-reflection I eke out between bouts of screaming and flower arranging, I find myself puzzled by the fact that I continue to play video games. I generally take it for granted that, in any given week, I'm going to spend at least 10 or 12 hours chipping away at a set of tasks that don't really matter in a world that doesn't really exist. But I've never really figured out whether something insidious lurks beneath those pixels. I'm no luddite, however; if a majority of people spend a huge chunk of their time staring into screens, I'm inclined to assume they have a good reason to do so.It seems to me that one giant principle behind media in general, and video games to a greater extent, is ego deletion. When you play a game or watch a movie, you give up your goals, surroundings and even your sense of self, and through the exercise of your empathy you substitute in a set of fictional priorities. This is typically called escapism, but it's only escapism in the substantive sense; you don't obviate yourself of desire, you just attune yourself to a different bandwidth of it. There's no change to the form of your thought, only the content.We can conclude from this that, as media consumption rises, people en masse have become less satisfied with their lives. To be human is to experience desire, or so says the Buddha anyway. The experience and fulfillment of desire are the fundamentals of human identity — who you are is conditioned by what you want and whether you have it. So, when I play video games, or you watch "Parks and Recreation" (2009–15), we're not so much expressing a curiosity about the content of those things as much as a desire to be, for a while, different people.
Ultimately, then, it seems to me that the trouble with media escapism only really reveals itself in aggregate. If you imagine for a moment a world in which stories and all their derivative forms don't exist, you imagine a world in which everyone is tremendously bored. Bored enough, perhaps, to do something interesting with their lives. However, the human mind can only bear a certain amount of lived experience before it starts to snap. And if this means the choice is between a world of extremely motivated lunatics and the relative placidity we live in now — I think I'd prefer to avoid the choice, honestly.So I've resolved that the next time I play video games, I'm going to try to be conscious of exactly what it is I'm doing and exactly what life I'm escaping from. I'm not confident that there will be any answers there, but it never hurts to look. It's not like I've got anything better to do. I've just been playing video games all afternoon.
The Starving Aesthete: Escaping with the tube
