If I were to guess how many hours I spent playing video games in high school, I would have to round it up to somewhere around 10,000. Perhaps more.
This is, in part, because video games are the best form of escapism that has ever existed.
Playing a video game gives a sense of agency, of being able to directly affect a different world. This is so addicting because we so often associate choices with meaning.
And the only popular entertainment medium with that option is video games (putting aside the hypertext from “choose-your-own-adventure” books, some of which are fantastic).
With movies, you are being shown a situation, and invited to spend two hours or so with a certain set of characters. When we watch Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter in all of those movies, we are watching a character grow, but we, as an audience, have no influence on him.
We are given the exact amount of time it takes for a film to run, and then we are booted out of Hogwarts forever. (To combat this inevitable eviction from a world of magic, they’ve created a theme park.)
With books, you get to know characters on precise levels and are able to move at your own pace. Nevertheless, you are, in the end, being dragged along on a plot line and end up in the same place as every other reader.
You can take as long as you want, but the words don’t change.
Not so with video games.
The best example is the popular game adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s "The Walking Dead." It is focused around one simple concept: you are in control of a survivor and most of their actions and responses. The game more or less flows differently depending on your choices — although some, sadly, are unavoidable.
You can play this game again and again, getting different reactions from different characters. The game, like all good games, is adept at tricking you into thinking that your choices ultimately matter.
Other games, like "World of Warcraft" or "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion," you can literally play for hundreds of thousands of hours, because there is no winstate (which is wonkspeak for the “Congratulations, you won! Roll credits” part of the game).
All this comes back to the idea of choosing as being meaningful. The central idea around most video games is to engage the player to such an extent that he or she forgets that none of the choices they make matter.
The deception here is the belief that all choices are imbued with meaning. Every “gamer” must have a strong suspension of disbelief when it comes to making choices that matter.
Just as we choose to believe, for an instant, that each character’s lines in a movie were created on the spot, a video game player chooses to believe that everything they do in that world is spontaneous, personal and completely one’s own.
For those who don’t feel as if they have agency in the real world, it is indescribable bliss to have an escape into a world where you are always the protagonist, where you are always "the chosen one,” where all the attention is focused on you.
I don’t have to tell you how dangerous this could be. Virtually all of entertainment we choose is centered on escapism rather than enlightenment. This makes video games, by far, the most effective entertainment imaginable in terms of keeping the consumer sitting in one place for hours on end.
Why live in the outside world? Why try, when there are so many pseudo-worlds to explore in my computer screen?
This is not to say that video games don’t have room to grow or change. After so many years of mindless power-fantasy shooters, most of the gaming public has entered something like a post-modern phase.
Ever since "BioShock," (or, more precisely, "System Shock 2") with its introduction of an unreliable quest-giver, more and more video games are beginning to explore it as a medium, which is well and good.
Particularly engaging is "Spec Ops: The Line," which presents itself as a power fantasy and ends up trying its hardest to make the player feel like a terrible person. It’s wonderful.
Until the gaming public stops using this form of media as a refuge from reality instead of an art form among other art forms, the depths of the medium can never be fully explored.