Virtual worlds are much more real than one – and especially their detractors, who for satanic reasons would like to sequester us in everyday material reality, and would forbid even novels if they could still historically afford to do so – usually claims; they are immaterial universes.
Because they are existential frameworks, because we act in them and are acted upon, virtual worlds and video games arouse emotions and reactions that are quite real (so much so that video games are used in certain psychotherapies), and leave memories in the same way as an event in the material world, or a landscape, or a "real" person.
In a way, there's a part of me that "really" lives in Vice City and Los Santos – as in the now-defunct German residential areas of Second Life, where I used to wander around at night, entering residents' homes while they were away to take photos like a thief, or in the infinite space of Minecraft – since I have memories there, both visual and emotional, and even a future if I so wish.
Often, rather than completing the missions of a GTA San Andreas as quickly as possible, I'll launch the game and go for a leisurely jog at dusk, to build up my stamina – and then go for a walk, take a few photos, dance with Denise Robinson, or play the excellent 8-bit arcade machines found throughout the game.
A repetitive, slow, simple daily life; the kind that leaves the player with memories, real, personal memories.
You come home from work in your real life, go about your business, have dinner, and at some point in the evening, spend an hour jogging, or driving fast along the beach in a Porsche at dusk, with Tears for Fears on the radio.
Or to consolidate your fortress.
Video games as part and parcel of everyday life, and of life itself
Obviously, my life in video games is an extremely limited part of my existence, restricted to the few possibilities offered by the game. But when you think about it, what makes it so much more limited than the "part of me" that goes shopping at the supermarket after work? These utilitarian moments, always the same, segmented, are nevertheless considered real. And God knows there are a lot of them in the course of a day.
The set of gestures I can perform in a GTA, for example, is even wider and more varied than the one I'm entitled to when I'm shopping – in the absolute, of course, I could start singing at the top of my lungs in the cheese department, provoke a brawl or organize a poetic happening between the rows of packs of beer, but I don't, and nobody does, to avoid the Matrix's immediate reaction, which consists of a security guard politely kicking you out.
The sum of the moments in our lives when we are content with a restricted catalog of behaviors, because all the others are not part of the program, is immeasurable.
So, considering that what is experienced in the game is perceived as "at least relatively" real by the mind, and that material life offers few behavioral possibilities to everyone, the use of video games as a means of relaxation, compensation, catharsis and even knowledge of the world, like the novel, is unassailable, and historically ineluctable and irreversible.
I'm really saying "like the novel".
Who can deny the historical impact of the novel, born of the emergence of the individual, and by feedback, contributing to individuation, reinforcing it, and giving, by its unique qualities of analysis of what is the world and man, by its ability to arouse identification and even bovarysm, by its capacity to create myths, to "lie true", to prospect the future and invent it?
There isn't a phenomenon of the twentieth century that hasn't been heralded by literature. From Julien Sorel to Tyler Durden, from the heroes of the Boy Scout novels enjoyed by the prepubescent fascist Brasillach, fictional characters, fiction, and the very logic of the novel have mentally shaped several generations of Westerners.
What will be the fate of video games in this field? What role will it play in people's psyches, representations and ideals, after novels and television?
Who will decide to quit their job and join an ideological or criminal battle, no longer to imitate a paper hero, but their own video-game avatar, thus bringing together and reunifying their different "selves"?
Who is to judge the Second Life housewife who leaves everything behind one morning to join the BDSM "Master" she met there?
She's just the descendant of the man who joined the PCF after reading Aragon's Les Communistes, and the hordes of clones of the Loft-Story generation.
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