Games in Our Lives by Mackinley Clevinger, January 22, 2016
A large part of many people’s lives are video games, some spending their time unwinding in front of a television or their computer after a long and stressful day to get away from their problems and put themselves into the shoes of someone else doing something far away from the reality they may struggle with. Others use games as their way of business, creating entertainment that is viewed and enjoyed by millions as their preferred method of unwinding.
It is no overstatement to say that the gaming industry has boomed in the last few decades, enriching a market and creating an impressive catalogue of games for their vast following to purchase and enjoy. Work has sprung up in the shadows cast by these industrial giants, the fascination by some into a certain series or personality funding the lives of numerous individuals who create multimedia based around these games and their stories.
Begrudgingly, the controller is put down and the work done, but the strings attaching us to that spot on the couch where we can sink back into a world vastly more preferred to our own are always there, drawing us back in. You go to work, wanting to be able to leave so you can go back to that comfortable position and let your mind unwind from the stresses of life.
Video games give us an escape from our real lives, and help us cope with the stress of our day to day lives. They know how to press our happy buttons and make us enjoy them, that’s the point of their existence. A game that makes a player happier is a game that sells better, and what makes us happy is believing we can exist in a world more preferable to our own. Where would you rather be, at a desk job or throwing around fireballs? As games become more complicated and better designed, our immersion into them becomes stronger, oftentimes leading to you suddenly snapping out of the game and remembering that you’re not the hero, you’re just playing a game
Being able to go home at the end of the day and immerse yourself in another world is, for many, an immense stress relief. Real life isn’t always easy, and statistics say that two times as many people aren’t happy with their job as there are who do enjoy their work. Work encompasses roughly a third of your waking hour, so of the millions of people working regular jobs, a third of their lives are spent wishing they could be somewhere else. The other eight hours besides, ideally, sleep, is spent in that other life, that other place where they can be who they want to be and do something that actually feels important.
Video games are very much a bandage in this case, a method for people to escape from their disappointment with reality and go someplace else. Not everyone falls into this case, of course, but a great many people are simply drifting through their days until they can be where they actually want to be: in front of that screen. This bandage is applied to our lives so often that it begins to constrict us and our potential.
Video games, having that clear purpose and being the guy, the one who is admired, respected and can do anything, that gives us a sense of fulfillment. We had a goal, we knew what we had to do, and against adversaries and difficulties we managed to win victorious over the bad guys. We fulfill the story and are rewarded, exist in this wonderfully bright and wonderful place that makes us feel satisfied for getting something done.
Then we go to bed, and wake up far too early to go a job we don’t like, or have to run errands for something we don’t really care about. An eight-hour void is left in our lives by this job or other thing that gets in the way of game-time. Such a strong dichotomy between these two activities breeds resentment and a dependency on the time spent gaming, turning it from a cheerful time of immersion and unwinding into something you feel like you have to do to feel normal again.
It isn’t the game’s fault for this, they aren’t made to turn you against your own life. In people’s lives, the games have been forced to fill a void left empty by the rest of their day. This same void is filled with thousands of different things by the untold millions of people who aren’t satisfied with their lives. They all seek deeper meaning and a life that fulfills them, and when they can’t find it they grab for the next best thing to keep themselves afloat.
All these things are just bandages, applied to our lives to feel better without ever actually addressing the core issue. If we don’t treat the cause of this emptiness in our lives, all we do is wrap ourselves tighter until we’ve constricted ourselves in the need to satiate our dependency on a thing that is now hurting us and limiting what we can be.
Games are not intrinsically bad, but we as humans have an addictive personality that looks for quick validation which is never-ending from the vast catalogues of games available. If you’re going home after school or work every day, hating your job or the way it makes you feel, and your first action is to pick up a controller and let your mind drift until you have to go to sleep and back to work, that video game is not solving your problems, and is merely enabling your complacency with a life you don’t want.
Games are used too often as a crutch in our lives that limits our true potential, and it’s no wonder why. They’re easy to get, easy to play, and don’t require any kind of risks to your lifestyle. There’s no threat to your livelihood because you picked up a forty-dollar game, but quitting your job because you hate it and looking for better work? That’s scary. There’s risk involved, and requires action instead of carrying on with what’s become normal.
This isn’t to say games are bad, I myself quite enjoy them, and I’ve spent days, weeks, months straight putting all my free time into a game and wishing I didn’t have to do anything else. I didn’t have a great revelation that broke me free of them, I just lost interest or finally put something else before them that brokered enough time for me to realize that I didn’t want to go back to them.
I still plan, when time finally permits, to go and play some video games, but they do not come first. Games can be art, they can inspire and change lives, but they are ultimately created by someone else. The time I spend playing that game is time not spent on developing myself, or doing the things that make me genuinely satisfied and self-fulfilled, it’s time spent enjoying somebody else’s creation. It’s good to experience other’s work and broaden your mind with different ideas, but you can’t live your life just collecting knowledge and experience. Eventually, you have to do something with what you’ve got.
Some people turn their interest in games into careers that they love and adore, and that’s wonderful, but most people who play them have their own interests and passions that they’re putting on a backburner in exchange for an easier, if emptier, sense of fulfillment. They fear failure, fear not achieving anything with their passion, fear making a mistake, and so they continue on with the same cycle that slowly breaks down with every repetition.
Our passions and interests, the things that make us feel alive and energized, they belong at the forefront of our minds as the guiding forces of our lives, with games as an activity left to free time or when something particularly takes our fancy. All the things we do instead of following up on our interests, the things we use to distract ourselves from our own lives, they need to be shifted to the backseat so we can get on with living our lives in full instead of when convenient to a schedule full of activities we only perform as a part of routine.
I found that I was spending far too much of my time watching videos on the internet of people playing games, not because I was actually interested or wanted to, but because it was what I’d done the day before, and the day before that, so I’ll do it today and I’ll probably do it tomorrow. These activities that make us happy aren’t supposed to be done because we feel obligated to do it, we’re supposed to do them because they make us feel, actively, happy.
Games belong in the backseat, and the lives we want to live need to be put first. A game can be a rewarding and valuable experience, a game can be a work of pure art, it can inspire and galvanize you to do great things, but it can’t replace living your life first hand. That’s what it seems a lot of people have forgotten: That they have lives outside of the spheres of their work and the activities they’re able to relax with. Pick up a controller every once in a while, sure, but make sure you have a firm grasp on your life and are doing what you want with it first. You only get the one life, no matter what the games may tell you, and what you do with it is held accountable to one person: You.