Thoughts on Video Games

Video games have been a presence in my life for as long as I can remember.  Atari. Nintendo. PlayStation.  Now my attention has shifted to Facebook apps.  When I am not careful, I catch myself mindlessly click-click-clicking the mouse button for way longer than I care to admit.  In light of the challenges I face in finding time to accomplish what I need to in a given day, I often wonder why I bother.   In fact, I have been trying to answer the why question for some time now.  Some reasons to that come to mind are: they offer temporary escape, they demonstrate improvement in a tangible way, and in games, mistakes are not fatal.

The Great Escape

There are times were almost all of us want a temporary escape from reality.  Some find it by putting on a pair of earphones and letting music drown the world around them.  Others get lost in the lives and landscapes of other worlds they discover in books.  Some people zap their cares away with video games.  The momentary respites from the stresses of everyday life are healthy coping mechanisms.  However, they can become unhealthy if we overindulge.  When we find it harder and harder to abandon our escape and return to the responsibilities of life, we can be sure that we are in too deep. 

Leveling Up

Another reason I play games is because they permit me to see improvement in a tangible way.  It isn’t always easy to see growth in everyday life.  Maturity is very difficult to quantify, but characters in video games show progress by leveling up.  If I start out on level one, and in a matter of days I’m at level 100, it feels like an achievement.  Putting your clothes in the hamper, without your wife reminding you to do so, doesn’t come with the same feeling.  Compared to real life, with its continual ebb and flow, video games offer a seductive simplistic approach to understanding personal improvement.

Resume Play

Closely related to the idea of tangible growth, video games operate under the assumption that failure is not fatal.  Making a mistake in a video game may cost your character energy, money, or even its digital life, but you can always continue the game.  “Game over,” to my knowledge, has never really been game over.  It’s really more of like a “sessions over.”  I have never heard of a video game that permanently locked a player out for failing to advance.  No, they get to start over, again and again.  For a person who fears failure, this is an alluring enticement. 

Summary

It turns out I play video games so that my mind can return, refreshed and renewed through temporary reassignment, to the task of solving real world problems.  Although I have to be careful not to overindulge in escapism, I have learned some things from playing video games.  I have learned that leveling up in life is more difficult and more rewarding, than leveling up in a game.  A character in a game is unaware of his achievements, but if we will continually reflect on our lives, we will see the pattern of growth in them.  I also learned that most failure is not fatal.  The Lord grants us the opportunity to do things over, if we will cease them.  The most dangerous mistakes are the ones we don’t learn from, and the ones we don’t make because we don’t do anything.

How do you escape the worries of your day?  Do you do it in a healthy manner?  How do you measure growth in your life?  In other words, how do you know if you are leveling up?  What mistakes have you learned the most from?  How have you put those lessons into practice?