Culture Clash

(September 2008)

The Great Escape

To some, it's more than a pastime

Long ago, when I was but a tadpole, our Atari 2600 broke. And this is before the age of Indian tech support and 3-day UPS. Nowadays a broken console just means it's, like, Tuesday. Back then a broken console was kind of a big deal.

Anyway, before sending it in for repair, my Dad decided to take the thing apart in hopes of effecting some kind of speedier homebrew fix. Of this event, what stands out sharply in my mind is the how I felt when he lifted off the faux wood-grain plastic top. Staring down at the disemboweled machine, I recall feeling… a profound disappointment, a surprised melancholy akin to loss. I felt bereft, as though something I'd long thought to be true and around which I had built a belief system of sorts had been suddenly and cruelly disproved. I realized to my dismay that an Atari 2600 was not some magnificent clockwork organism, it was merely a collection of circuitry – banal, ordinary, unmagical. At my tender age, I was unable to equate the fabulous things it did to the TV with the glum silicon innards sprawled so defeatedly on my father's workbench. I do not know what I expected to see in there. Something beautiful, I suppose. Cut me some slack, I was seven.

And yet even now, more than a quarter century later, a little bit of that childish disappointment returns whenever I stop and consider the fact that games are just artfully constructed equations and algorithms, and not gateways to other worlds at all. At seven it was more traumatic because I really did believe that there would be something luminous inside that 2600 case. Nowadays the letdown is more vague, because after all these years I know quite well that life – even those parts we seek out and enjoy – tends to be about nine parts gray machinery to one part luminous. But it is still hard to correlate the delightful self-obviation that games allow with their mathematically practical underpinnings in reality.

Just last month I suggested that games attract a certain demographic in part because of their ability to teleport the player to another reality, one in which they are important and influential and almost certainly in better shape than they are here. My argument was based in part on the theory that certain pastimes – such as videogames and comics and tabletop roleplaying – tend to be appealing to people who are uncomfortable with themselves, because those pastimes allow them to become someone else for a short time. Among the pieces of feedback I received for that column were more than a few articulate reflections on that point.

“I consider myself pretty well-adjusted,” wrote one reader, “I don't need to escape reality. And neither do most gamers. I just want to from time to time. I accomplish that with video games. Frankly I think there are a lot of people who don't play video games who could benefit from a little bit of escapism. Those people can make fun of ‘geeks' for being weird if they want. I actually kind of pity them, even when they do, because they don't know what they're missing.”

The idea of escapism didn't materialize with Pong. It's been sought in one form or another pretty much since we came down from the trees. But as time and technology change the nature of our species, so too changes the way we seek to escape from the daily defeats and humiliations of reality that trammel us here. The real key with videogames is how effectively they manage the departure, and how immersive escape through them can be. People like to get away, for long periods and short. They like to pretend that they're leading different lives and doing different things. They like to be made to feel happy and sad, excited and afraid; to experience adventures and encounter personalities and become people they'd never otherwise during their regular lives. And short of drugs – an altogether less reliable, less safe, less cost-effective and less practical means of escapism – there aren't many other options that do it with near the richness of a good videogame.

The ability of games to create worlds that we can willingly visit and cheerfully lose ourselves in is pretty powerful. It's because of this that many gamers are so passionate about the hobby, and treasure so much each experience. After all, passion for videogames leads people to do things like collect 30,000 of them or self-publish a massively comprehensive fictional diary recounting in excruciating detail the daily adventures of one's character in a beloved game. It's what causes people to pen fervent defenses of experiences others disliked or thoughtful analyses of games 99% of the population will never play and never want to. Videogames offer a fantastic, safe, and wildly diverse opportunity for escape. And serious gamers who prize the experiences they have while playing are missionaries of sorts. Gaming is a proselytizing faith. In seeking ways to verbalize how important games can be to those who love them, gamers wax amazingly eloquent (if often incomprehensible to nongamers) on the experience and what it means.

As a little boy staring disconsolately into the ruins of my Atari, I was distraught to learn that the console was not something Promethean, not something miraculous and inherently unknowable, hand-delivered by a higher power. After all, I'd been playing games since I came out of beta; the suggestion that they were nothing more than the mundane creations of other humans didn't compute. These days I see things a little more pragmatically. But it's still important, for those who love and cherish the hobby – and even those who see it as just a pleasant pastime – to take a moment now and then and reflect on the myriad joys and happy moments the medium has allowed us, and look forward to those yet to come.