Die, die, die

Is it wrong to play a PSP game and superimpose characters from your everyday life onto the hapless enemy that withers under your ferocious gunfire?

I know that we all play games for a touch of escapism but is there becoming a crossover from reality? I seem to try and come up with ever more inventive ways for my enemies to meet their maker, hell I even chainsawed somebody to death last week (you should have seen it though, HA! that wanker had no chance!) and surely that’s not normal behaviour.

I believe that some of this may stem from our flight or fight responses. Modern life is largely devoid of risk and consequently we create scenarios to give ourselves a digital risk. I have caught myself trying to peer around a corner in a game and actually leaning forward with my head to one side without leaving my seat! Mankind didn’t always need to fake such action as life was a struggle everyday and each one could be your last. Whilst I by no means wish to see a return to this kind of life (and sadly, many people in our world are still in it) I feel that life should involve some risks. It would be very easy for us to settle for what we have, but if we all did that we’d still be living in caves with Ug, Mnmn, Blargh and the rest of our cavemen (sorry, caveperson) family. Fortunately for us Ug thought, “I wonder what it’s like over there?” and one of his (or her) descendants thought “If I plant this stuff in the first place then it’ll always be here.”

But here’s the paradox; by taking those risks in the first place it started us on the road to the spawning of the Health and Safety Executive and me sitting on the sofa with a PSP in my risk free world. So we are taking risks to avoid further risk. Will this all end with us lying in a vat of goo cocooned from the dangerous world outside or will we seek to add increasingly more digital risk until one day our appetite is completely insatiable and the real world is put on course to a meltdown?

I could do something about this, but that would be far too risky

This entry was posted on 20/06/2007 at 08:15 am and is filed under Random stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.