Ever had the urge to escape your life? To leave what you know behind and enter someone else’s reality? Maybe you lost your job, perhaps your significant other left you, or you have a class that takes you to a new reality. You need that moment where you can just forget the world around you ever existed and enter someplace fantasy and different. Video games give us that means of transportation from reality to a place we can control, if for only a couple of hours.
Video games are a form of modern day entertainment. Without them, we lose something very vital to everybody’s existence: a gateway outside of ourselves. We lose a sense of immersion that keeps us going to work or class every day. Video games allow gamers to see into new insights on current topics by playing through the stories of totally different people; people that we will never become, but admire none the less. Video games allow gamers to experience new and exciting things that they would not dare to do themselves because there is an underlying fear that we have everything to lose by doing so. Games allow us to not be ourselves. To leave everything we worry about behind for bursts of hours or minutes.
Mass Effect, a role-playing action video game from developers Bioware, was a title that gave us the opportunity to not only be ourselves, but to amplify the people we want to be. Gamers take the role as Commander Shepard. Commander Shepard becomes a part of us. Shepard can be a man or woman, black or white. He is what we create. He is either an extension of us or the polar opposite. Playing Shepard gives us the journey of a life time as we become a hero and a seasoned individual. Gamers can choose to be evil, good, or neutral. Shepard lets us take on the persona of someone we always wanted to be deep inside. A person without a purpose; a person who does what he wants and aims to do what is right or wrong. The Mass Effect series ties together not only that benefit of being someone else for a change, it also gives us perspective on our actions we have, both in game and in reality. When playing Mass Effect, Shepard takes on assignments for people who he does not need to help, but he can choose to. These missions give not only experience points and credits, but the option to make decisions. These decisions signify your character and who you are. Shepard can kill a criminal or introduce him to the law enforcement and talk him out of his evil ways. There is free reign for what choices you can make and what experiences the player has. The viewpoints Shepard can experience are based on who you are or not as a person. You can see how criminals, government, and law enforcement work in a fictional situation. Shepard can have in-depth conversations with characters in the game that feel real and spooky. They give feedback people in the real world would give and they have beliefs and situations that you actually care about and can affect. The consequences of Mass Effect pour into Mass Effect 2 and that is where it really dawns on you that you have become this person and you have made decisions that count. If you spare the life of a crime boss and talk her into stopping the gang violence, she will become a social worker and help others get on new feet like she did.
The Sims is not as action packed as the Mass Effect series, but it still has the same qualities that allow gamers to steal themselves out of the normal and into a new life with new focuses and responsibilities. The Sims allows gamers to create a complex character from the start. You can change every aspect of your character’s life from their facial features to their career. You control what they do and when they do it. Gamers can escape the world where there is little to no control and invite themselves into a reality that they have all the power. They can have all the things they want come their way with the push of a button and without consequence. The thing that makes people come back to The Sims is that the molding players can do in the game can be addicting and fun. The Sims gives so much control and an environment that can be anything you dream, whether it is close to yours or not.
“Video games are real and reality, sometimes, is like a video game,” says Kurt Reymers, associate professor of humanities and social science at Morrisville State College. He uses video games as a way to interact with his students in an intuitive way in his Cyber Culture class. He understands the benefits people gain from playing video games and releasing themselves into them. “I think today, people see the virtual worlds as more as an idealized version of reality where you can be who you want and do what you want,” says Reymers. He believes that is what America wants: the freedom to do anything. He states the urge for freedom has slipped into all parts of society whether it is from a book, in a movie, or a video game. “People can meet out their ideal behavior; their ideal life,” said Reymers. He glorifies the idea that a lot of us want to “be the hero.” To him, the structure of video games is a part of what drives gamers to continue playing until they climb a social ladder, one step at a time, until they beat the game and come back to themselves and have a sense of success. Control is another big factor that makes gamers seek video games. “We seek to have control over that which we can and in many cases, the obstacles that are presented as a result of one’s social status, economic situation, troubles of life that people experience and don’t have control over can be soothed with that escape,” says Reymers. He compares video games to drugs. Both give the user an escape from their reality and brought into a “drug consciousness.” He says both also change the user’s perspective and awareness of reality. The users become unaware of the things around them. They are escaping into their own minds and stimulated by the flavors presented on the television screen or in the drugs. He notes that people can get so addicted to the virtual world that they don’t keep themselves healthy and in rare cases, have died from not keeping themselves away from the escape. He says that there is a form of ecstasy when playing in a virtual world that makes gamers so immersed in the world they are playing in. “You are embodying yourself into that avatar on the screen…you can, in some cases, fool yourself into being that avatar,” says Reymers. He brings up the idea that we play games in order to “play with identity.” We play to challenge our political and social views. He states some people can have some confusion when identifying themselves from their characters. He says we sometimes take on the role we play rather than going back to who we really are. Reymers recalls a story he read about a woman who got into a car crash and lost both of her legs. She took interest in a video game that allowed her to portray herself as who she was or who she is now. She chose to have no legs in the game and be herself. She ended up having an online romantic relationship with someone who accepted her for her. He told me he believes that video games can be therapeutic and another reason why people retreat into virtual worlds in order to get over their real world. Reymers states that video games are more appealing to some people rather than television or books and other forms of entertainment because of the social and story aspect, for single-player titles, that is integrated into video games. He believes that America tends to find and integrate new ways of adding to the social side of gaming and how we meet people in multiplayer video games. Reymers believes that everyone has a “core self” inside of every one of us that we cannot run away from or change. It is a part of every character we create to mimic ourselves. “I like the idea of a core identity referring more to the identity that we develop through that process and growing up, even though that’s not necessarily natural. In the past, there was the idea we have an n essential nature,” says Reymers. He goes on to referring to religion and how that “essential self” is the identity given to us by God, but disclaims that the belief has disintegrated over the years and now evolved to what we stated earlier about the “core self.” He says we can lose the core self. “You can lose that and one great way to lose that is not spend much time with yourself,” said Reymers. He says that going too in depth with the virtual world can lead to you losing yourself, even if the only reason you wanted to play was to escape; you become more of a prisoner to who you want to be and lose who you are as a person.
Reymers gave some good points about escapism and why we run towards video games when we want to get away from our daily tasks. Mass Effect and The Sims provide great examples of games that provide a sense of immersion that developers want and a way to escape and gain control for gamers. We all want a way to shed a new light on our lives. We are not special, but we want to be and a video game is the key we’re looking for to unlock who we really want to be.
