Video games

I am currently playing Fallout 3.  It is set in a post-Apocalyptic Washington D.C./northern Virginia, with many of the ruins, I suspect, modeled with occasional fidelity on actually existing places they mapped out and included, like Arlington National Cemetery.

As an unknown intellectual–I will use that word here–I see no limits on where I can go.  I have no reputation at all, which is a clear blessing.

And I am finding that video games calm me.  It is a way of practicing persistence, and experiencing success in a very tightly controlled environment.  Some situations I have to go through 20-30-50 times to master, since I am not a quick learner.  I tend to want to do frontal assaults, and they usually fail.  I don’t use my brain, and this game requires the use of intelligence.

It is a way of harnessing aggressive and destructive energies in a controlled environment.  On the one hand we read that first person shooters are very similar to the way that the Army trains people to kill, which it has gotten very good at. David Grossman has written about this quite a bit.  I don’t doubt this.  All tools have their place, and this sort of “tool” is available to everyone at all times, and some people are made sick by this one, particularly those who use immersion in a fake world as real world acculturation.

At the same time, it is connecting me, personally, with energies that were already there.  Combined with a meditative practice it constitutes a sort of Tantric immersion in death.  I see the effects in my dreams, and I watch them, and learn from them.  On balance, I have learned needed lessons.  In my own case, it is making me more compassionate.

Traumatized individuals, particularly, have some part of themselves that is trapped in a subversive sweat, a sense of helplessness, within which is enfolded both life and expressive rage.  You cannot get the one without the other.

I am a very different sort of person.  I am unique in my experience.  I have not knowingly met anyone like me, although I look like a redneck construction worker, and have often been mistaken as such.  If I am invisible, then others like me must be too.

Be that as it may, my experience may differ from most.  But I suspect that the sheer volume of the video game business–about $100 billion or so–speaks to a variety of cultural needs that games meet.

Could we perhaps posit that anything anyone can get addicted to meets on some level, and in an appropriate proportion, an actual need?  Do not most people need at times a River Lethe, sex, work, risk, an immersive experience?