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The paradox of escaping from reality only to meet it again

Francisco Miraval

For many people, videogames are just a pastime. For others, videogames are a passion and even an addiction, according to different definitions of this confusing and dynamic relationship between player and game. Regardless, because the newest games are more realistic than ever, the paradox is that those who play videogames to escape reality will find it again in the game.

I must confess I still remember (with some nostalgia) those old games when the ball was a square, the players were just lines, and the spaceships were triangles. The only thing you had to do was to move the joystick up, down, or to the sides, and sometimes you have to press the red button to “fire.”

The new videogames, however, are so realistic, that even with my several decades of driving real cars in real life I can’t drive a virtual car without immediately crashing. The realism is so good that many times I can’t tell if my son is watching a soccer match on TV or playing soccer with his videogame “box.”
Obviously, this is a topic that has been analyzed by many researches, including Nick Yee, a social scientist focusing on the social interaction in virtual environments. Yee’s new book (about to be released), The Proteus Paradox, is subtitled “How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us—And How They Don't.”

In this book, recently reviewed by the Columbia Journalism Review, Yee wants to correct some “myths” or assumptions about videogames, including the “moral panic” many people (including me) associate with playing games or the belief that only young people –mostly teenagers with antisocial behaviors– play those games.

In fact, according to Yee, only 20 percent of those actively playing “virtual world” games online are teenagers. Half of those players are adults with full time jobs. And 36 percent of the online players are married.

Yee says that the stereotypes about the videogame players are not only false, but they “prevent the understanding” of the positive effects videogames have on those players. For example, 70 percent of players only play games with friends they know in real life.

There are, obviously, also problems. For example, for many players, videogames become “a second job,” that is, it is something those players do for several hours every day. In doing so, the players create the same routine, competition, and frictions people face in real life and players wanted to avoid.

The paradox, according to Yee, is that the constant upgrades in technology help to create a virtual reality that in turn recreates the real reality video-gamers wanted to avoid. In those games, the feeling “totally in control” is just an illusion.

This topic is so complicated that can’t be properly analyzed within the limits of a 500-word column. The key idea, however, is clear: the disappointment with reality leads us seek refuge inside a virtual reality that is looks very much as the reality we don’t like. Perhaps it is time to escape to a new virtual virtual reality.

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