The Continued Search of Answers

As I read the chapters assigned to us in the book a specific theme became apparent to me (no that it hadn’t before…to any of us...so all of us hehe), this theme being the symbolic search for answers within the virtual reality of video games. Just to debrief everyone, I am not a gamer and I have not had the pleasure of playing any of the games mentioned in the text (Assassin’s Creed, Halo or Zelda). Going back to the theme of searching for answers I found myself being able to put the search into different mini categories, the first being the search for meaning about ourselves, who are we and what is the meaning of us being here in the world right now. The second mini category is the quest of answering questions that are out of our reach, for these questions we are unable to use research methods and determine whether our hypothesis is true or not because we have no way of gathering data, these questions can have “believed” answers all of which cannot be proven or disproven. The first category covers the individual as a gamer and as an active participant in our society. The second category includes questions about heaven and hell and what happens after our “game” is over.

The first category I mentioned is based around the individual. Who are we? More specifically, who is the gamer? As I read through these chapters I couldn’t help but wonder about the background of gamers, their childhood, relationships and lives now. (I am going all psych on this sawy). The book mentions that apocalyptic literature was developed to fill the void of oppressed people’s needs to retaliate against their enemies. This began sounding to me like an escape for them, a way to control the buildup of stress that would otherwise stay within and may come out in the least opportune moment, maybe even in front of a Roman soldier.  Wagner finds similarities between this and the gaming world. The question that this brings up to me is- how much stress is a game designer or writer feeling in order to come up with all these apocalyptic images? Who do they feel entrapped by? This may sound like an assumption that all gamers or writers have a void themselves that they try to fill by creating this apocalyptic world not only for others to play but for their own psychological gains. What correlations would we be able to find between gamers and designers of today, and the oppressed?

The second category I mentioned was the BIG questions category. I read the chapters and it seems like all of the gaming and virtual reality leads to an answer that we would never find in real life. There is always an ending to the game where we are in possession of the knowledge we would never be able to access in our real world. The Christian game “Heaven” explores one of the largest questions to a person whether one is Christian or not, what is heaven? What does it look like? Is this right? There is something about this that doesn't feel right to me. Is it okay to answer a question and influence belief of what could be real or overwhelmingly false? The depiction of otherworldly settings is one that these games all had in common. I couldn't help but think about all the accounts people tell in near death experiences, or when people actually die. How are we able to 1. Distinguish reality from their perception while they were dying and 2. How can we separate these accounts from what we believe in?

Finding meaning in the virtual world seems to be a need, these themes aren’t just popping up in games because they are unimportant but because they are things that in the real world, real people struggle with and are manifesting themselves in the virtual world as settings to existence.