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There is nothing more universally shared across cultures as death.
As organic creatures, we will all eventually die.
Think of it as the great equalizer.
At the end of our lives, we move onto a new, exciting career as worm food.
It could happen in the next few days, or it could happen years from now, but it will happen.
And that’s a pretty grim thought, one that every living person will eventually struggle
with.
Let me live up to my namesake for once and talk a bit about psychology.
Terror management theory addresses the fact that, as an intelligent species, humans know
they will die.
The theory goes that this threat of death is so strong that it unconsciously motivates
our actions.
When confronted with death, we try to remind ourselves that our lives have meaning.
We’ll do things like focus on our hobbies, or start working on our careers.
This is the concept of self-esteem, or self-worth.
But according to TMT, this is an illusion, “a living myth of the significance of human
life.”
We build up our self-esteem by having a strong cultural worldview, and evaluate our self-image
and actions based on whether or not they live up to that worldview.
The mortality salience hypothesis states that when you threaten these world-views,
you make our lives seem worthless,
and defenses come up to return us to invincibility.
Living what we think is a meaningful life helps us cope with the anxiety, or terror,
of death.
And this anxiety isn’t limited to just death, it’s related to any threat of loss.
In other words, we hide from our deepest anxieties by convincing ourselves that we are doing
something that matters.
So where do video games fit into all this?
Dying is the last thing you’ll ever do, except in a video game.
Barring a few flash games that lock you out of the game after your first death, death
is never really final in a game.
Instead, it’s a lose condition.
The game is basically telling you,
“You have flown in the face of our mechanics and done so poorly that you are now dead.”
And they punish your poor performance by setting you back in some way.
Death in hardcore modes or games like DayZ isn’t really permanent, just an extreme
form of that punishment.
You may lose some lives along the way, but you try again and keep going until you win.
Otherwise, games are all about progress, and I think that’s what makes them so attractive
as a hobby.
In their simplest form, you’re progressing through levels, leveling up, and eventually
you beat the game.
Your actions are attached to all sorts of metrics and progress bars, and it’s satisfying
to see a clear, positive evaluation of your actions.
Games help you live a fantasy where you’re completely unlimited, not by death or anything
else.
You do things that matter.
You’re an invincible being that can beat any obstacle set before you because the game
wants you to.
There are objectives to complete and missions to accomplish, quests added to an ever-growing
list of your achievements.
At the end of a play session you can point out exactly how you’ve improved.
But when you explain the mechanics of a game like World of Warcraft to a non-gamer,
most of the time you’re going to get the same question:
“What’s the point?”
And most of the time you’re going to give the same answer:
“It’s fun.”
Still, to an outsider, these games are wastes of time because your accomplishments don’t
translate to the real world.
And there may be some truth to the idea that some games are just a series of pointless
objectives.
I think this directly relates to Terror Management Theory.
These games play into a natural human desire to feel powerful.
They’re distractions that have been carefully crafted to trick you into feeling productive
and in-control by giving you easily completed challenges.
To be fair, the value of “fun” is subjective and hard to nail down, and anyone who has
played a game understands the joy and sense of satisfaction these games can deliver.
I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t enjoy most of the games you’re seeing in this
video.
My gamerscore is sitting at just over thirty-six thousand,
and I’ll admit to being a little proud of that.
But I can recognize that it’s just a meaningless number,
and that there’s more to gaming than just metrics.
I think games actually have something more to offer than mild satisfaction,
something that an outsider can understand as more than an empty experience.
When you consider our mortality, you start to realize that in the grand scheme of things,
we’re not here for very long.
We have a limited amount of time to experience everything this world has to offer,
and only one perspective from which to witness the tiniest fraction of human history.
It’s a cruel fact that, try as you might, you are limited to a small range of options
from which to pick your experiences.
But you know what we do have?
We have fiction.
Works of fiction help you beat this reality.
They let you see things from a new perspective, opening up experiences that were otherwise
impossible for you to recreate.
And to me, game’s are perfect for that, because more so than any other medium you
can truly become a new person.
The limitation of your own life has been replaced with the limitation of the author’s creativity
and imagination.
You can live in a society where the next stage of human evolution can be bought in stores.
You can know what it feels like to be the last of your kind in a world that has outgrown
you.
You can change how you see your own life by learning from the multitude of experiences
you have at your fingertips.
And obviously going out into the world and living for yourself is infinitely better than
playing a video game.
I think the Walking Dead did a great job showing you what it means to be a father, but I’m
almost positive actually being a father is the richer experience of the two.
But that doesn’t mean games aren’t valuable.
Storytelling, and specifically storytelling in games, let’s you experience scenarios
that you might never encounter,
all of their messages, morals, and information condensed into a medium that lends itself
to immersion.
I think that’s something that has value.