Video Game Theory

by Dyske Suematsu  •  September 3, 2002

Video games represent how we should live our lives. This is why playing them can be addictive. What they offer is removal of our selves. We become selfless. We can be brave, generous, loving, giving, caring, or be their binary opposites. Given that the sense of self is an illusion, a sheer concoction of our minds, how we live in the video games should be how we should live in our real lives, but for most of us, this is impossible. What makes it impossible is the idea of death. In video games, we are immortal. We simply hit the restart button and we are back on, so we can afford to be whatever we want to be. Death prevents us from being what we want to be.

Since no one can experience true death, none of us knows what death is. More precisely, no one can know what death is. If the possibility of knowing is null, then the concept of death is nonsensical, that is, it will never have a sense. Life, therefore, has no binary opposite in our language.

The world of video games eliminates this ontological problem. Death exists. We experience it when it says “Game Over”. We know what death is in the world of video games. From the perspective of the video games, our language becomes their meta-language capable of describing what death is. Our knowledge of death allows us to live fully and confidently in video games.

The goal of my life is to live like I’m playing a video game, where everything and anything is a game, where there is no self, and therefore no limits. The difficulty is that we rely on knowledge to give us the power to live. In our world, death is un-knowable. Video games, in this sense, only provide the form of selfless life, not the content, or the state of mind. This is what prevents me from playing the game.