Playing God

I've realized that computer games which engross human beings most do so by creating three things:

1. Creating worlds.
2. Creating purpose.
3. Creating community.

No other media has ever been able to do this so well. With current technology it is not only possible for computer games to imitate the reality of the spatial world, but its size of our planet as well. In addition, the placement of a character within an online community makes it possible for a human being to live out a life within a character which does not, for whatever reason, exist in reality. An online community reinforces the particular purposes of the game, connects minds and grants the ability to create relationships even in the real world.

Purpose in a game can be as simple as the annihilation of all competition to diplomacy to a combination of many different goals or threads.

What world creators will never be able to do however, is copy the infinite, the eternal which is everywhere present in the universe, in each of the said three forms.

1. Spatial infinitude
2. Purpose (meaning)
3. Psycho spiritual infinitude



The universe, I think, could be easily argued to be infinite in its scope. The space of being and non-being cannot even be understood as a complete concept, wherever we go, smaller or larger, further, closer, we are infinitely confronted by the infinite. Before we saw the vast expanses of space, we already had the strange concept of infinity in mathematics. It has not left science as a strange problem. I do not think it will.

Games do something that books and movies do not: they create purposes and meaning specifically for the individual playing the game. But games created by human beings for human beings can never reach beyond the level of the human; additionally, purpose in a game is rooted in the game itself, and consequently goes no further than the game itself and the skill it requires.

Game characters will never expend the character pool of real individuals in the world, nor will character relationships be able to replicate fully the relations of those human beings who exist and interact in the real world. In other words, you are unique, and no matter how many characters are invented, they will never expend the uniqueness of human individuals as it astoundingly crops up from one generation to the next.

My point is not a denunciation of the versatility of games nor a perpetuation of their undervalued status as an absolutely unrivalled artistically holistic art form. Human beings integrate and can modify the gaming experience for their entertainment in such a radical way that it can be nearly unrecognizable from the original party which created the game. Games are extremely 'moddable' - which is what makes them powerful; but it is also what makes them dangerous. Electronic gaming is the most powerful psychotropic drug known to humankind and the greatest distraction from reality ever devised; its capacity to mimic eternity grows with each passing day.

Imitation, it has been said, is the sincerest form of flattery. Art imitates infinitude (that's what we really meant by "art imitates life"). Celebrate art. Celebrate good games like you would good film, good music, good paintings.

But imitation can not only be flattery: it can be supreme deceit. Games aren't real, but they can still take away a life; and a fulfilled eternity.