Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline by Simon Parkin Page B

economists increasingly study EVE Online . ‘Within EVE we can see a political community that models hierarchy, authority, rule of law, power, violence, and distribution of labour,’ says Felix Ciuta, senior lecturer in international politics at University College London. Players project onto this blank space their political and ideological principles. The way in which people act in the game might not reflect the way in which they act in the real world. But their virtual behaviour almost certainly is an expression of their ideas about how the world really works. Its populace is, when set against the Western world’s increasingly disaffected electorate, energised and politically engaged. Why? Perhaps its players find here a virtual world that they are able to affect in meaningful ways, where their voice and actions are heard and seen. The game makes visible and comprehensible a political system that, in life, is often opaque, confusing, and, to some, distant. Even in the farthest reaches of virtual outer space, the game reflects our world and, for some, makes it more approachable.
    Birth, life, creation, hubris, death, and politics: at least some of the appeal of these video-game realities is that they offer a means to understand the world around us, in manageable chunks.
    They are usually built up on familiar and recognisable rules and systems. The recognition evolves into comfort when it’s possible for us to triumph within those systems: they imply that our world, too, is fair, when in fact it is, very often, capricious and unfair. Witness how game designers try to turn the slippery and mysterious act of falling in love into a manageable, reliable system (often to ridiculous effect). In The Sims you can make someone fall in love with you by tickling them repeatedly; in Harvest Moon you make someone fall in love with you by presenting them with an egg laid by one of your chickens each day; in Fire Emblem , relationships are formed through mere proximity to others on a battlefield.
    Moreover, video games flatter us: their worlds exist for our benefit, and, usually, revolve around us. A video game requires a player: without input, it is inert. Our world, by contrast, seems indifferent to us. The cogs around us, both natural and human-made, turn regardless of our interest or input. It is sometimes difficult to know whether we matter, whether anyone cares. When a company loses our details or forgets about us for some reason, we talk of being ‘lost in the system.’ This is how loneliness is seeded in the human heart: a sense that the world and all of its people are indifferent, oblivious.
    Video games are different. They deal in the language of cause and effect; they offer constant feedback to our interactions. Their sound effects offer an aural indication that our presence and interest have been registered. Their high-score tables offer encouragement as well as the hope of improvement and yet further approval.
    Likewise, a video game’s creator is not a distant, seemingly uninvolved god. He, she, or they not only lay down the rules of the creation’s existence; they are also on hand to listen to our comments and cries, the feedback that many then use to iterate and improve upon virtual existence. Often, in video games, there is a back-and-forth between a creator and the people who live within his or hercreation. In these realities, we have an opportunity to influence the systems that govern us.
    Marilynn Strasser Olson, in her 1991 biography of the American illustrator and writer Ellen Raskin, wrote, ‘Games as arbiters of rules and objectives are a metaphor for a vision of life that can be ordered, understood, and won.’ We play video games in order to be comforted by a particular vision of life, an ordering at times dramatic and at times systemic. In this way they share an essential characteristic with literature: the fiction brings order and sense to the randomness of life. Video games comfort us as their worlds