A good friend of mine once said something like (and this is paraphrased, as I heard it by evesdropping and wasn't paying full attention and it was a long time ago) "there's a moment in each of our lives when we realize we can reach out and change the movie". Actually I might have read that somewhere - I don't know - but I attribute it to this friend of mine whom I haven't seen in almost two years. He himself quite a mover and shaker, or at least he was last time I checked, so I'm inclined to trust in the wisdom of that saying.
But back to video games, and real life. In real life, I notice so many are struck with the affliction of seeing themselves as part of the background, as one of the herd. They wonder what's going to happen next, and whether they will be close enough to the action to be able to see it. I do this quite a bit too, often to the point where I'll be sitting somewhere listening to others around the same table hold conversation, and completely forget that I'm sitting there, that in these people's subjective experience is this other guy sitting there not saying anything. It's very similar to the sensation of watching television, because I forget that I can "reach out and change the movie".
Have you ever been to a play and sat in the front row and forcibly tried to remind yourself that these are flesh-and-blood people, strolling around on a wooden floor not ten feet in front of you? That you could toss a paper airplane and it would glide through the scene and come to rest on Anne Frank's nightstand? I do that every time I go to the theatre (pronounced with as haughty an accent as you can imagine). Theatre has been going on for decades, if not centuries :) but even before television I'm sure most people did not go the theater that often. Perhaps this illusion of separation between the audience and the stage was more difficult to achieve before television. But then the boob tube dropped on our civilization like a neutron bomb, and all of a sudden people got to experience a completely detached and powerless witnessing on a daily basis. Before that instead of saying like I did that the theatre illusion is "like watching television", people must have remarked that it was "like being a ghost" - that is if they experienced it at all.
If television was like a neutron bomb, surgically slicing human forces from the battlefield and leaving the environment intact, video games exploded like weaponized LSD, rendering their targets immobile for hours at a time, lost in strange and varied colorful worlds full of fantastic creatures and an always-heightened sense of urgent compulsion to do things outside observers just don't understand. And this is where being a hero comes in. In real life you are rarely if ever a hero; in television you never even consider it; in video games it never crosses your mind that you could be anything else. Can you imagine trolling back and forth as a goomba for the entire game until Mario enters stage left, jumps on your head without hesitation and hops down a nearby pipe? "What the fuck just happened!?"
No, when you're playing a video game, you are of course Mario - the one with the power to give life and to take it away, who gets bigger when he eats the Amanitas and for whom the fire-shooting overalls are perfectly tailored. It's up to you to pull that flag down or no one will. Cortana's in your head and no one else is going to stop the Covenant from destroying the human race. Of course you have shields, of course you can fire a plasma rifle. Zelda's not going to save herself, and if you don't have a means of getting across that gorge to bring her back you'll find something along the way. Darth Vader is your wingman, not the other way around. The only one you have to blame if crime is rampant in the city is yourself - you decided to take the cash flow from that casino, not anyone else.
What if we looked at life this way, as a very few of us do? No one else is going to swing the presidential campaign, it's up to you. Everyone else assumes that someone else will bring peace to the middle east, and you're the only one who doesn't, so it won't get done unless you do it.
There is an interesting technique ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_box ) used to help a person overcome paralysis which involves using a mirror to make the good arm (or leg, or nut) look like it is moving in the space where the brain thinks the bad arm should be. As much as one's conceptual mind knows it's a "trick", on some level the brain believes the bad arm is moving and this alone has been shown to increase the pace of or even make possible recuperation of motility in the paralyzed limb.
I believe this is an example of a phenomenon that is very widespread in human life. Somehow a motivational barrier is drawn between two different mental spaces - perhaps between being a sheep and being a shepherd. If you always inhabit a certain mental space, you will get so locked into a particular "solution" that works that your mind is unable to venture out into the unknown to locate other working solutions.
For instance, let's say you have a certain diet consisting of meat, potatoes, and cooked veggies and rolls or something. You've eaten this way all your life, so you're pretty good at cooking these sorts of things. Maybe you learned this from your parents. You also have a little dietary theory that says that you're getting your protein and fat from the meat, your carbohydrates from the bread, your starch from he potatoes, and other stuff you don't understand from the cooked veggies. This conglomeration of things - the ingredients in your larder, the cooking implements in your kitchen, your knowledge of recipes - works together as a whole to keep you fed.
Now what if you wanted to switch to a completely organic, macrobiotic, vegan diet? You'd have to change many things in order to get there - probably have to get a steamer because you're no longer cooking the veggies in with the stew, would have to learn new recipes, and would have to re-learn how to shop in order to have enough proper ingredients for all these new recipes. If you change any one of these things without changing the whole batch your level of difficulty rises rapidly and you feel this pull back to the system you are familiar with. Maybe once you get all the things in place and change your habits you find you really like this new organic, macrobiotic, vegan diet, but at first it's only pain because you're pushing yourself into confusion.
With something like your diet, you can of course get yourself there because what you have to do is clear, the outcome state is clear, and you can just choose to put up with the difficulty because in the end it'll pay off. However, with something like "reaching out and changing the movie", with being the catalyst for change, it's much harder to visualize what this would be like, or what benefits might come from it. A lot of the changes that need to be made are subconscious, and you can't just force yourself to make the changes and put up with the discomfort. Likewise with a paralyzed limb. The process of communicating with that limb is unconscious - you can't consciously make specific nerves fire any more easily than you can consciously force your ears to wiggle if you've never done that before. So in comes the mirror box, and gives you a head start with the illusion that your arm is moving. And voila!, somehow this helps your brain overcome its internal barriers to connection. It's like having someone cater an organic, macrobiotic, vegan meal to your home and eating it where you would normally eat your meat and potatoes.
Likewise with video games. Unlike television, which constantly shows you what it's like to be completely powerless and comfortable at the same time, video games place a mirror between you on the one hand who is an average joe, and you on the other hand who is the universe's only hope, who is THE source of oomph in a particular universe. Yes, the internet is great and all and it's revolutionizing the world by providing connectivity. But that I think is revolutionizing the world even more is a generation of gamers growing up and replacing the controllers with their bodies and minds. Generations before us grew up watching TV, and I won't even pretend that ours did not. But at the same time we had a constant parallel dose of couch hero to balance the dose of couch potato. In the end, it probably just balances out and returns us to our natural state as beautiful, powerful, unique creatures who are taking the world back from those who were nurtured in the trance of helplessness.
Amen.
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