From Virtual Leisure To A Virtual Life

With gamers around the world forging whole new virtual identities through video games and real life simulators, we’ve reached the point where the line denoting where the living person ends and the virtual player starts is blurrier than ever before. Once upon a time, a game was just a game, relatively detached from our actual personalities, but over the years, gaming has sucked us into its weird and wonderful world to such an extent that some of us feel more truly ourselves in the game than in real life! So how did this happen?

Playing games…

To begin with, playing games simply involved gamers in mechanical tasks such as deflecting a ball across a screen (see: Pong) or firing a dot into some bigger dots. Not much space for identity formation there.

Playing the protagonist…

Since the days of Super Mario Bros on the SNES and Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Megadrive, gamers have been playing the part of the hero figure in video games. As a result of the rudimentary performance capabilities of the 16-bit and 32-bit consoles, the narratives that accompanied games like these classics were appropriately two dimensional, and it wasn’t until the late 1990s and early 2000s with the emergence of consoles such as the Sega Dreamcast that story lines started to become more involving.

Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast is an excellent example of this. With narrative-building cut scenes and a virtual world complete with talkative strangers to freely explore, the idea of an alternative life in a video game was beginning to develop.

Playing God…

When The Sims was released in 1999, it changed our perception of what a gaming experience could be. We’d already been playing God for years through titles like Theme Park and Theme Hospital, but here for the first time in mainstream gaming, we had the chance to simply build an alternative life (no quests attached!), complete with love, work, boredom, excitement and death. The Sims allows players to model their Sims however they want, whether that’s in their own image or that of someone completely different. All of a sudden, gamers were cultivating a second life – notably easier to control than reality – alongside their own.

Playing yourself…

So now we play as ourselves. Gamers in some cultures have even taken to buying virtual girlfriend consoles, whilst sources such as this website offer players a portal to an online casino world that apes the japes and jackpots of Vegas. For better or for worse, gamers are now getting married, formulating their personalities and living and loving through gaming, and we don’t see any way back to the days when games were just some dots on a screen.