Playing God

by CawdorMarx

To a gamer it is a natural thing, you hit the button and you are in. To the casual observer all you are doing is turning on a game; let it be a Playstation or a Dreamcast, and sitting down in front of it. To most people this might seem boring and pointless, "Why do you play those things?" we often hear. To this most of us just shrug and say that it is fun, or that we are bored and the games help keep us entertained. The non-gamer walks away and we shudder at having to explain ourselves to them. We even hate the fact that we called it a game, because to us it is a little more.

When you first pop the disk in and start a new adventure you learn about your initial character or characters lives before you nosed your way into it. You also learn of some threat that may loom over the horizon even if your characters don't know it. Then their fate is thrown into your hands, but it is more than that, it is the fate of an entire world, universe or of all time. The future and sometimes the past is now hanging in the balance and it is up to you. To most people it would sound like we all want to be hero's, but if you look closer it is something else. We want to play god.

We control the game; even if the story is linear we still control it. Doctors are said to develop a god complex when they believe that it is their will and nothing else can keep a person alive. While feeling this way, the doctor may soon forget about certain aspects of their own life that need attention. Their personal lives slip away and all they have is their work. This is also the sort of thing that can happen to gamers. The more we live and control these little realities on disks the more we neglect our lives in reality. We feel as if we don't have much control over things, but in the games we do. So people dive further and further into the games and in some cases can become with drawn all together. This is a reason some people start playing in the first place, for that sense of control. With everything spinning out of control they still have that one place where they control everything. So they play god there and neglect the real world.

In a way a game is like a drug, it takes us to a place that is much more agreeable. It allows us to drift away and not have to deal with reality. It is as addicting as a drug because once you are sucked into that world you have to go back and do it again. It is like a book with the addictive qualities of crack. It takes us away on the backing of a good story and it allows us to control everything.

I am not saying that every person that plays RPG's is a shut in who does not know how to live in the real world. But the reasons that we plat these games are more than a simple time killer. It gives us a chance to control the situation for a moment. To give us a sense of control that some of us need every once in awhile. It lets us be a god, just at the flick of a switch.