Gaming as an Escapism
Fourteen-year-old me in a semester break was looking at the wall in my bedroom, listening to early 2010's music in the radio and thought, if and only if I could play any new triple-A game right now, I would be taken out of my misery in this boredom. How this boring life of mine that I am going through could have been better. The hottest game that was out that time was Watch Dogs, I know it wasn’t the best game of all-time, but still, as an early adolescent boy, imagining myself playing game as a hacker who can literally stop red lights and make a whole city blackout was the O.G of imagining “if I have 5 million right now”. Game has played a huge part of my life, I born in the year of 2000 and grew up in an era in which games was transforming to the kind of games we play right now. I grow up encountering game with the likes of Half-life 2 which was the first game that introduced the technology of responsive environment. Then Crysis and Far Cry also came out in my childhood which was the first game that have a massive open-world and detailed environment with a far depth of field. Adding the fact that my uncle was a hardcore gamer, every new game that was coming out he instantly bought it. I got Nintendo WII in my 6th birthday which means, I got WII in the first year it was released. It came with a lot of other gaming console as well, I was the first to get any video games or gaming console that just came out. That is to say, games had a huge impact on my life and I could say that, I am not who I am right now if I had not played video games.
People, especially parents thought gaming is useless. They thought that gaming is simply something that is a mere entertainment and addictive like drugs. They want to believe that gaming will harm us. I find parents efforts are annoying when sending outlier cases of accident caused by video games to traumatize us for no reason. For instance, they sent a news of “A teenager died because of playing game 12 hours non-stop” when I have played Witcher 3 for 18 straight hours and the only thing that died was my laptop. Even worse, they attempt to send fake news from the government that says games like Counter-strike, Grand Theft Auto V, and literally other popular games is harmful because it could cause a stroke (if I’m not mistaken). I understand parents concern, I understand that they are afraid of kids having their grades going down hills and even dropped out from school because of playing game. However though, I am not making this article to prove them that those things won’t happen. Those things will happen but it’s an outlier, I am making this article to tell readers of how much games have been a part of my life and made me happy many times. For those gamer reader, you might be nostalagic into the feels of 2000's and 2010's gaming era, and those of who are not, I will be telling you of what you missed out in life.
My early days of gaming was playing Game Boy Advanced and Playstation 1. I was very young, it was not much but it was fun. Playing as Jackie Chan and kungfu kick enemies was badass af. Then my uncle told me that there is a new console that he just bought and I am allowed to play it. It was PlayStation 2. I played the second spider-man game which amazed me so much, how I can control someone that can swing from one building to another. If hypothetically speaking, you could time travel back in the past, and let an early Spider-man fan in the 70's to play this game, seeing that he could control Spider-man when he’s kicking bad guys and explore New York City, I guarantee you that person would have cry of joy. The enlightening moment for me was when I bought X-BOX 360. I played some of the best game franchise like Far-Cry, Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare & Black Ops. The more you play those games, the more you feel like you’re sucked into it, you feel like you are the character in the game. This is due to the precision of the control. What makes someone feels like they’re in the world of digital is not the surround audio of Dolby Atmos, not over the top realistic CGI, not even the advanced technology of Virtual Reality (VR) in and of itself. It is actually when you have the abilities to control the character. Video games developer understands this, they make games as controllable as possible, playing Far Cry and Call of Duty makes you feel like a master of weapon, when perhaps if you are not living in the U.S, you’ve never even hold a gun before. We feel like we are being brought into the hellish of war in Call of Duty, shooting the bad guys, and I vividly remember being with Captain Price, and him asking me to help him in killing a certain enemy in the left when he will kill the guy in the right or when we are in a mission with Captain Mactavish as a sniper and we sneak around to kill the villain of the game Imran Zakhaev. When we play Far Cry 3, we are free to do whatever we want, we have weapons in our hand and we would find ourselves being attacked by the enemy militias, we could engage in certain ways to defeat the enemy. The fact that we could control the character that we played is exactly the reason why it is so relatable. We feel like we are the character, we feel like we are in a hellish war in Call of Duty, we feel like we are in a forest full of threat in Far Cry, and we have the ability to do something about it. Even as detailed as moving one meter to the left or right, for those reasons games are relatable and sucked us into their world.
The more advance the technology is, the more there is, an attempt to make games as realistic as possible. A good study case would be the newest VR game Half-life: Alyx. To be honest, I haven’t played the game, but I have seen the walk through on Youtube, and I think it was close to perfect. One of the limitations VR game had was the graphic, and Half-life: Alyx actually break the barrier by making the game with a realistic graphic. The interaction with the object around the character was also pretty responsive just like its predecessor Half-life 2. However though, the problem came with the movement, they are still unable to make the character to move with an analog and they made the movement by transporting from one place to another, for me this is fatal. It made the game feels limited by the technology of its time, therefore the attempt is there but it still failed to make us relate into the game because of lack of humanization of the game. As long as the VR can’t make a good movement mechanics, I don’t think VR will replace old classic gaming console, but if they can, I think the potential for VR is there. With that being said, I prefer a game in which we can control the human, even though the graphic is still not as good, and the feature still limited, as long as we are free to move the character’s body, we would feel like we are in the game.
“The fact that we can control the character that we played is exactly the reason why it is so relatable”
Life is harsh, sometimes you can’t get what you want, you can’t always live as a badass mercenary, you can’t always live as a sport superstar, if only there is a way to live as one. I feel like going to school and study was way too monotone for me, there is no action, no fighting bad guys and so on. But knowing that everyday I could go home and play my X-BOX 360 or PC for gaming, and living a different live everyday, it is the best thing I could ever feel. I feel like I have something looking forward to in life, when I am playing Assassin’s Creed, the world building is the best, ever wondered how would it feel to live in a renaissance Italy would be or perhaps living in a french revolution is more to your liking? worry not, in Assassin’s Creed not only you could live in those era, you could also parkour from one building to another. Even the Japanese anime industry understands how some people just really want to be a game character and they made a whole genre sort of dedicated to living as a game character called “Isekai” which means literally : “different world”, some cases the Isekai genre just go to a simple fantasy land but most of them based a video games and the genre is famous in Japan. Games have been a symbol of hope for many people that wanted to stop living in a monotone world, it has been the perfect form of escapism for kids all over the world that suffers from living a boring life. As for myself personally, gaming had help me gone through tough time. Always having a bad grades when my parents expect me to be in the ranking, rarely go out with my friends because I moved from one city to another, and all of other hard times I felt; as long as I have my gaming console and my mid-end PC, I think I am still able to strive in life.
As I am writing this article, the world is being affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, and we are being forced to stay at home. A lot of people stressed out because of this, not being able to hangout with friends, having nothing to do in home and so on. But as for me, even though according to my MBTI test says that I am an extrovert, I have no problem with staying at home, because yesterday I found out that Red Dead Redemption 2 was on sale, I bought it off Steam. As I am downloading the game, I find myself in a very good mood, hearing of how good the game Red Dead Redemption 2 is, and this feeling of hype when I am downloading the game, I felt like it’s a Déjà vu. It reminds me of my childhood, going to the nearest video game store, and choosing the perfect game for my X-BOX 360, getting in the car on my way back home, feels like I can wait of what to come when I get home. That is living another life in the digital world of video games. I thought I was way too old to enjoy good ole’ video games, but how wrong I was. To wrap up this article, I believe that no matter how busy you are or how depressed you are in this life, I think gaming will always have a place in our life, once a gamer will always be a gamer.
