#dinension hopping

[springbudeyes]

Gamers as Fledgling Dimension Hoppers

It’s been suggested in the science fiction and science fantasy genres that when you hop into a virtual reality console or even just sit down to play a game, you’re doing a bit more than just escaping reality. You’re actually entering a new one.

It may be cute, primitive, and predictable - the whole story of that world might be played out in a matter of hours, then repeated - but sometimes, a spontaneous element rises into the mix. That’s where you get choose your own adventure games, RPG’s, and what I would call super-RPG’s like D&D, where the world of the game is so complex and adaptable that no computer created by man can process it; it requires a human game master to weave the threads of fate. That’s where you get into God simulations, man playing God and players playing creatures in the confines of God’s world.

When you dwell in another world, you get life experiences. You come back smarter, stronger, or discouraged, maybe wounded. It runs the whole spectrum. “It doesn’t matter; it isn’t real” is an argument made from ignorance. If you’ve ever cared about a game, you’ve probably felt a piece of your mind get pulled away from the world you’re “supposed” to care about, caught up in daydreams of that other place. You’ve found yourself straddling the border between your living flesh-world and anywhere from one to hundreds of other worlds, some of them even more visceral and compelling than your own.

Of course, the same goes for books, films, and other kinds of “portals,” but the thing with games is that they directly involve you in the shaping of the world; they draw attention to the idea that you’re more than just a spectator, but an active participant in how things play out, and I think that’s really important for people who don’t feel involved in the affairs of Earth. Now they can make an impact. The confidence this breeds in a person can be life-changing. Even so, the world of a game is useful for more than just cultivating virtues for the “real world.” It has a fate of its own that must be tended to. If you go about gaming didactically, just looking for life experiences to harvest for Earth, you’ll get those experiences, but you’ll get them less intensely and meaningfully than you would if you made yourself believe, for a little while, that the world of the game was the only world that mattered and that in order to be satisfied, you needed to see the events of that world unfold properly.

There’s the idea that every fictional world has a secret life of its own; that by tunneling deep enough into the annals of the collective unconscious, you could come out the other side into the living, breathing world of your deepest fantasy and have a life there.

But as Mianite S2 has touched on, you might be a little disenchanted after spending a while in such a world. On the scale Ianite used to categorize the power and complexity of life forms, you might be a 3 or a 4 while even the most developed beings in that world might be a 2 at best. After all, you’d have come from a world built of countless molecules and they’d be natives of a polygonal plane running on simple physics and rendered in rough artistic strokes. You might be unable to express to them how it felt to live in a higher dimension and you might miss the richness; the variety of that place. You might realize, in regret, that you were born and rooted there for a reason.