Back in July of this year, Daniel Lipscombe wrote “Why I Play Games: My Escapism”, an excellent piece for Resolution Magazine on gaming as a means of positive escapism. He considered gaming as an extension of fantasy, with role-playing games allowing players to take on Cinderella-like roles in a fairy-tale, such as the prevalence of nobody-to-somebody plots in the Final Fantasy series. He also considered gaming as a social platform, something that’s flourished as online gaming has proliferated and become increasingly mainstream. I certainly agree with him that, some who feel like social outcasts have found gaming communities to belong to. Without stereotyping, I’ve met people like this in World of Warcraft and Everquest II, their personalities shining in the absence of self-doubt based in reality. Then again – and here I am stereotyping – for some of these people this social dependence on gaming is akin to the psychological clutter found in mocking Internet series The Guild, in which players’ social and virtual worlds clash amusingly, but also disastrously.
Daniel’s sagest observation, however, was that in one form or another most games involve a problem that has to be solved, or more pertinently that can be solved. Daniel admirably wrote about his daughter’s passing away, which happened two and a half years ago. It’s something which I’ll readily admit and accept as too unfair and tragic for me to really have a handle on.
