The following excerpt, parts of a chapter from “Video Games as Culture: Considering the Role and Importance of Video Games in Contemporary Society” by Daniel Muriel and Garry Crawford, may be useful to game developers in order to understand some of the key elements that make video games windows that enable the player to access other experiences and realities. It is based on chapter five, “Video Games beyond Escapism: Empathy and Identification”, where video games can be seen as mediation devices that allow players to experience situations that they have not had or would not have otherwise.

This excerpt is part of a book that considers contemporary video game culture, which provides an important lens for understanding crucial aspects of contemporary society. Drawing on new and original empirical data, including interviews with gamers, as well as key representatives of the video game industry, media, education and arts, the book will appeal to upper undergraduate and postgraduate students, video game scholars, media and cultural studies researchers, and those involved in the video game industry and media. “Video Games as Culture” was published in March, and is available for order on Amazon or directly from publisher Routledge (20% discount using the code FLR40 at checkout ).

Introduction

We frequently associate the act of video gaming with escapism. That we play video games in order to escape the ordinariness of our everyday lives is a widely accepted idea. It is often suggested that video games provide opportunities to build an alternative or parallel reality in which players are able to live an immersive experience far from the ones they are having in their regular lives. In this sense, video games are helping create a new range of social and personal experiences, but by doing so, they are not only fostering escapism, but they are also enabling connections with other aspects of social reality.

Numinous Games' 2016 release That Dragon, Cancer

Escapism is indeed an important part of why people play video games, but it is not the only cause or consequence of video gaming. We would suggest that, far from escaping from reality, video games can also connect us with (other aspects of) reality in surprising and unexpected ways. For instance, video games can help us put ourselves in the shoes of others and provide new experiences. Video games work then as mediation devices between players and reality, which could potentially, encourage players to empathize with different, even extreme, situations – such as, civilians in a context of war in This War of Mine (11 bit studios, 2014), parents of a boy with cancer in That Dragon, Cancer (Numinous Games, 2016), migrants trying to pass through a border post in Papers, Please (Pope, 2013), or groups living through a scenario of social catastrophe in The Walking Dead (Telltale Games, 2012).

[…]

Escapism and video games

According to Yi-Fu Tuan (1998), escapism is inherent in human culture. It is a notion that, ironically, human beings cannot escape from, and can be found in times, places, and practices as distant as the prehistoric era, Disneyland, shopping malls, religion, the contemporary city, imagination, and cooking. Escapism implies ‘going from somewhere we don’t want to be to be somewhere we do’ (Evans, 2001: 55), and this place we seem to desperately want to escape from always points to the notion of reality. This outlines then a canonical definition of escapism as the process through which we (temporally) escape from some aspects of our current reality, such as boredom, work, routine, or stress, for example. However, having defined escapism as about getting away from ‘reality’ (even though we acknowledge that ‘reality’ is a concept that is particularly difficult to define and filled with multiple nuances), we are still left with an unanswered question: where are individuals escaping to?

Lucas Pope's Papers, Please, released in 2013

This idea then, seems to suggest that people seek relief and shelter in places in which their current socio-material conditions of existence – what we know as reality – are suspended or altered in a way that, typically, makes them, for example, more pleasant, safer, under control, or more exciting and thrilling. In this sense, virtual versions of reality – imagined (Tuan, 1998), simulated (Evans, 2001), or staged (MacCannell, 1973; Pine and Gilmore, 2011) – appear to be preferred destinations. In particular, taking into account the argument that we live in a digital age, as we saw in Chapter 2, video games could be seen as one of the most typical contemporary forms of escapism. Moreover, according to Gordon Calleja (2010: 336), it is possible to assert without exaggeration that ‘digital games are considered the epitome of contemporary escapism’.

This is the case for many of our interviewees, who stated that one of the main reasons they play video games is to escape from their daily life problems and routines:

For many of our research participants, video games are, at least partly, about escapism, and they expressed their wish to be transported to a different world where they would be able to live diametrically opposed realities from those they experience normally. Thus, video games involve an idea of escapism realized through the realistic fiction of entering in an alternate-reality: ‘Sometimes I wish I could be transported to this world and just live that part’ (Carl, male, 28, self-identifying gamer). Hence, our participants identify a movement across a boundary line between reality and the video game, and then, articulate this boundary-crossing as an escape from the vicissitudes of the real world to the pleasures of the video game universe. As we find in the following definition of video games:

Playing video games is, for this interviewee and many others, a place to visit, a location to escape to, a space to inhabit; it is also (typically) a pleasant experience: enjoyable, safe, and fun. The experience of video gaming is defined by the elaboration of an alternative reality, detached from the one players normally live in; a reality that is construed as a better version of its mundane counterpart, which is usually riddled with routine and boredom.

[…]

However, as Alfred, a 26-year-old dedicated video gamer, argues, ‘escapism is just a part of the experience’. For him, playing video games is ‘half and half’, adding that there is ‘definitely an element of escapism’, but that it is also about keeping ‘in touch with people’. Alfred also narrates how he often has conversations with friends and family about out of the game matters while he is playing, and will shift in and out of focusing on the game, depending on the level of attention needed at a particular point. Hence here, Alfred is describing a continuous process that does not make clear distinctions between the game world and everyday life. Gamers articulate both the (perceived) distinctions and continuities between the two (or more) realities. They speak in terms of ins and outs, ons and offs, entering and exiting, but also make connections and recognize overlaps between both universes. In the end, according to Pawel Miechowski, the developer at 11 bit studios (creators for This War of Mine), escapism is undoubtedly part of the appeal of video games, as gamers often ‘want to run into power fantasy’, but escapism ‘is not everything’ because the ‘world isn’t such’. For a game to be enjoyable, often they have to retain, at least some sense of believability; the fantasy has to connect to some sense of (alternative) reality. And therefore, we would suggest, that video games might also lead the player toward not just escapism, but also empathy, identification, and connection to other roads.

Connecting with other realities