Partly it’s the fun of exploring fictional world and taking part in them.

Partly it’s just the illusion of a productive distraction. When people have leisure they tend to go to exploratory behaviors, testing out new skills and possibilities.

Part of it is the illusion of winning and dominance, of being in a more interesting world, in which you have more significance and efficacy than you have in the real world.

This can be a problem, because you can get addicted to the feeling of winning, but your a compliments, your identity as that winner, exist only in that fictional realm. So it disincentivises you from returning to the real world and encourages you to invest more and more in building your digital world and persona. Certain social media platforms may operate according to a similar game theory of human psychology. It’s a constructed realm in which you can be the hero and work to build your kingdom.

The problem is, wins in the game world are bought with time that is not spent building or creating or gaining wins in the real world, which is the game we all must play. It’s very easy to lose perspective, and upon returning to the real world find it dull and depressing, quite a disappointment compared to the world of the game. You may not have found your skill and identity and efficacy in the real world. It’s a realm of make believe, the world of a child. But instead of preparing you for the real world, it makes you fear it, it makes you dislike it. And in doing so it loses the important function that games provide (practice and escape), becomes entirely about escape, and swallow you up.

I’ve had a lot of fun playing video games. I really enjoy them. I try to be pretty picky about what I let myself play though. There are some games that waste your time, some designed to frustrate you and steal your money, and some that make of you someone you do not profit by becoming and give you a world to live in that isn’t good for you to inhabit. And I’ve let an enormous amount of my time and life disappear down that hole and seen it just disappear and leave nothing behind in this world.

It was my time to spend, my recreation, my fun times and memories. But still, even having shown restraint, I’ve had times of regret. I’ve had days where I thought I would have some fun while my wife was gone and just spend the day playing my favorite games. But eventually the day comes to an end and I have to go back to real life, and I feel oddly deflated. All that time is just gone. I didn’t get to share it with anyone, I have nothing to show in the real world for it, nothing to carry into the future, nothing to make me feel better about tomorrow, nothing to give to anyone around me. It put off my confrontation with the real world, a game I sometimes struggle to win, but it didn’t help me solve it.

And the escape can be very addictive. That feeling of winning and progress and accomplishment that you can just command by turning on the game is so alluring, so easy, so exciting. It can become pornographic, the simulation of the satisfaction and validation of being desired without the difficulty or risk of the real world, the feeling of winning, the pleasure, the accomplishment, all at your command, and all that energy is spent on yourself: building nothing, creating nothing, venturing nothing, producing nothing, diverting all that energy into a dead end of self-service.

I love video games. But lately I don’t even have the energy to play the ones I really love, whose challenge and story excite me and stimulate me. I play lazier games, more convenient games. And maybe that’s just because of where I am in life and what time and leisure I have. But I miss the days when I had childhood friends to play my games with. That was a whole different kind of activity, because it was something we shared and did together.

I miss the days of disappearing into World of Warcraft. Such a wonderful world, so many places to explore. A world that offered so much, but also a world that demanded so much. And that’s part of the problem. How much a game gives and how much it asks. And who it makes of you. Does it make you a hero, a cunning leader, a brave defender? There’s some value in that. And these days we men, especially, may find that some of our instincts cannot be easily fulfilled in the real world. Maybe there is some utility in having a playground of little consequence for our energies to be diverted into.

But there’s a line between catharsis or productive channeling of aggressive impulses and indulgence of those same impulses. One helps you live in a balanced way with yourself within the limits of the modern world. The other feeds and exaggerates and twists and indulges in extremes that cannot and should not be lived out in the world. And living within them in a created fantasy world isn’t really that much better for you than doing so in the real world. It has fewer real world consequences, but that doesn’t make it helsthy or beneficial. You’re still letting yourself be that person. And the imaginstion is the testing ground for reality.

I’m not arguing that video game violence, in some simple sense, turns people into murderers. But what we indulge in as fantasy does shape who we become in many subtle ways. The prevalence of choking in pornogroahy has led to a rash of young men attempting to choke their sexual partners in real life. They have imagined themselves into those roles in their fantasies and enjoyed them, and seen it portrayed as acceptable or even desirable, so they try it out in real life. By living inside that person in their minds, in their play and fantasy, they try on being that person, and it at least becomes possible as an experiment in other areas. It becomes an attitude worth considering.

The thing about the video game world is that it is so much further removed from real life, usually. Often the genre causes you to take a perspective quite divorced from actual human experience. And even when the genre is closer to real life and experience simulation, the worlds are often quite far from our own, by design.