Tag Archives: utopia

A Utopia with Video Games

I awoke one morning to the sight of blue light bathing my bedroom.

“Huh, that’s odd,” I thought, “Usually the sun’s golden rays light everything up.”

I looked out the window and saw the sun was a brilliant blue. My eyes widened and my brain froze in disbelief for a minute. Then I did a double take and looked out the window so fast that my neck nearly snapped.

It got weirder. The sky was yellow. The grass was a fiery red and the ocean was green.

“What the…” I muttered as I rubbed my eyes.

I thought of a couple of reasons why I saw the world that way. Maybe I had overdosed on Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, and now I saw the world through a neon lens. Or I might have had too much to drink the night before. Nah, neither hypothesis was correct.

I shrugged off the world’s appearance and checked out my WordPress Reader. There were new posts from all my favourite video game blogs. Time for some good reading.

I scanned the editorials, expecting to find the usual topics, but everything was upside down. Nothing was the same. Video games had changed the world – for the better.

Critics now praised video games for promoting peace in the world. There were even articles on how the U.N. used games to entice countries to lay down their arms. Also, games, among other factors, helped end hunger, poverty, disease and brought all humanity together in love. So, naturally, all the old arguments against playing video games were swept up and thrown into the trash.

It was a utopia – a perfect world – with video games . It seemed like it was only going to get better, yet it all seemed a little too perfect.

Alas, it was not be! My gut feeling was right. I woke up in my bed, the sun was still bright yellow and video games had not helped make the world a perfect place. Not yet anyway…

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Filed under Video Game Misc.

Why I Want to Live in a Video Game World

life is playLet us say you could live in any video game world you wanted. Would you do it? Count me in.

A video game could offer a great escape – see what I did there? – from the doldrums of life. Life is something like equal parts work and play, or contemplation and action. But a game would rearrange this balance. Life is play inside a video game.

The concerns of everyday life would not apply inside a game. Death does not exist because I would always re-spawn. I wouldn’t have to plan my finances because all my digital coins would fit inside my pocket. Also, unless it was a boring game, it wouldn’t force me to mop my apartment floors, scrub dishes or do chores. Instead, I would have plenty of free time to explore an open world game.

The game world would give me all sorts of powers to play with. I’d do things like climb a mountain peak, jump over a skyscraper, heal myself and solve physics based puzzles with ease. Sleep would not exist, and I could run on forever like a sentence without a stop.

But life inside the game is not only about me. A beautiful princess lies in wait, in that world, for someone to rescue her. Now, this blog post is unconventional, so let us take it a step further and pretend that she would save me. I would still meet a beautiful woman no matter who saved the day, which is fine by me.

If I never crossed paths with the princess, I could still talk to other video game characters. The seedy bars from large open world games are great places to meet people. I could talk to the code too; we could chew over performance problems and the game would run better because of me. That lifestyle doesn’t sound lonely at all.

Wait! I can’t keep up this happiness charade. I could not survive a day in there without family, friends and WordPress.com. So would some of you join me?

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Filed under Video Game Misc.