A Treatise to Man...
...better known as 'Houston we have a problem.'
One thing that has always troubled me is the nature of success. What does it mean to succeed? Is success relative? Is it comparable? Does the success of a daisy girl compare to the success of an astronaut? Does the completion of a Janitor's day compare to the completion of a Business CEO's? Does the fulfillment of a Public Official's social plan compare to the fulfillment of a Gamer's social plan in a virtual metropolis?
Without a clear goal in mind, how can someone make well thought-out decisions and have the will power to carry them out? This world we live in today confuses me. The prevalence of virtual worlds alarms me. There are a lot of people who care more about their Night Elf than their jobs. Is this right? Can success be virtual? And if so, how does it compare to real success? The problem I find is that people compare them at all. If you can compare success in a video game to finishing a piece of art, you've already made the jump into dangerous territory. The case is made to where success in your life can be fulfilled by working at Block Busters for 20 years, while playing the latest game and keeping up with your buds in the latest WoW Raid. I honestly think I could be just as happy as I am now, if not more so, if I were working a deadbeat, easy job with the freedom to frolic in virtual worlds without any repercussions. But I'm not. I'm in college, I'm on a full scholarship- I'm heading somewhere. But where, and more importantly, why?
If success can come from staring at a computer screen and fiddling with a mouse for eight hours a day, what's the point of struggle? I feel that you have to see it for what it is in order to be able to move on. It is unproductive, selfish, and moreover, inhumane, to believe one can achieve success through virtual reality. Because virtual reality is the exact same thing as 'nothing'. I feel gaming is slowly going to turn into our and future generation's opiate of the masses. People said that of TV twenty years ago. And went straight to drugs for the twenty years before that. In modern society, there has always been a struggle between pragmatism and the opiate at hand. The problem is Pragmatists have almost always caused the world to turn black-and-white before them. The true biles they detest are not alcohol, not drugs, not TV, not video games. It's escapism itself.
Virtual Reality is the ultimate escape. It will only get worse, or better if you are inclined that way, down the road from here.
But you can not achieve success through acts of escapism. That's just the bottom line. Wannabe philosophers on message boards may ask what the difference is between reality and virtual reality--after all, everything we experience is just a chemical reaction in our brain right? The difference is, I'm a pragmatist. Reality is mandatory experience; a child in an African country doesn't get a choice of whether to feel like he is starving or not. He just is.
I wish every day that I could run back to my old naivety and hedonist attitudes. And despite what I've said, video games aren't necessarily bad. They just have to be taken for what they are. Obsession in all forms annoys me.
One thing that has always troubled me is the nature of success. What does it mean to succeed? Is success relative? Is it comparable? Does the success of a daisy girl compare to the success of an astronaut? Does the completion of a Janitor's day compare to the completion of a Business CEO's? Does the fulfillment of a Public Official's social plan compare to the fulfillment of a Gamer's social plan in a virtual metropolis?
Without a clear goal in mind, how can someone make well thought-out decisions and have the will power to carry them out? This world we live in today confuses me. The prevalence of virtual worlds alarms me. There are a lot of people who care more about their Night Elf than their jobs. Is this right? Can success be virtual? And if so, how does it compare to real success? The problem I find is that people compare them at all. If you can compare success in a video game to finishing a piece of art, you've already made the jump into dangerous territory. The case is made to where success in your life can be fulfilled by working at Block Busters for 20 years, while playing the latest game and keeping up with your buds in the latest WoW Raid. I honestly think I could be just as happy as I am now, if not more so, if I were working a deadbeat, easy job with the freedom to frolic in virtual worlds without any repercussions. But I'm not. I'm in college, I'm on a full scholarship- I'm heading somewhere. But where, and more importantly, why?
If success can come from staring at a computer screen and fiddling with a mouse for eight hours a day, what's the point of struggle? I feel that you have to see it for what it is in order to be able to move on. It is unproductive, selfish, and moreover, inhumane, to believe one can achieve success through virtual reality. Because virtual reality is the exact same thing as 'nothing'. I feel gaming is slowly going to turn into our and future generation's opiate of the masses. People said that of TV twenty years ago. And went straight to drugs for the twenty years before that. In modern society, there has always been a struggle between pragmatism and the opiate at hand. The problem is Pragmatists have almost always caused the world to turn black-and-white before them. The true biles they detest are not alcohol, not drugs, not TV, not video games. It's escapism itself.
Virtual Reality is the ultimate escape. It will only get worse, or better if you are inclined that way, down the road from here.
But you can not achieve success through acts of escapism. That's just the bottom line. Wannabe philosophers on message boards may ask what the difference is between reality and virtual reality--after all, everything we experience is just a chemical reaction in our brain right? The difference is, I'm a pragmatist. Reality is mandatory experience; a child in an African country doesn't get a choice of whether to feel like he is starving or not. He just is.
I wish every day that I could run back to my old naivety and hedonist attitudes. And despite what I've said, video games aren't necessarily bad. They just have to be taken for what they are. Obsession in all forms annoys me.