RIB Introduction

Gaming is an escape from reality. An escape to a place in which we can all delve in to and achieve things seemingly out of this world. Gamers worldwide lead double lives. One is real, the other is virtual. However, the virtual life has proven to be much more rewarding, especially when the one in reality has proven to be faulty. This is the obvious reason that all gamers alike find one way or another to take time out of their days to immerse themselves in their phones, consoles, or PCs to game. It’s an escape from everything bad, everything wrong, with the world we live in, and an obsession with being in a world that is rewarding and fulfilling.

Three thousand years ago, King Atys of Lydia created games for his people to engage in when famine struck his kingdom. This enabled the people to pass the days with entertainment, instead of yearning for food. Today, we have the technology to better the lives of all seven some billion people, through gaming. There are many people who may think that videogames take up too much of our time, or are a threat to our society. Yet there is a reason that over a billion people game. It’s to get away from the world that is truly the one breaking us down, and to go the one that can fix us.

Posted on by Carson Clark
Categories: Uncategorized

5 Responses

  1. Rachel Helbling says:
    September 2, 2018 at 6:32 pm

    I found Carson’s post very interesting and true. That gaming is an escape from reality, and that people tend to like the virtual world better for obvious reasons. I like how Carson used an example of how gaming has positively helped people. This shows that McGonigal’s ideas aren’t as crazy as they might initially seem. I also found this post interesting because it seems like Carson may have a different level of gaming experience than me so it is very interesting to read his opinions.

  2. James Bachmann says:
    September 2, 2018 at 8:29 pm

    To play devil’s advocate though, an argument can be placed forward about the dangers of using games as an escape method from the broken reality. If people are able to escape into games, then in some sense, that takes away the incentive to fix reality itself. Food for thought

  3. Ahsan Ahmad says:
    September 2, 2018 at 11:41 pm

    Carson’s post on the introductory chapter of Reality is Broken appeared to be pretty succinct to me—in a good way. As he summarizes, games have been both traditionally and contemporarily used as escapes to virtual worlds; worlds that are digital light-years away from the agonizing torments of the plane of reality, be the torments famines or family troubles or any other cause of stress. While the frameworks of such games have evolved over the ages, their purpose has largely remained the same—providing an opportunity to take a quick breather from the run of life. Nowadays, however, I feel like the purpose is evolving as society grows more innovative and self-aware. While we’ve already started witnessing the appearance of modern, social-innovation-supporting games like Evoke by McGonigal, I feel like it is only going to get exponentially better from here owing to the law of exponential growth. This is my input to the topic and these games of the future are something I really wish to witness during my life.

  4. Hyewon Hong says:
    September 3, 2018 at 10:43 am

    Rather than focusing on gaming as a means of going to a world that can “fix us”, I’d say gaming is more widely used as a means of obtaining something unobtainable in the real world. This manifests itself in the thrill of playing Call of Duty, or the satisfaction of solving tactical puzzles, or even just trying to kill time playing Candy Crush or one of its seemingly endless knockoffs. The reason I would argue this is because no game is perfect, nor can any game remove one’s deficiencies. Sure, games can make you forget about them, ignore them, but inside they will always stay there unless one tries actively to fix them. Games are only going to get bigger in the following years with the advent of new technologies like VR, and maybe in a few years we will have a world like the one depicted in Ready Player One (but hopefully less apocalyptic), and we as a society should still be prepared to invest time both in and out of gaming in order to better our lives, not just run away from them.

  5. Shanay Amin says:
    September 3, 2018 at 11:49 am

    I think all games are a great escape from reality, from video games to sports. As we discussed in class games are a distraction from life and it could help you escape reality. Games can create an obsession and its not healthy at all, I just read a story about a 12 year old boy who head butted his mother because she tried to take away his console. Games need to have some sort of limit, even in sports you can burn out.