What if video game addiction were real-life resignation?
Perhaps video games have a problem.And we have a problem with them too, if we can’t admit it.
Video games cause addiction. Not to everyone, not always, but to a certain degree (and in specific moments of our lives) many of us were addicted to gaming. Because when you choose to spend the whole weekend in your Underpants Radius and you have to deliver digital stuff to digital characters in Death Stranding, you are addicted.
So yes, in the past few weeks we all kinda had a problem.
But what if we were playing video games because we gave up on real life?
Okay, okay. The whole wide world outside is the real thing. The only place in which we can upgrade ourselves and the bonds with other people that make us feel alive, peacemakers for hearts that wouldn’t know how to beat otherwise. And it’s the only place in which those bonds can make us suffer. It’s the flip side of the coin, but it’s the one giving us the nominal value. So we can only feel alive in the real world, and the quest for escape routes in fake ones is meaningless. But that’s where the real problem resides.
How many really meaningful days are we truly living?
How many days in which we’re not drowning in a boring, grey sea of boredom? We’re wasting time in offices, at a shitty work we don’t even like. Stuck in traffic on the streets, driving the same way as our parents. Different cars, same void actions. Queues at ATMs, on the highway, at the grocery store whenever we buy some healthy yet tasteless stuff to eat.
Time wasted forever, spent doing things we don’t give a fuck about anymore. Duties before pleasure again, and again, and again. They taught us this way, and maybe this is the real addiction. Addiction to real-life mediocrity which makes video games look sexier than our pre-rendered routine.
So why do I have to feel guilty if I let video games bring colour to this anonymous canvas?