The Fiction of the Video Game Power Fantasy
The pursuit of power in our gaming lives
Be the better of your world and everything in it — that’s power. The child staying up past bedtime, the worker telling their boss to get lost: people enacting their will and breaking the rules, free from comeuppance and consequence. Video games, they say, are made to bring that fantasy to life.
And that’s almost right: video games do empower us to act in ways we never could have before, freeing us from those pesky real-world constraints. But that’s wrong, too. Video games are drenched in the edicts of a designer telling you precisely what can’t be done — a distant parent who wants you to grow in ways that make you thankful you surrendered that hard-earned cash.
But that fantasy stumbles in the face of that catchy chest-opening jingle or that oversized text littered with arbitrary numbers. In a medium where a mere sound or pop-up is specifically engineered to keep you in the worlds it creates, power is the last thing you would ascribe to its audience.
All-powerful, then, we are not.
