Returning to Reality, and Beyond
Regarding value in video games
I don’t much like touching bugs. I was certainly never one of those kids who liked to catch them or pick them up or play with them. They’re just too crunchy and weird and sus.
When playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, though, it’s another matter. If I want a Hearty Elixir, I’m going to need a Hearty Lizard, so I’m going to track him down. Similarly, if I’ve got some serious climbing to do, I will not hesitate to nab a Tireless Frog out of a puddle so I can make an Enduring Elixir (one of them most satisfying concotions in my opinion).
Obviously, it helps that playing a video game means I don’t actually have to touch the bug. But while in that respect the game provides me with a bit of a departure from reality, in another sense Breath of the Bug Hunt does precisely the opposite. When I am running through a grassy field, I may notice the Restless Crickets flying out of the grass as I pass by. The next day while taking a real life walk in the real life world, I notice a creature of the same sort making the same hop out of my way. What’s funny about that is how, to my memory, I was never likely to take any notice of such fellow wayfarers prior to playing BOTW.
I noticed something similar fiddling with Skyrim mods a while back, specifically ENB presets that alter the graphical style and effects in the game. After looking through several such mods and their preview screenshots, I found myself being alert to the peculiar qualities of lighting, tone, and other “vibes” when looking at real life photos or even at times simply standing outside IRL.
Yet another effect of a similar sort came from analyzing some of these games from a computing/programming angle. As I delved into the systems and reverse engineered code of Breath of the Wild (and later Tears of the Kingdom), I was stunned by the sheer volume of information and mechanics being processed so swiftly on a rather weak device. Again, this turned my thoughts back toward reality. If there is so much going into the blending of colors in the water and sand on a virtual shoreline (and yes, Nintendo really put a shocking amount of careful work into that), how much more is actually happening all around me, where the reality of the things and “systems” running all around me goes all the way down to quarks and gluons and all the way up to galaxies and superclusters. The resolution goes down, as far as we can tell, to the Planck length,1 and the FPS should correspondingly be about 18.549 tredecillion.2 Meanwhile at every moment the four fundamental forces (sort of) are operating at every point in the universe following patterns that make the worldest most impressive supercomputers have panic attacks.
The point of all this is that I have found in the world of video games points which redirect my attention to the complexities and beauties of the real world. The secondary world plays the servant, sending me back to the primary world with fresh eyes. In these cases it functions much like Tolkien said of Fantasy:
Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give… It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.3
For this reason I see value in video games (when used rightly, of course, for abusus non tollit usum4) as places for subcreation in Tolkien’s sense, where other worlds inspired by our own may be constructed and enjoyed, but using a wider variety of methods and skills than go into any other single medium (book, movie, etc.). The potential here is probably enormous, and precisely for this reason video games can become so gangrenous in their abuse. To quote another old Latin maxim, Corruptio optimi pessima.5 I would love to see more Christians taking seriously the possibilities here and create an interactive equivalent to The Lord of the Rings (which will by no means be an LOTR game).
Beyond that, though, the way in which well-crafted games point us back to the real world seems like a healthy reminder that the “real world” itself is meant only to point us further on. The world we know is not all there is nor all there will ever be. There is now a realm beyond the highest heavens full of light and perfection in which God’s name is hallowed and His will is done as we can only pray it will be on earth. There is lying in our future a version of our own world which will indeed be “heavenized” and glorious beyond our current imaginations. What we see and know now is but a foretaste of we will see. It will be for us as though Link, after having spent his life collecting 999 Korok seeds in the virtual world of Hyrule, suddenly stepped out atop a real mountain and surveyed the richness of an environment far beyond Nintendo’s most impressive code and textures.
The best a video game can do, then―which is indeed the best thing that anything we subcreate can do―is point our eyes there, not only beyond itself to our world, but beyond our world to the place where all the beauty comes from, and to the God from whom all these blessings flow. I can’t say all the hours I’ve ever spent in Zelda have always done this, but the moments have been there nonetheless. May there be ever more such moments to awaken many a gamer out of his virtual slumber.
Approximately 0.000000000000000000000000000000000016 meters, alternatively expressed this way if you’re too lazy for that many zeroes:
That’s 18,549,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Or, again, if you’re too lazy for that many zeroes:
J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, in Tree and Leaf (London: HarperCollins, 2012), ebook, under “Recovery, Escape, Consolation,” pars. 5–6.
“Abuse does not destroy use,” or, more dynamically, “The abuse of a thing does not remove its proper use.”
“The corruption of the best is the worst.”