Second Life- on escapism

The whole point of gaming, it can be said, is escapism. To escape from this world, to be so immersed in an experience that you forget everything else about you, even if for a short while. When you're playing a game, you're not you anymore. You are a witness to an epic adventure when you play an RPG, a powerful electronic athlete when you play a MOBA, or a romantic hero when you play a dating sim. But there is a game that takes this notion and runs with it entirely, turning it into its Modus Operandi. That game is Second Life.

Second Life is a free to play three dimensional game. Some may claim it is not a game, as there are no goals or anything of the sort, but I disagree. However, I am not here to debate whether Second Life is a game or not. I am here to speak about how Second Life brings escapism to a whole new level.

The very name in itself gives away the purpose of the game. Second Life: a second life for you, the player. Here is a game world unlike any other. Here is a world for you to create, to be free. To buy what you like, to be who you want to be. You are limited only by your imagination.

And yet, therein lays a question. Is this right? Is it right to escape from your real life to pretend to be someone you are not?

In Second Life it is easy to be someone you're not. No, let me rephrase that. It is easy to pretend to be someone you're not. In Second Life, you can start your own business. You can dress your avatar down in the latest Gucci suit, give him sunglasses, a chauffer, the works. You can rent out a house made to look like a mansion, in a sim that closely resembles West Hollywood. You can have an office, you can sit your avatar down in meetings. You can be this huge success, and honestly? That does not sound so bad. But, when you turn off that computer, where will you be? Back in real life. Hopefully with a family that loves you, working a job that pays the bills, on a nice enough house that may not be a mansion, but it provides what you need. I wish to God this was how it always is. And for most people, it is. But not everyone is like this.

Too many people take the game more seriously than they should. Single people go on here looking to start relationships. Sometimes they find it, and their avatars enter a pretend relationship, where they go on pretend dates to places that are simply not real. I have seen avatars go to sims made to look like amusement parks. It may be fun to pretend you are on a date, but you're not. You're not in a real amusement park, you're at home, on a computer, watching two avatars go up and down a fake roller coaster. Too many people forget this.

Far too many avatars are done up to look like glamour models. I understand that, sometimes, we are unsatisfied with how we look. We often wish to ourselves "if only I were skinnier", "if only I were more tanned", "if only I were white, blonde, blue eyed, slim and petite." Second Life does not give you the chance to live that life, no matter how much we wish to pretend we were. Second Life only allows you to make an avatar that looks like what you wish you it to look like. By itself, that's not bad, but some people take it too far. I once had the misfortune of knowing someone who ditched a friend, just so she could date someone who's avatar looked like her favorite rock star. The guy behind the avatar was married in real life, but the two began an online relationship anyway.

That's another issue. People catfishing, pretending to be someone online when in real life they are someone else, beginning online relationships on false pretenses. I have seen this happen far too many times. I once met two people on Second Life. A boy and a girl. They were in a relationship. They were in love. Thing is, the guy was really a girl in real life, and the girl was perfectly straight. The 'guy' eventually confessed, and they broke up afterwards. No harm was meant, but the 'relationship' was simply false to begin with.

That's why I don't believe in relationships that start on Second Life, or anything from Second Life at all. There is always a falseness to it, to everything. What you are seeing may look like something, but it is not. It is simply a bunch of 1's and 0's, gathered together to create data to look like an object from real life. It is not real.

It is not real. That tiny phrase, to me at least, became almost like a mantra that I repeated to myself every time I logged in to Second Life. It is not real. It is not real. It is not real. So why treat it like it is? Why treat something fake like it's real?

Sometimes, real life becomes too much to bear.We often fail, we often grow tired. We often just feel like retreating, to get away from the hustle and bustle. Video games offer us a retreat from this. In a video game, we can rescue the princess, we can develop a farm, we can save the world from the Magic Emperor, we can date a high school girl. But this retreat is not meant to replace your real life. After you're done, you're supposed to be re energized, so you can take on the world. But when you start neglecting your real life, for a game? That's when you have a problem.

Escapism is not the answer to anything. Running away from your problems does not solve them. It is OK to take a rest. It is not OK to abandon yourself in a game. You don't need a Second Life, if your First Life is not what you wanted it to be. You just need to get out there and make it happen.

The Crooked Man: On failed dreams, depression, and hope

The Crooked Man is not the best game ever made. It is not the most sophisticated game, it is not the most graphically impressive game ever made, but it still is one of the best games you will ever play.

(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)

In The Crooked Man, you play as David Hoover. David's a nice guy. He's a decent man, works as a clerk, earns his own money. He also has a mother with a tumor in her brain that's caused her to go senile, his lover abandoned him, and his dream of becoming a pilot is pretty much dead thanks to him being colorblind. To try and get over how much his life has disappointed him, he moves into a shabby apartment that is in need of repairs. During the night, he experiences several paranormal phenomena that inspire him to look for the apartment's previous tenant. Thus begins the story of The Crooked Man.

David's journey first takes him to the Hotel Ruhenheim (Which means Rest home in German), an abandoned hotel that held special significance to the previous tenant. In here he first encounters the eponymous Crooked Man: a vile monster with a crooked neck, an unstoppable force that aims to kill David. In this level, we also learn of David's failed romance with the woman whom he planned on marrying. Because of his meekness, especially compared to her fiery attitude, David's girlfriend, Shirley, abandoned him. During his trek through the hotel, David meets someone in a similar position: a woman named Sissy. Sissy's boyfriend had also previously left her, and she's come to the hotel to search for a memento from her boyfriend. After several events which I shall not spoil, David gives Sissy a speech on what it means to love, to lose, and to keep going.

The game then takes us to Julius Stone Law School. Here, David meets a young man nicknamed D, who has failed the Bar exam a total of five times, and is currently vying for his sixth attempt. Once more, David finds himself menaced by the Crooked Man. David also confronts his failed dream: to become a pilot. I had mentioned earlier that he had been unable to become a pilot, due to his color blindness. David, until this point, remained haunted not just by this failure, but by the efforts he made to overcome his shortcomings and become a pilot regardless. He cheated on his sight test, breezed through his courses, and became top of his class, only to be found out and expelled on the day of his test. D has also gone through something similar. All his life, D dreamed of becoming a lawyer. Unfortunately, once he got into Law School, he learned of his one glaring weakness: He simply didn't have the book smarts to be a lawyer. He tried and tried, he studied like crazy, dedicating every moment he could to hitting the books. He took extra classes, he took tutoring, he asked for direct help from his professors. And what did he achieve? He barely graduated, and has failed the Bar exam a total of five times. He tries and tries, but ultimately keeps failing. It is here that David makes peace with his failure, and encourages D to move past his shattered dream, while subtly encouraging himself to move past his own failure.

The game next takes us towards an abandoned hospital. While here, David meets a boy nicknamed Fluffy, whose mother is missing. During his trek through the hospital, David is confronted with a horrid memory: one night, when his mother's condition took a turn for the worse, her dementia caused her to forget about her son, which caused her in turn to believe that David was a stranger who meant to harm her. In a moment of absolute weakness, David attacked his mother, and would have murdered her if not for his friend, Paul's, sudden intervention. From that day forward, David felt his mother did not love him, that she had abandoned him. Fluffy, during their time exploring the hospital, begins to feel abandoned by his mother as well. David tries encouraging Fluffy, but they are attacked by the Crooked Man. David fails to make peace with his past at first, but he eventually does.

Who is David Hoover? He's a guy with a failed love life, a mediocre job, an unfulfilled lifelong ambition, and a dying mother. He's trapped by his own failings, his own meekness, and his own mediocrity.

He's also one of the kindest, most dependable guy you could ever meet. He goes out of his way to make sure Sissi and D are alright, warning them of the Crooked Man as soon as he can. He goes above and beyond the call of duty to protect Fluffy from this vile monster. He saves D's life at his own risk! He rescues Sissi from death twice! He actually fights off the Crooked Man and pushes him off the roof of a four story hospital to protect Fluffy! David is so immersed in his own sadness, his own sorrow, that he fails to recognize his greatest strengths, attributes, and his blessings. His friends love him, and often go out of their way to make sure he's alright. He has a job that allows him to have his own place. He's kind, an attribute women often find attractive.

That's what depression is like. We become overwhelmed by our own negative feelings. Through our minds there is an echo, repeating a list of our worst flaws. "I'm weak, I'm unworthy, everyone would be happier if I were gone." After a while, sometimes depression goes away, but often, we sink deeper into our own negativity. And we keep torturing ourselves, inching ever closer into the edge of this abyss. And when you finally stare down, that's when it hits you, an idea that a healthy person would find repulsive: suicide.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd be lying if I said I did not identify with David up to a certain point. Often video games give their heroes some extraordinary reasons to act depressed, extraordinary tragedies that affect their lives. An example would be Ryu from Breath of Fire 1, who lost his village in an attack from the villains of the game. Or Fayt Leingod from Star Ocean 3, who was experimented on as a child to act as a weapon against aliens from another dimension. But David? What happened to him can happen to all of us. Depression? A lover leaving you? A senile parent? A dream that went unfulfilled? That's normal, everyday things that can happen to anybody, and often does. These are real life tragedies that often go ignored by those who do not suffer them. And often, we are told that these things are no big deal. "Oh, your mom is suffering dementia? Somewhere in Africa a woman has died from war, think about THAT while you whine! Oh, you can't get into the college you wanted? Let me play you a song on the world's smallest violin while we think of those starving kids in Asia!" Often people downplay the things that get them down, because we often mock depression. Wangst, we call it. Excessive whining. And that is one of the many, many reasons we often do not seek help when we're depressed.

Depression is a real thing. People kill themselves because they often hit that moment, that Event Horizon of Despair, that sends them spiraling into a vicious circle of feelings of self loathing and entrapment. People kill themselves to escape from this vicious circle. And trust me when I say that the moment you hit that level of sorrow, the moment you see your own death as the ONLY relief from this much sadness, that is one scary moment.

The abyss is dark and seemingly bottomless. We often hold onto something, the ledge, to keep from falling in. But we don't need to fall.

When we're in our darkest hour, we need to find our light. We need to focus on what we are good at, what our best virtues are. Life is tough, that's a given. We fail more often than we win. It is when we are down that we need to find the strength to get back up. Most of the time, we do this by ourselves. But sometimes, the pain is so great, we are unable to get up. We've fallen, and we can no longer get up. That's when we have to find to remind ourselves of who we are. Like David, we need to remember our greatest strengths. For David, it was his kindness. We must also overcome what we feel is our greatest weaknesses. For David, he thought he was meek, a doormat, but he proved to be anything but when he faced down the Crooked Man. And just as important, we need the people who love us. When David had become suicidal, it was Paul who came to his rescue. Paul and his wife Marion drove for a whole day towards a place they had never been to, all to make sure David would be OK. Just like that, we need to learn to trust the people that love us.

In South Africa, there is a philosophy, called Ubuntu, that is defined as thus: "I am who I am because of who we all are." We humans need to take care of each other, to treat each other with kindness. We can not, should not ignore or ridicule another person's sorrow.

This is what The Crooked Man is trying to tell us. Do good for others. Your sorrow is NOT trivial, because you suffer from it. Kindness and empathy are some of the best qualities a person can possess. You are not alone in your suffering. Your dreams may go unfulfilled, but when that happens, find a new dream. Emotions are a good thing, do not think less of yourself for having them. You will, eventually, stop loving the one who hurt you. Keep the people that love you close, do not doubt them. And most importantly: don't kill yourself. You are better than you think you are.