When the first video games arrived on the scene in the Seventies, it was immediately clear that they filled a need that people might not have even known they possessed. Playing a video game required a new and different set of tools from players than they had previously employed in their everyday activities. Similar in essence to the kind of focus required of athletics, yet lacking the simultaneous exertion that grounds the action in sensory reality, there was a commitment to a real kind of remote-control/out-of-body proxy experience. Over time, gameplay evolved from controlling small square pixels to fully-articulated digital models of human beings. There is a subtle process at work there, moving the frame of reference from manipulation of mechanical stimuli to operating a homunculus embedded with the operator's personality. In other words, the longer video games existed, the more the action began to center on the conceit that the protagonist was yourself, regardless what the actual character looked like.

What's to be made of this? This phenomenon seems to say that we have a deep need to experience new stimuli on a regular basis, and if that means creating a discrete pocket universe -- such as the environment of a video game -- in which to exist, so be it. Quite separate from the consensual reality that we occupy with the rest of humanity, a video game allows us to roleplay virtually any type of character we can imagine, featuring abilities that we can only dream of employing in our quotidian existence.

This argues for the idea that people need to feel powerful. People need to feel that their actions have a lasting effect on reality, and for whatever reason, it's lacking in their lives. While this is, of course, an oversimplification of a complex issue, it's at the heart of why we choose to play a video game as entertainment, over reading a book or watching a movie. We do those as well, among many other pursuits, but for that rush of potency, nothing can touch the average video game.

Now here, I'm speaking of games like Dead Space or Mass Effect with their heroic protagonists, rather than games like Pac-man or The Sims, which do have characters, but don't relate the sort of epic storylines that the former titles evince. More often than not, these proxy extensions of our psyches come equipped with radically altered physical abilities, to the extent that they more closely resemble magic than any sort of true physical models. Our need to feel powerful is so strong that we've invented whole realities, sometimes with their own completely different physics, just to have a place to exercise these puissant abilities. More to the point, we often choose to make combat the focus of these games, rather than the types of conflict that might be resolved through peaceful means. What does this say about ourselves?