Digital Dreams and New Worlds

Posted by | January 12, 2011 .

We were all born with a brand on our souls, a brand of purpose. To build, to explore, and to experience. We are the hands and eyes of our creator. As he made us to explore this universe, so too do we make our own realities to explore. One universe is simply not enough for us. It began with stories. Myths and legends were the currency around the fires of old, tales of other places seen in dreams or visions. These strange sights were taken as supernatural truths, and in those days they might well have been.

The printing press changed everything. Now, our stories were more than just tales and legends. They became entertainment. The novel was born, along with its younger sister, the magazine, and their weird cousin, the penny-dreadful. These stories were full of new worlds, new visions, but the sights inside were less of shamanic omens and more the settings for grand adventures. We were creating imaginary new worlds to not only explore them, but to conquer them with our fictional heroes.

In the modern world, these imaginary worlds surround us. We are a culture of stories and creation on demand. The TV shows you watch are all set in their own worlds, just like the movies you see. Novels and the new worlds inside line the shelves of every store, and who among us doesn’t know about a certain magical school of wizardry, or the terrible clown who lurks in sewers and strikes with the savagery of a child’s nightmares? The stories we tell become the culture we keep.

Stories, though, have always had a problem that mere words and pictures could never solve. There is a barrier, a wall, between reading about a thing, watching a thing, and experiencing a thing. No matter how exciting, you’re not a part of the spaceship battle that settles the fate of a world. You’re just watching it. No matter how artfully the words are arranged, you’re not sinking a knife into the vampire count’s heart. You’re just reading it. It is the wall between being told of a world, and being part of that world.

This barrier, though, is being crossed. I do believe in our lifetime the barrier will be shattered entirely, torn down and cast aside, but for now, we are making our first careful steps across a bridge between the real world and the worlds of our imaginations. This bridge is built of something called immersion, the ability to act within the story itself, to control and live through the characters of an imaginary world. This great step, this fragile bridge, comes from a hidden tide pool in our cultural river that few expected. Immersion isn’t found in movies, or books, but in video games.

We have within us a desire to break free of this world and escape to something grander, greater, than what we know. This burning brand on our souls shows itself when we create our new worlds. Nowhere in our culture and history demonstrates this quite so powerfully as in the video games we play.

Video games have a great advantage over movies and books because they can place you directly into the story, leaving you standing on a patch of ground in their fictional worlds. You control a character in the story, taking action and making choices. The world, the story surrounds you, but you aren’t just watching it unfold. In a game, what you do and how you do it becomes part of the story. Your actions become part of the world. This is a revelation for exploring the worlds of our imaginations.

The most powerful video games create full virtual worlds. Your character doesn’t just pass through them on his way to level 6, he lives there. You can come back, again and again, taking on your character to explore these virtual worlds, not as a visitor racking up a high score, but as a native living his life. In a sense, you are trading the real world and your own self for the virtual world and the new self of your character.

These virtual worlds are often called MMORPGs, or Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games, and they are big business. The most successful of the breed is called World of Warcraft, and claims over 11-million players. That’s a bigger population than many countries. Lesser games have populations in the hundreds of thousands, which is still enough to settle down into a fair-sized city. If you aren’t already playing one of these MMORPGs, chances are you know someone who is.

Numbers like that are only possible because these games speak to something in our souls. They give us the chance to explore and experience a reality beyond our own, a place we could never visit in the real world. The purpose given to us by our creator is one of exploration, even if that means scouting out realms of our own fantasy. Video games also fulfill another desire of the human soul, that of creation. We, as children of a god, are born to create and build. This is proof of the creative divinity in our souls.

Not everyone can create their own video game, of course. That’s fine, though, since people who play these games do still create something. They craft their own stories, their own art. Any game of importance and many best forgotten stands in the center of a swirling vortex of fan fiction. Tales and pictures made by the community itself, some to noble ends, while other works are little more than cheap porn. While the quality of these amateur stories might be in doubt, the spirit behind them is not. They are expressions of the same creative spirit which, long ago, raised up the great tower over the first human city. We are creators and builders, even in fantasy worlds of our design.

In this modern world, our daily lives aren’t very exciting, and the trip to work and back home doesn’t offer much fertile ground to grow up thrilling stories. Our games fill that void left by our safe and comfortable lives, giving us new worlds of adventure to replace the real world that we have tamed. This is vital for the health of our souls, as every part of who we are demands to explore and experience new things, new places. Without that chance, without immersive games, we would be left trapped inside our own works in a predictable monotony. Our souls would wither. Good thing, then, that we play video games.

Time and technology will improve the sense of immersion video games offer. You’ll be able to touch objects in the game, feel the virtual breeze, smell the virtual flowers in bloom across the fields of a fictional world. This will happen because there’s a tremendous amount of money involved, and an incredible number of people playing these games. Soon enough, these games will be as real as reality itself, and for many people, possibly just as important. They will spend their time in the games, they’ll meet friends, lovers, and then spouses in the games, and they’ll make money in the games. Our future will be, very literally, of our own creation.

We were built to explore and to experience. We were given a drive to transcend this universe and expand beyond the limits of reality. This is the brand that burns on our souls. As the real world we live in becomes more comfortable, more predictable, more mundane, it limits our ability to explore and experience. Fantasy worlds let us escape the trap of our own success over this world. Through our stories, we create new worlds to fulfill the purpose in our souls. Through our technology, we can enter those new worlds and live in them. Before we become powerful enough to reach up into the realm of the gods itself, we are creating our own virtual heavens around us.

That is our way. That is our future. Our video games are becoming a powerful way for us to worship and serve our creator. Virtual video realms will be the new inspiration for the stories of our people.

What stories will you tell?

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