on getting inside
“This is how games get inside you… your mind, and your feelings, become so seemingly crucial to its operation as its many millions of lines of code. It is the sensation that the game itself is as suddenly, unknowably alive as you are. […]
I felt a tremendous sense of preemptive loss and anxiety, and even called my girlfriend, described my dilemma, and asked her for her counsel. “You do know,” she said, “that you’re crazy, yes?” On the face of things, she was right. Here I was — a straight, thirty-four-year-old man — worrying over the consummation of my female avatar’s love affair. But she was also wrong. To say that any game that allows such surreally intense feelings of attachment and projection is divorced from questions of human identity, choice, perception, and empathy — what is, and always will be, the proper domain of art — is to miss the point not only of such a game but art itself.”
— From Tom Bissell’s brilliant Extra Lives
