A recent Wired article called Real World Doesn’t Use a Joystick is oddly funny. As a gamer and g33k I have spent several thousands of hours in front of a CRT screen, playing games, playing around with various kinds of software or whatever, and though variations to a lot of the examples given in the article have popped up in my mind as well over time, I have never -not even for a split second- mistaken the real world for the in-game or digital realm.
Yes, stuff like hitting Ctrl-Z when you say something or do something stupid have come to mind, but I never actually reached for an unexisting keyboard. I never tried pressing someone reset or power button when they where annoying me, and I’ve never mistaken people for FPS targets, nor thought that bunny hopping would an efficient way of moving around faster outside of Quake 2. The idea of being able to save “life” before embarking on a dangerous or potentially humiliating endeavor, and then restore a saved game if things go wrong is indeed appealing, and has popped into my mind before, but I always knew it was far from reality and I saw it as a geeky joke.
Either the gamerz in the article are exaggerating, or perhaps they should start gaming less… before they start slinging circular saws at innocent bystanders after an intense session of Halflife 2.
Remember that life is just a game… oh wait, no it isn’t!
