Playing a video game is usually something we do outside of our everyday lives. As with any medium, our experiences with video games can influence how we think about our real lives, whether now or in the future. But when we play games, we take a break from that life. Playing a game is different from sorting digital photos, filing business receipts, or responding to email.
The same is true for so-called serious games. A corporate training game or an advergame might be designed to serve a purpose outside of the game — learning how to implement a fast food franchise’s customer service process, or exploring the features and functions of a new mobile phone, for example.
But even so, playing the game isn’t the same thing as fielding customer complaints at the taco hut or managing appointments in the mobile calendar. Doing those things requires leaving the game and re-entering the real world.
There is power in using games as an “act apart,” to use one of Johan Huizinga’s terms for the separateness of play. When games invite us inside, they involve experimentation, ritual, role-playing, and risk-taking that might be impossible or undesirable in the real world. When video games take over our television screens or black out our computer desktops, they act as portals to alternate realities.
In short, when we play games, we temporarily interrupt and set aside ordinary life. And that’s not really anything unusual. We do the same thing when we curl up in an armchair with a novel, or when the lights go down in a theatre, or when we plug in our earbuds on the commuter train.
But, in other media, immersion in a world apart is only one of many modalities. We don’t just read novels, we also read road signs and sales reports and postal mail. We don’t just watch film or television, we also watch security monitors and focus group recordings and weather reports. We don’t just listen to music, we also listen to telephone ringtones and train chimes and lullabies.
In these cases, when we interact with the writing, or the moving images, or the music, we simultaneously perform or experience an action, be it work, play, or something mundane and in-between.