I’m a hobbyist gamer, and I also think to much.  Ditto for my wife.  Naturally, we’ve spent much time internally and between each other trying to determine what drives video gamers to play video games.  Some theories come quickly and easily: video games are an escape, video games give you quicker gratification for less work, and so on.

Last night another reason occurred to me: control.  Religion, government, living with our parents for too long, all are indications that it’s human nature to want to feel like there’s a greater power in control.  This is a generalization, not everyone feels this way, but I bet more people do than are willing to admit it.

Anyhow, when you are faced with a task in your real life, you are not in a controlled environment.  There might be rules or laws governing certain aspects of your task, but ultimately you’re in a universe full of uncertainty, mystery, and chaos.

However when you play a video game, that is out the window.  You are now operating within the controlled environment created by somebody else.  Any video game is going to be man-made with a finite set of rules which are enforced without exception, and while there may be mysteries (depending on the game), they can be answered ultimately by a human being — the one(s) who wrote it.

Is it possible that on some level people respond favorably to immersing themselves in an environment governed by irretractable man-made rules?  Perhaps it’s comfortable to know that within the context of your video game, if things go well or poorly, you know who to blame: the programmers, the designers, so on.  In the real world we don’t have that.  If we’re religious we can point to God.  If we’re atheist we can only blame events on cosmic chance.  Perhaps that’s inherently unsettling to mankind.