I had a passing thought that, abruptly, turned into something of an insight.

I was thinking about two videogames that I’ve been playing lately, and I considered which of the two I’d like to play. One of the two games is a multiplayer game, and the other is a singleplayer game. As I sat and considered which of the two I wanted to play, I noticed myself doing something that I’ve been doing for years:

I tend to consider multiplayer videogames, to some degree, “more valid” than singleplayer games. If deciding which videogame to play, I’m often inclined to give more weight to the notion of playing a multiplayer game – but for no very specific reason. The universe in which a multiplayer game takes place seems to possess some degree of validation by virtue of it being a shared, social space. There’s a subtle sense in which the time I spend playing a singleplayer game feels “wasted” by its ultimate irrelevancy to the world outside of it. But time spent playing a multiplayer game suffers no such sense of invalidity. My actions and the time spent on them can be seen by other people and therefore possesses a level of realness that is absent in the single-player game.

As I came to understand that, the word realness resonated with me. The truth is that there isn’t a super rational, logcial reason to feel that my time is better spent playing one game than the other just because it’s multiplayer. But that is absolutely not how I feel! Multiplayer games provide a feeling of credibility and legitimacy to the experience of playing them. Not merely because the existence of Others means that the world is unpredictable and surprising but because of something far more subtle. There’s a hard-to-put-into-words sense of sharedness, in that even though I’m not always directly interacting with other people, I could be, and that no matter how far I push the world around me, it will continue to exist for me and for others.

If I know everything that exists is finite, ultimately, and constrained to a certain program, beyond which the game doesn’t continue to exist, the game can be a great experience, but it can never be a world unto itself. For a game to feel like a valid world in-and-of itself, it has to feel close to infinite. It can’t feel contained. It must accommodate any reasonable scrutiny. And for communicating beings like ourselves, the scrutiny of being able to interact with the world through language and receive responses reflective of vivid personalities is vital. It validates, to some degree, a game world.

The conventional, waking world is just like an extraordinarily advanced video game world. It can withstand ridiculous, nearly-infinite amount of scrutiny. You can use tools to look at smaller and smaller, or farther and farther objects and the universe will persist to appear coherently (this theoretically has a limit, like videogames do, but much, much greater). You can interact with a massive variety of complex personalities through an extraordinarily intricate amount of communication. It’s the ultimate, infinitely-HD, fully-virtual sandbox world. And we like it that way and we’re very, very comfortable with it that way.

Following this path will eventually take you to a place, if it hasn’t already, where a sense of the existence of Others will evaporate, or at least become distinctly agnostic. Following this path will eventually take you to a place where you begin stressing the limits of the conventional world and, with intense-enough scrutiny, begin to notice that the world has taken on a hue of illegitimacy or invalidity. When you encounter these experiences, and others like them, they can appear as obstacles. They can potentially appear as obstacles larger and more daunting than any conventional obstacle could. Your mind has latent preferences about how it likes its reality to be. You’ll naturally push yourself away from important insights because of the fear you have, even (especially!) at a subconscious level, for the implications. Your mind won’t go where it isn’t conditioned to want to be. It’s like a wild horse. It’s like a backwards magnet. It’ll just keep pushing away. It’ll push away with all of its force and the experience for you will be one of fear.

I don’t necessarily have an alternative for you. I have no, “When faced with your deeply-rooted desire for a social, shared world and a world which can be highly scrutinized, here’s what you should consider instead:”. Short of renunciation, the traditional and obvious solution (to which I assume the reader is not open, but which I advocate to anyone who is) I don’t have a good method for overcoming these tendencies and rebuilding latent desires, nor for overcoming metaphysical lightning bolts of fear. But I do think it’s very important to acknowledge their existence and influence, because they can pass us by entirely undetected.