We are all inhabitants of our own reality. On the one hand we’re kind of like sponges, absorbing everything around us and integrating it, whether we care to or not. On the other hand, deliberately or not we shape our worlds to reflect our own inner structures.
Whatever we may carry into a situation, experiences physically change our neural pathways. Repetition, familiarity, reinforces a link, like sketching over a line again and again until it becomes solid. Likewise, the way we position furniture, leave piles of papers or empty cans, what we choose to clean and how, what projects we leave unfinished, what we ruin, what we fix, what we wear down; how we choose to break up and break in and use the space given to us, it all imprints our environments just as emotions crease our aging faces.
In effect, our inner and outer worlds build up a feedback loop. As we carve out our place in the world, we settle into the spaces we carve, reassuring ourselves with their familiarity while we use those bold lines, so often scribbled over, to brand ourselves inside and out. This, we tell ourselves, is how the world works.
This is why videogames are so interesting; they are, in effect, bottled external worlds, into which we can momentarily plug our inner worlds to see what happens. Each game is a little feedback loop, allowing the player both to imprint his actions into a world, to leave his little mark — even if only in a high score table — and to absorb, from a simplified sketch with no social or practical consequences, a new way of being, a new way of doing things.
Some people are more concerned with leaving their mark, others more with expanding their horizons. Some give more, some take more. The point is that in their essence, videogames encapsulate this dynamic between the two. They are a study in cause and effect; the easier those worlds are to affect, the more useful a response they give, the more the player owns actions and consequences alike, the more satisfying the experience.