I was visiting a friend at work the other day when an attractive woman walked by his office, looked in and winked. He smiled back, then turned to confide that she had expressed an interest in him. Knowing he was married with three children and that the workplace is a common place for romance, I was surprised when he closed the office door and began to regale me with the possibilities, the fantasies, the opportunities and temptations of a liaison.
"Too bad it's not a video game," he mused. "Role playing has gotten so sophisticated you can be whoever you want to be. Take the latest version of Grand Theft auto. You can do good things and help people or you can be a thug who goes on a murder spree. Of course if you go bad, the cops chase you and you gotta run and hide."
"Consequences," I said. "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas."
"Right," he nodded. "You turn off the game and you're done."
"At least until you get a long-distance call in the middle of the night that doesn't fit your agreement."
"Ouch," he smiled, a little bit thinly.
I got to thinking about the common denominator between the virtual world and the real world, between the world of the business hotel and the home. Long after the plane has landed, long after the game is switched off the ideas, images, rules, and even the energy of what was done in the video game remains in the mind of the traveler, the gamer. There's a link there, a bridge of memories, values and emotions. Once the game is turned on again, or the plane's wheels go up, that traffic begins to flow once more.
If this were not true, if there was no emotional resonance stirred by the games we play, the TV we watch, the movies we see, then studies would not find a correlation between on-screen violence and real-world violence; but they do. The mind is a delicate and complex entity. It can suspend the disbelief created by one set of senses to enjoy the reality created by another. That's what makes the small screen, the big screen, and the computer screen so compelling. In the not-too-distant future perhaps we will have helmets and sensors all over our body and be able to "enter" worlds of technology's making. In those worlds we will voyage to other planets, fight dinosaurs, rob banks, breathe quickly, feel fatigue and pain, shoot each other, and have pangs of guilt -- or not -- over morally reprehensible actions.
Probably it's a good time to start considering how the mind -- rife with sensory and motor nerves and including its bodily extensions, circulating hormones, pheromones, neurotransmitters and more -- is shaped by experience. What we do in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas. It comes home with us, and worms around inside us. What we do on the computer does the same thing. Over time, the worms of betrayal, wantonness, lust, dishonesty and violence bear fruit. That fruit may be something as truly horrific as a school shooting, but more likely it's just a sense of unhappiness, uneases, or even self-loathing.
I happen to be a fan of video games, especially if I can play them with my son. As a martial artist I particularly favor those that involve a good round of kicking and punching or better yet some swordplay. I even wrote a video game parlor scene in my most recent novel, The Crocodile and the Crane. In it, an immortal plays the game in front of his student, and his foes evoke some of the real life challenges of his 3000 years on the planet. That immortal is a character of great substance, though, a semi-supernatural creature in no danger of being dragged down by two-dimensional war.
Although society demands a certain common ground, when it comes to our private lives, we all have our own ideas about what is right and what is wrong and we may well have different susceptibilities to experience and patterning too. A person's beliefs and faith and choices are personal, so long as they don't affect others. Free will is great, free choice is great. Business trips often bear great fruit, and there are many terrific options in the virtual world; action simulators, puzzles of beautifully drawn worlds within worlds, fascinating absorbing games like Spore and the Sim series. It's a new frontier and the profit and possibilities draw some of our most creative minds.
In the end it turns out it's all about what's inside us, not what's out there. Despite the barrage of temptations and entertainments, our lives continue to be about the choices we make; the resulting emotions are most often of our own making. Technology may support us and deepen our experience, or it may threaten to pull us away from our core and threaten our sense of reality.
As President Jimmy Carter famously confessed to doing, maybe we all lust in our minds from time to time, and maybe we all entertain shooting fantasies too. It's great to imagine and it's great to have fun, but if we are going to strive to be the best people we can be, to elevate ourselves according to a spiritual model we each carry with us in our heart, to touch something ineffable and larger than ourselves, then we have to be aware of the flow of energy within us and consider how even our virtual worlds affect us.