Sean recently posted an excellent research paper that touches, among other things, on the notion of games as "safe spaces". If you haven't read it, or at least skimmed it, then in the words of the great Will Ferrell James Lipton, do yourself a favor.
"I'll found a civilization/be a serial killer/perform surgery on a sea lion/fight a Clone War in this safe space, and it won't affect me at all!"
The notion is undeniably enticing - it helps explain games' seemingly contradictory effectiveness as both teaching tools and escapist fare. In many cases, the appeal of a safe and inconsequential reality-space is what draws people to this medium. But as Sean points out through the example of negotiation games, the inconsequentiality of games is something of a mirage.
Even when the event is framed and contained in a glowing 17" LCD monitor, even when the only sensory feedback we get from our actions is a flashing screen or MAYBE (if we're not playing PS3) a rumbling controller, we can never FULLY compartmentalize our experience and be safe from consequence, no matter how hard we try. We've still spent our time and energy on the experience, and whatever we've gone through is a part of our mental makeup, as surely as the cereal you ate for breakfast is part of next week's muscle mass and the fried chicken you ate for dinner is next week's roll of belly fat.
Now that Jack Thomson has been disbarred and we're all sleeping a little easier, this claim will hopefully be a little more palatable to other gamers. Still, let me clarify what I mean.
I'm not saying that playing Grand Theft Auto makes you a carjacker, or playing Phoenix Wright makes you a lawyer... because there's a vast difference between what you actually experience in games and the fiction that's being presented to you. When you do a hit and run in GTA, you are (hopefully) quite aware that there are essentially no real-world consequences for your actions, and that the so-called "damage" you're doing to the world is just the shuffle of polygons. You've (hopefully) internalized that before you turned on the game. However, even though you're not really jacking cars, you ARE really spending a chunk of of your day playing through an adrenaline fueled dance of break-the-rules-then-escape-to-safety.
Does your body engage in that activity then throw those experiences away when the game ends? Absolutely not.
My conviction isn't purely theoretical... I've had experiences that back it up. The most obvious one points back to GTA, and that aforementioned transgression/flight pattern that makes it so entertaining. One afternoon I was hanging out with my friends the Pineiro brothers, playing San Andreas the only way I know how: raking up stars and trying to make the sickest escapes possible. I had a great time driving tractor-trailers off cliffs, zig-zagging through cop barricades, leaping from building to building as sirens pursued. But after a while, Vic and I got hungry, so we turned off the game and went for a drive to get some grub.
I was sitting in the passenger seat watching the streets go by when I saw a cop pull around a corner. You know the moment when you see the sirens and you wonder whether they'll flash. Usually I get instinctively nervous (having spent a fair shake of time driving over the speed limit on I-95).
This time, minutes off a session of GTA, what was my gut response? A rush of excitement.
Had I become morally bankrupt? Had I been lost my respect for authority? No, not at all. But my body was responding, as it had for the last few hours, to the stimulus of a cop as if it was part of the GTA pattern. It expected a chase.
There's a lot more to say about the consequences of our supposedly consequence-free game spaces, some of which are covered in Sean's paper. In another post, I'd like to continue examining the concept of games as metaphorical activities, and look at the difference between what we THINK we're doing (because of the fiction) and what we're actually doing in a game.