I didn't grow up rich. Most of the toys I made were homemade. I remember I actually made myself a little wooden Tommy gun and ran around my parent's yard shooting up the place. I had a few other little things, swords, crossbows, all that I made from the woods behind the house. They were pretty good for a kid with no attention span and only the most rudimentary understanding of power tools.
But what made up for the quality of the items, was the fact that I transported myself when I was using them. I really had a lot of fun, pretending to play war, or building a survival hut out in the middle of "the wilderness" all of 500 feet from my house. But that didn't matter. The sense of accomplishment I felt when I came back in from "winning the war" or "being rescued" wasn't diminished by the fact it wasn't real. I admit, I don't know what it's like to actually accomplish those things, but I'd imagine they're comprable to what I felt.
As I got older, as I think most of us did, I stopped wanting the purely infantile excitement of imagined accomplishment. I wanted to achieve in reality. I started doing better in school, started looking for opportunities to make a difference in my neighborhood, I plugged into a few volunteer organizations, and all with the expectation that I'd find that certain satisfaction that I felt as a kid. I'd say I came close. But as with most nostalgic memories, I never got it quite right....
I think that what I came to realize is that what I needed wasn't a real accomplishment, but rather the feeling of accomplishment. One that was relevant to my context. If I hung out with a bunch of football players and bragged about how I read Sowell's "Basic Economics" when I was 12 I doubt that'd mean the same thing as it would to a bunch of bookworms. Our accomplishments are entirely based off our context. That's why video games are so powerful. Video games not only provide easy to achieve goals, but they provide a context in which those goals are important. When I'm saving the universe, that feels important. Despite the fact that the universe I'm saving is a bunch of ones and zeros on a magnetic disc.
But does the fact that it wasn't real diminish any part of our personal satisfaction? I don't think it does, at least not to a huge extent. Especially when we understand the context of videogames to be something we inheritantly seek out for a sense of satisfaction. Much like a drug, videogames give us the feeling that we want from them. They enable some aprt of our brain to latch on to sensory information and tell us that we're doing a "good job. And that we're achieveing. That feeling, like a drug, is still real. It's a chemical reaction happening in our brain. But the fact is that the reason it's happening isn't what people call "real". But if I played videogames for what was "real" I wouldn't be playing videogames.
The bottom line is that I enjoy the "false" sense of accomplishment I get when I defend Gondor from Sauron. I like it when I hear the Halo announcer tell me I've gotten a "Killing Spree". I feel good when I see "100%" complete on a game's statistic. That means something in my own personal context. Whether or not a college profesor would advocate that this is "meaningful" is irrelevant I like it. And in the end, that's the entire premise of gaming.
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