I knew Postman had great critiques along these lines, but was too lazy to find the exact quotes. I still intend to read the books. Yeah it is a bit ironic to use AI, but I know I am not going to end up using AI 8+ hours a day to live in a virtual world -like most if not all gamers will do at some point in their life (probably the most developmental time).
Kind of a bad argument, considering you can apply this exact same argument to books, comics, hell even stuff like music, or daydreaming. People have used real
and fake experiences as a way to relax/learn/process things.
Simple breathing techniques can relax you very well. But then you are still stuck in the boring real world, which I think is the real problem.
Not particularly for most people in the world. Ask around any real people who play video games, and have a job they go to, most people play games casually, the same way others scroll their phone, watch a movie, or read a book. They don't spend 8+ hours on it. The core issue here is overuse, it also isn't particularly good for you if you spend 8+ hours a day reading books, or listening to music, instead of doing something more productive, the key to your argument is overuse without moderation. Which... you don't seem particularly capable of, and are projecting your own incapability upon others around you.
the insidious nature of submerging yourself in a false digital reality where you can increasingly be mesmerized into thinking it is real.
Also this one is rather weird to begin with, since pretty much everyone is VERY capable of distinguishing reality from fiction these days, I could actually apply the same logic you are using here to people who read books, for example, the Mary Celeste. And Conan Doyle's short story; "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" which was essentially the Mary Celeste tragedy but with slight details changed, like the ship being renamed to the Marie Celeste. And yet it was influential enough to actively fuck up the actual investigation into the Mary Celeste. Including having the investigator make inquiries based on the story facts, rather than real facts... Yet another one I can posit for books/stories is the original radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" which caused actual panic in parts of America. I can directly quote a memoir about it here too.
"The following hours were a nightmare. The building was suddenly full of people and dark-blue uniforms. Hustled out of the studio, we were locked into a small back office on another floor. Here we sat incommunicado while network employees were busily collecting, destroying, or locking up all scripts and records of the broadcast. Finally, the Press was let loose upon us, ravening for horror. How many deaths had
we heard of? (Implying they knew of thousands.) What did
we know of the fatal stampede in a Jersey hall? (Implying it was one of many.) What traffic deaths? (The ditches must be choked with corpses.) The suicides? (Haven't you heard about the one on Riverside Drive?) It is all quite vague in my memory and quite terrible."
Quoted directly from the memoir made of the radio broadcast, that being said, there are also statements from Paul White (head of CBS News at the time, whose Radio subsection was transmitting the radio reading.) who mentioned that calls were coming in from as far as the Pacific Coast.
My entire point, to summarize with a TLDR, is that people over-reacting to fictional media isn't a new thing introduced by games, and people being unable to distinguish fiction from reality isn't entirely new either. It's a broader human behavior.
