Too Engrossed to notice

I'm an avid player of videogames(I detest the word gamer because mainstream media has effectively ruined it for me now) and I've played a significant number of games over the years. With genres varying from Real Time Strategy to Racing, I'd like to think that I've tried a little of it all.

I think one of the essential things about videogames that make it so alluring as a medium is its ease of escapism. With a piece of art or book or movie, one must empathize with the characters to truly immerse themselves in that world but for videogames that barrier to entry is removed. 

In a sense its an ability to experience and do things without any consequences of significance that makes videogames so desirable as they are. One such game for me was Dishonored(yes it spells honour like that because it's made by an American Game Studio).

Dishonored

In Dishonored the player controls Corvo Attano, Lord Protector(Think head bodyguard) to the Empress Jessamine of Dunwall. The story of the game sets off with the Empress' assassination(yeah she didn't stick around for long) at the hands of a mysterious assassin with supernatural powers, Corvo is framed for the incident by some corrupt Royal officials looking to usurp the throne(the rightful heir-Emily the daughter of the Empress was also kidnapped in the incident). Corvo is thrown in the prison to await his death but he manages to break out and gains powers of his own to set out through the plague ridden Dunwall, to take vengeance on the conspirators and rescue Emily.

It's a fairly cliché story in a sense- very Count Of Monte Cristo-esque and yet I think that even the most rudimentary and simple ideas when applied with excellent execution can be extremely beautiful in their result. Dishonored is a prime example for that.

The most enthralling part of Dishonored is Corvo's powers, he can possess people, teleport himself. slow(even stop) time and can even create swarms of plague infested rates who devour hapless enemies in a macabre dance of death. All of this leads to a lot of player driven choices to engage in a variety of ways to dispose of your enemies. 

You could freeze time and shoot a crossbow bolt at his head and summon a swarm of rats at his feet with the result of his instant decapitation and the devouring of the rest of his body by the rats- Vivid, yes.

However, there is another option available to you as an alternative. You could choose to be the bigger man, you could choose to just avoid them entirely using your abilities to at most knock them out non-lethally, in fact you can do the same to your targets. It is a more difficult route without the aforementioned satisfaction of using your powers to their fullest extent but they result in a good ending where you manage to restore piece to the empire.

Someone's who's playing the game blind(for the first time) however won't know of this and therefore will likely go all out on a murdering spree resulting in a ending that honestly leaves one kind of dazed the first time around. You turn out to have influenced the young Lady Emily who you rescue at some point in the game and she transforms into a paranoid megalomaniac with a penchant for bloodlust, while you yourself have become the one thing that you set out to prove wrong, a cold blooded murderer.

What's all this got to do with anything?

Now I hear you thinking, what was the point of telling us all about this game that you played at some point Aby? How is it relevant to this post? 

I just wanted to tell you guys about this game that I thought was really cool...is what would get me killed but no, I mentioned this game and specifically the latter instance in regards to the topic at hand. 

Ever walk into a room and just completely forget why you came in there in the first place because you were thinking about something else? That is called being engrossed or specifically being in a state of deep thought or concentration. Being engrossed is a natural trait of human beings that allows them to concentrate on a single issue at the cost of reduced ability to multitask.

Earlier when I mentioned the second ending in Dishonored, why do you think people even got that ending in the first place? It's because they killed too much people in the game- straight forward answer, yes but why did they kill too many people?

A few answers come to mind: "I didn't know that you could spare people"(nonsense the game is very clear on your ability to do so) "I thought that I had spared enough people", "it was just too fun killing people."

Those last two answers are in particular interesting because they suggest that people knew what they were doing but rather than considering any potential long-term ramifications they were just enjoying the short term benefits. This resulted in them tunnel visioning on one thing and ignoring another.

In a way we as people are like Corvo(the evil one anyway), however there are no retries nor loading of saves for our lives.

"Ignorance is bliss"

That quote given above is particularly famous and is widely misconstrued to be said by William Shakespeare. It was actually said by Thomas Gray an English Poet. He implies that the world is full of misery and injustice and that one would be better off without knowledge of it. And yet I tend to disagree with him on this.

Does ignorance remove misery or injustice? No it merely avoids acknowledgement of it, sweeping it under the rug only for it to too big of a problem for us to merely avoid it. Yes, ignorance is bliss but in most scenarios it only causes greater pain than one would have to endure otherwise.

William Shakespeare DOES have a  quote on the matter but ironically it is critical of this notion and even contrary to it. His quote is "Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven".

Human beings have sought knowledge since ancient times, from Homo habilis to Aristotle to Nikola Tesla to the geniuses of today. We are incapable of just turning of our minds to a certain idea unless it falls afoul of our system of morality and even then outliers won't shy away from it.

How do we cope with this then? We avoid the issues by deflecting them or by focusing our energy on to other "worthier" causes and issues.

Why is addiction and dependence on the rise despite education regarding their negative effects? In fact a large amount of educated professionals are prime users of these substances. When surveyed on why these people would do as such with knowledge of potential repercussions and it's usually because they want to take their mind off things and indeed distract themselves from depressing situations in their lives.

Similarly when people are fresh off a heartbreak they are usually seen to become a "gym rat" in the case of men and focus more on their career and themselves for women, this is not mutually exclusive of course and more often than not a great deal of people engage in both.

In the first scenario the distraction that they engage in turns out to make the thing they avoided in the first place much more difficult to deal with and in some times insignificant compared to their much more dangerous new issue.

In the second scenario the distraction they engage in is more constructive in nature and turns out to be a net benefit for them.

So it stands to reason that people should engage in constructive distractions to further better their lives, however that isn't quite the right idea in my opinion. 

No matter how good you are doing with other issues, that won't affect the issues you're ignoring(at least not usually), that issue will persist until you respond to it for better or worse.

So, by all means engage in constructive pastimes or even some plain stupid pastimes that will take your mind off things for a while but do not try to ignore your problems, indeed rather consider the problem from fresh angles, introspect, consider a second opinion or maybe just wait; life has a funny way of providing the opportunities to solve its puzzles. They are opportunities however; not solutions, that is for you to find.

In our world of endless prophecies of doom, stagnant realities and seemingly irrelevant pasts it is easy to feel like one can't solve a problem, but drowning yourself in ignorance is not the way out, "accepting" your state of affairs is nothing without ever considering your actions is nothing more than giving up in the face of difficulty only to land in greater difficulty.

Ignorance is fleeting bliss after all.