Morgan van Humbeck completed his shift in front of the television and passed out. Ten minutes later, his cell phone woke him.
‘Morgan, this is Teller,’ said a voice on the other end of the line.
‘Fuck off,’ van Humbeck replied in disbelief.
He hung up the phone and went back to sleep.
The drive from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas, Nevada, takes approximately eight hours when travelling in a vehicle whose top speed is forty-five miles per hour. In Desert Bus, an unreleased video game from 1995 conceived by the American illusionists and entertainers Penn Jillette and Teller, players must complete that journey in real time. Finishing a single leg of the trip requires considerable stamina and concentration in the face of arch-boredom: the vehicle constantly lists to the right, so players cannot take their hands off the virtual wheel; swerving from the road will cause the bus’s engine to stall, forcing the player to be towed back to the beginning.
The game cannot be paused. The bus carries no virtual passengers to add human interest, and there is no traffic to negotiate. The only scenery is the odd sand-pocked rock or road sign. Players earn a single point for each eight-hour trip completed between the two cities, making a Desert Bus high score perhaps the most costly in the medium. Van Humbeck, again unconscious on the couch, had just contributed to what was then a Desert Bus world record: five points.
Whenever Penn and Teller were booked to appear on Late Night with David Letterman, a close friend, Eddie Gorodetsky, the Emmy Award-winning television writer whose credits include The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Two and a Half Men, and Saturday Night Live, would visit their office and pretend to be Letterman to help them prepare. During one of these rehearsals, the trio came up with the concept of a video game that could work as a satire against the anti-video-game lobby.
‘Every few years, video games are blamed in the media for all of the ills in society,’ Teller tells me. ‘In the early 1990s, I wrote an article for The New York Times citing all the studies that show video games have no effect on a child’s morals. But we wanted to create some entertainment that helped make the point.’
The conversation with Gorodetsky seeded the idea of a video game that casts the player as a bus driver in a rote simulation. Where most game designers choose the extremities of life for their metaphor, Penn and Teller were interested in the most mundane and irritating job they could imagine.
‘The route between Las Vegas and Phoenix is long,’ says Teller. ‘It’s a boring job that just goes on and on repetitiously, and your task is simply to remain conscious. That was one of the big keys—we would make no cheats about time, so people like the attorney general could get a good idea of how valuable and worthwhile a game that just reflects reality would be.’ (The U.S. attorney general at the time, Janet Reno, was a vociferous critic of on-screen violence.)
The New Jersey–based video-game developer Imagineering created Desert Bus as one component of a larger game collection, called Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors, for the Sega CD, a short-lived add-on for the Sega Genesis console. Penn, Teller, and the game’s publisher, Absolute Entertainment, planned a lavish prize for any player who scored a hundred points, a feat that would require eight hundred continuous hours of play: a real-life trip from Tucson to Las Vegas on a desert bus carrying showgirls and a live band.
‘But by the time the game was finished, the format was dead,’ says Teller. ‘We were unable to find anybody interested in acquiring the game.’
Imagineering went out of business, and Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors was never released. The only record of the game’s existence was a handful of review copies that had been sent out to journalists in the weeks before the publisher went bust, in 1995.
The game remained a rumour until September 2005, when Frank Cifaldi, a freelance American journalist and self-professed video-game historian, received a package in the mail. Cifaldi is the founder of Lost Levels, a website dedicated to the preservation of rare and obscure video games.
‘The site attracted the attention of some people who happened to have copies of unpublished games they didn’t know what to do with,’ he explained. ‘One guy who used to review games for a magazine in the 1990s still had his review copy of Smoke and Mirrors.’ Cifaldi posted a review and a copy of the game to a number of Internet forums. Desert Bus had been rediscovered.
Humanity’s oldest quest is survival. We eat, drink, fight, and reproduce in service of this quest, passing on our DNA to each successive generation, ensuring that we survive, not only in life, but also after death. It’s logical, then, that the quests found in our video games reflect this daily undertaking, from which no living thing can escape. From the earliest titles in the arcades, video games have tasked players with staving off the inevitable ‘game over’ screen, that black, mournful purgatory into which we are deposited when our virtual opponents (be they space invaders, enemy soldiers, or a rival football team) get the better of us.
Almost all video games have this survival element coded within their rules, and ‘losing’ a game is usually closely linked to some idea of death. Video-game designers routinely employ the metaphor of life and death in their games’ terminology: characters have ‘lives’ (when they are depleted, you are ‘over’; do well in the game and you often earn extra lives, second chances that prolong your journey and provide a buffer from death), or ‘health,’ usually represented by hearts.
In many games, you replenish this health with food (Gauntlet), medicine (Halo: Combat Evolved) or bandages (Dead Rising). The language of survival is used across the medium with such regularity that we no longer notice its origins.
Some games turn characters into ghosts when they ‘die’ (Spelunky) while others, such as Demon’s Souls, make you return to the site of your most recent ‘death’ in order to collect the items you dropped there. Other video-game characters, such as Worms, mark the spot of their passing with a gravestone. In Cannon Fodder, for each of your soldiers that perishes during a mission, a new grave is added to a virtual hillside, a mark of their deaths (as well as an indication of the cumulative human cost of your various sorties). This language, both written and visual, infuses video games with primal urgency that we instinctively respond to; it’s a kind of shorthand by which a designer can indicate to a player that the stakes are tremendously high. They suggest that the loss is ultimate, even if, in the majority of cases, it is merely a temporary setback.
Eugene Jarvis, one of the most influential game designers of the 1980s, once said: ‘All the best video games are about survival—it’s our strongest instinct, stronger than food, sex, lust for money.’ (Jarvis’s best-known game, Defender, makes the player responsible not only for his or her own survival, but also for that of human characters, who must be carefully rescued.) Whether or not the central quest of survival makes for the best games is debatable, but survival is indisputably the dominant underlying quest of video games, from Spacewar! in the 1960s, all the way up to the latest military-themed blockbusters.
Video-game survival comes in many different guises. In Geometry Wars you play as a bright speck, trying to outmanoeuvre a firework display of angry particles. DayZ is a postapocalyptic scavenger hunt, in which players forage in the countryside, trading tins of beans, packets of biscuits, and scarce ammunition with people they meet, never quite sure whether the player they’re trading with will shoot them the moment their backs are turned. The Binding of Isaac is a game about surviving the shifting mazes of an underground basement. Here, enjoyment comes from being able to react to unexpected threats (which change with every play-through). Part of the appeal of this kind of survival challenge is the chance to learn and improve in a safe, consequence-free space. Like the lion cub play-fighting with its parent, learning how to handle itself, feint, pounce, and bite, we are somehow learning how to improve our chances of survival within a virtual dimension, perhaps so that we might better master survival in our own.
Not all kinds of survival in video games are so primal. Desert Bus explores a different kind of survival skill: that of endurance in the face of terminal boredom. Its challenge is that of persisting with a mundane task, the kind of situation we might face at our place of work. This kind of survival has to do with persistence, not for one’s life, but for one’s livelihood. And, in Desert Bus, some players were inspired to test just how long they could persist.
Van Humbeck is a former member of LoadingReadyRun, an Internet sketch-comedy group founded by Graham Stark and Paul Saunders in 2003.
‘I heard about Desert Bus in early 2006, on a website called waxy.org,’ Saunders tells me. ‘The blog post linked to an extensive description of the main game, as well as the various mini-games included on the disc—and, most importantly, it had a torrent of the entire game available for download.’
Saunders wanted to film the group as it attempted to complete Desert Bus for a sketch. But another of the team members, James Turner, had another idea. He suggested that, in the group’s quest to survive the monotony of the game, they might have a chance to join in a survival project on this side of the screen. He suggested using the game as a way to benefit Child’s Play, a charity that donates video games and consoles to children’s wards in hospitals around the world.
‘His idea was a live competition event where we would take pledges depending on how far we made it in various video games,’ says Saunders. ‘We decided to combine both ideas and play Desert Bus for charity.’
Desert Bus for Hope, as the event was dubbed, was scheduled to begin late November 2007, and Saunders built a simple website to promote its existence.
‘I initially called the website “The First Annual Desert Bus for Hope,” but only because I thought it sounded funny,’ he says. ‘We hadn’t thought about repeating the event at this point.’
For every donation they received, the group pledged to drive a portion of the game’s route between Tucson and Las Vegas. They would film their progress and live-stream it on the Internet.
‘The event itself was very cobbled together in the first year,’ explains Stark. ‘The camera’s wide-angle lens was held on with rubber bands.’ On the weekend of the event, Saunders and Stark set up the camera and a Sega CD system, and embarked on the first leg of the virtual journey.
‘They didn’t contact us,’ says Teller. ‘Someone sent me a news story about the event over e-mail. So I got in contact.
Saunders e-mailed Teller back, thanking him for his interest. He asked whether Teller might consider giving the team an encouraging phone call to inspire what had become a ‘hub of sleep deprivation.’
After Morgan van Humbeck hung up on him, Teller found another number to reach the team, and asked what they’d like for lunch.
‘They sent me the menu for a local Chinese restaurant,’ Teller recalls. ‘I made the calls and had it all delivered.’ Teller called back every day to buy the group lunch; he and Penn each donated five hundred dollars.
‘That first year, we had no plans for food or scheduling,’ says Stark. ‘If it hadn’t been for friends and family coming by with food, and to just hang out and keep us awake, I don’t think it would have succeeded.’ The team managed to score five points in a hundred and eight hours of continuous play before a driver, in the fug of drowsiness, crashed the bus.
‘When we discussed our fund-raising goal, we decided to aim for one thousand dollars,’ says Stark. ‘But I lobbied to increase our goal to five thousand dollars, to give our viewers something crazy to reach for. We raised twenty-two thousand and eighty-five dollars that year.’
Desert Bus for Hope is now in its tenth year, and has raised more than a million dollars.
‘I liken it to AIDS walks,’ says Teller. ‘When they first started, I think everyone was quite puzzled by them. Then people began to understand that performing a mundane task and having someone sponsor you is an interesting way to raise money.’
Nevertheless, both Saunders and Stark struggle to understand the game’s efficacy.
‘I have friends involved in worthwhile charities that struggle for every twenty-dollar donation,’ said Saunders. ‘But Desert Bus for Hope seems to operate in this strange alternate universe where you can challenge strangers on the Internet to donate five thousand dollars in the next five minutes, and the money seems to just suddenly appear.’ Teller said that at a recent magic show, ‘a guy came up to me and handed me a hundred-dollar bill and asked, “Would you get this to the guys that do Desert Bus?” ’
‘The game isn’t the challenge for us; it’s the excuse to keep us all trapped in a room for a week,’ Stark explains. ‘It’s the horrible glue that binds the whole event together. I’ve achieved a Zen-like state while playing it, where it doesn’t bother me as long as I don’t think about it. If I do think about it, it’s goddamn awful.’
Saunders agrees, mournfully: ‘It is, without a doubt, the very worst video game I have ever played.’
Desert Bus isn’t the only desert-based video game whose appeal remains somewhat unclear to its players. Desert Golfing, launched for iPhones in 2014, is another game set in an arid locale, with an indefinite end point, that has inspired the devotion of a huge following of players.
Like Minecraft, with its familiar rhythms of day and night, and familiar urges to stave off predators and to scavenge, Desert Golfing is a straightforward video game. But the emotional journey for its player is far more complicated. And it’s in this psychological journey that we can perceive something of the enduring appeal of survival games.
Here’s how it goes: You begin with the eager anticipation that immediately precedes the playing of all video games: the hope that you are about to be challenged, surprised, and thrilled by the work. For the first eighteen holes, these hopes are quietly met, accompanied by (for players of a certain age, at least) a sense of nostalgia at Desert Golfing’s Atari-chic aesthetic and impossibly simple control scheme (press your finger to the phone or tablet’s glass; pull back to smearily set the ball’s power and angle; release to putt).
With confidence comes the urge to improve. It’s now not enough to merely land the ball in the hole: you have to do so quickly and efficiently in as few shots as possible. You begin to read the power meter properly, to better judge the angles, to pull off the odd joyous hole-in-one. With mastery comes the desire to reset the game and start over with your newly acquired knowledge. But here Desert Golfing defies convention: there is no restart button, no option to exit and begin again. In fact, there is no menu at all.
Now comes the bitter realisation that, in contrast to other video games, which so generously allow us to remake our history until we perfect our story, in this wilderness you must live with your mistakes. The realisation is simple but profound: your past scorecard cannot be undone; you only have power to change the future.
Resignation comes next. Then, if you’re sensible, reconciliation. You learn to forgive your past self, that idiot who took all those hubristic, arcing shots, who so gleefully went for the thunderous hole-in-one when he should have putted his way to lesser, more bankable glories. Now, as you reach hole 150-odd, you find resolve. You’re lining up shots with care, but the real game takes place, as Bobby Jones famously put it, on the five-and-a-half-inch course between your ears.
You obsessively divide your total number of shots by the number of holes you’ve completed. Can you maintain an average of three per hole or less? This state persists every time you slide out your phone to get a few tees in while standing at the supermarket checkout till, or queuing at the post office behind a phalanx of texters.
At some point you become weary of the grind. Yet there is the dim awareness that, just maybe, there is nobility in the fact that you’ve made it to hole 1,687. You take to social media to share your progress. The preening only draws the other Desert Golfers out. In turn they post their screenshots, proving how much farther they’ve travelled down the rabbit hole(s). The moment of irritation is short-lived; it soon thickens into grim resolve. You head back into the wilderness and you persist. This simple, throwaway game is complicated. Desert Golfing isn’t so much a good walk spoiled as the gaming of survival.
Inspiration for Desert Golfing came to Justin Smith, an independent game designer from Vancouver, Canada, when playing Journey, Sony’s PlayStation 3 game about death and religion in the desert.
‘I wanted to add golf to Journey in the same way someone would draw a moustache on the Mona Lisa,’ explains Smith. ‘The terrain in that game was perfect for golf, and I thought golf would add a quantifiable purpose.’ Smith ‘let the idea sit for a while’ and then began to realise his vision in the bold 2D graphics of 1980s computer games. ‘The colour palette for Desert Golf is actually borrowed from Journey, but I figured it would be best not to call it Journey Golfing.’
At first Smith wanted to limit the game to a thousand holes. Rather than manually design these, he wrote an algorithm to randomise their layout ‘as a survival technique.’ Smith already had the name for the game, taking inspiration from Desert Bus. He then decided to draw further inspiration from Penn and Teller’s game by making it interminably long and repetitive.
Smith, who taught himself to programme by typing code listings from the back of magazines into the Sinclair 1000 computer that his grandmother bought him one Christmas, made the decision to prevent restarting the game early on.
‘Adding a way to start over would sap some of the fun out,’ he says. ‘If you’re doing poorly, the temptation to hit the reset button would always be lurking over you. But with no way to restart, the player feels a sense of freedom and reconciliation with life’s past mistakes.’
That sense of freedom and reconciliation was reflected in Smith’s own process of designing the game—which took just eight days from start to finish. The greatest challenge was, he says, to resist the temptation to add in ‘indulgent’ features such as curved slopes, power-ups, and wind.
‘Not all the holes are enjoyable,’ he says. ‘There are some very repetitive ones. And I did nothing to ensure that an impossible hole wouldn’t be generated. In fact, there’s a hole in the late 2000s that I was certain was impossible, a sudden ending in the middle of the desert. Of course: never underestimate players. They got past it.’
Since the game’s launch, players have been ‘getting past it’ in droves. The game has no end (the algorithm created infinite courses). But as Smith didn’t expect anyone to make it past the hole in the late 2000s, ‘What comes after is just patterns in white noise.’ This hasn’t stopped one player from making it past the five-thousandth hole, surviving against the odds.
‘Nobody should go that far,’ says Smith. ‘I’m saying it now so I don’t feel responsible for more wasted time: there is officially nothing of interest past the three-thousandth hole.’
Or is there? Because much of what makes Desert Golfing interesting exists independently of Smith’s intentions. The player’s journey through resignation to resolve is one that takes place in the mind; the desert’s landscape is secondary. Sure, it is here, among the dunes, that the game pricks some key interests in the player, the mystery of what lies ahead, the joy of discovering a new place, a new subtlety, a new rhythm in the play experience. But the desert is a mere backdrop for the mind games of perseverance in the face of hostility or futility, that very same urge that drives any human to endure.
Video games offer us a place in which to practise the art of survival, be it in familiar circumstances (the domestic environment of The Sims) or alien ones (Mass Effect, Halo, Call of Duty). Human beings are adaptable and ingenious, and video games allow us to explore the bounds of this adaptability and ingenuity; a way for us to feel clever about our aptitude or talent for survival, not to mention a way to compare our survival scores with those of our peers (regardless of whether that score is recorded in points, seconds lasted, or holes completed).
Maybe the incontrovertible evidence of the video-game high-score table acts as a way to prove to others our aptitude for survival, to advertise by quantitative measure our power and suitability as a mate. High scores allow us to create a pecking order; they describe who is the fastest, the strongest, the quickest, the most adaptable, the most likely to survive for the longest.
Video games, of course, present a different sort of opportunity to survive for the people who create them. In Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1973 book The Denial of Death, the late psychologist argued that all human civilisation is an elaborate, symbolic defence mechanism against our mortality. If we have children as a way to preserve our DNA and values, then we create art and entertainment (and even engage in acts of heroism) as a way to preserve our names, thoughts, ideas, and perspectives.
‘The real world is simply too terrible to admit,’ wrote Becker. ‘It tells man that he is a small trembling animal who will someday decay and die. Culture changes all of this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe. Immortal in some ways.’
This much is true of all game-makers: in their creations they are able to make tiny worlds that reflect their interests, values, and skills. But for one group of indigenous American people who, in 2014, began to design their own video game, the goal to survive through art was more deliberate and pointed than for most.
For more than three thousand years, the Iñupiat people of Alaska have passed on stories to their children. Like all enduring fiction, the stories deliver truths that transcend cultural shifts. They act as seeds of moral instruction and help to define and preserve the community’s identity. The story of Kunuuksaayuka, for example, is a simple tale of how our actions affect others: a boy named Kunuuksaayuka goes on a journey to identify the source of a savage blizzard. In the calm eye of the storm, he finds a man heaving shovelfuls of snow into the air, oblivious that they gather and grow into the squalls battering Kunuuksaayuka’s home downstream.
The Iñupiat’s oral tradition, however, is at risk. Over the past few decades, advances in technology and communication have opened up the community to a flood of other stories delivered in new ways.
‘As is common for indigenous peoples who are also part of a modern nation, it’s been increasingly difficult to maintain our traditions and cultural heritage,’ Amy Fredeen, the CFO of both E-Line Media, a publisher of educational video games, and the Cook Inlet Tribal Council (CITC), a nonprofit group that serves the Iñupiat and other Alaska natives, told me. ‘Our people have passed down knowledge and wisdom through stories for thousands of years—almost all of this orally—and storytellers are incredibly respected members of society. But as our society modernises it’s become harder to keep these traditions alive.’
For the CITC, the challenge was to find a way to preserve the community’s stories in a way that could withstand modernity. As the team pondered the problem over lunch a few years ago, the council’s CEO, Gloria O’Neill, suggested a video game. O’Neill had been looking at examples of indigenous communities expressing their heritage through modern forms—such as the film Whale Rider, which explores gender roles in Maori culture—and was considering whether the medium could help to preserve the Iñupiat’s cultural heritage. ‘We all agreed that, if done well, a video game had the best chance of connecting native youth with their cultural heritage,’ Fredeen says. Moreover, the council believed that a video game offered a chance to share the community’s stories and culture with new audiences around the world. ‘Our stories feature strong characters, fascinating settings, and are filled with wisdom and learning that address universal human themes. We believe they can travel.’
In conjunction with E-Line, the CITC founded Upper One Games, the first indigenous-owned video-game company in the United States.
‘We looked at a range of options for reaching the community’s business and creative goals,’ Sean Vesce, a creative director at the company, tells me. ‘We quickly settled on the idea of a game inspired by and based on the rich storytelling traditions and culture of the Iñupiat people. The climate in which they live is some of the most remote and extreme on the planet. We were immediately drawn to their world view, traditions, and values, and how that might translate into a video game.’
With any creative project in which a group of privileged Westerners look to recount the tales and customs of an indigenous group, there is a risk of caricature, even amiable racism.
‘We’ve repeatedly seen our culture and stories appropriated and used without our permission or involvement,’ Fredeen said. ‘People were sceptical that the project would turn out like these other examples, all appropriation and Westernization.’ To reassure them, the development team assembled a group of Iñupiat elders, storytellers, and artists who would become partners in the game’s development and lend their ideas and voices to the venture.
‘As it became clear to the community that this project was only going to move forward with their active participation, that hesitancy quickly evaporated,’ Fredeen says. ‘We’ve had everybody from eighty-five-year-old elders who live most of the year in remote villages to kids in Barrow High School involved in the project.’
The result is Never Alone (Kisima In itchu a in the Iñupiat language). In the game, players switch between the role of a girl named Nuna and her pet arctic fox. Each character has a different set of skills, and the pair must work together to overcome obstacles on a journey that mirrors the one taken by Kunuuksaayuka, the blizzard investigator. This theme of interdependence is central to Iñupiat stories, no doubt born of the need to help one another in order to survive the harsh Alaskan conditions. It’s a message Never Alone seeks to impart through both its spoken narration (which has been recorded in Iñupiat) and the unspoken story communicated by its rules and mechanics.
For Vesce and the rest of the game’s development team, partnering with amateur game-makers was unusually challenging.
‘To make Never Alone, we had to break from some traditional and fundamental ways of making games and bring the community into the creative process—a community that knew very little about the medium but that had strong thoughts on what they wanted to see in a game based on their culture,’ Vesce says. He calls this kind of collaboration ‘inclusive development,’ in which each group is a student of the other’s world. ‘While it’s extremely rewarding, it also requires a huge commitment from all sides to build a foundation of mutual trust and respect.’
Despite the importance of keeping the Iñupiats’ vision for the project, there was no formal approval process during development.
‘It was more subtle, involving conversations with many different people, soliciting and gauging reactions to ideas, and finding creative solutions to meet both the community’s goals and our goals as game-developers,’ Vesce says. ‘When we encountered things that sounded great to us as game-developers but didn’t resonate with our community partners, they would often present alternatives that ended up being much more interesting and often more challenging to incorporate.’
Never Alone’s purpose is to preserve fading stories. It’s a way not only for game-makers to survive, per Becker’s definition, through their works of art, but also for an entire tradition and world view to survive through the representation. It’s a worthy ambition, but in order to convince the Iñupiat young people of the stories’ enduring power and worth, it must also succeed as a video game. In a sense, it was perhaps the riskiest way of approaching the Iñupiat’s problem: this kind of storytelling requires an entirely new vocabulary. Reconciling narrative demands with the need to be engaging and functional remains one of the greatest challenges in game development; it’s a struggle for even the largest and best-funded teams.
As we have seen, video games are well suited, however, to render in exquisite detail historical places and periods, and even the societies within them—the environments and systems that facilitate story creation in the first place. Players are often cast as a game’s protagonist, with an active role in its story, where they cannot help but see things, at least superficially, from a new perspective. Never Alone, if nothing else, offers a way, however incomplete, to experience life as an Iñupiat girl, eliciting the kind of empathy that we have seen games can generate in unique and powerful ways.
There’s another memorable line in The Denial of Death, a book built from columns of memorable lines.
‘People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves,’ Becker writes in a truth that’s dispensed with enviable brevity. This thought is especially pertinent to the game-maker, who is in the business of reality creation. There is something here that links Desert Bus to Desert Golfing to Never Alone (as well as, of course, to all of those games built for therapeutic reasons, in or through which their creators hope to find understanding and healing), all of which are games based in hostile environments, where survival is a challenge, where reality bears down on the human. They are adverse realities, to which humans are drawn. In games we can find a resilience to survive against all odds. In Desert Bus, it’s expressed as stoicism in the face of the stultifying rhythms of monotony found in a repetitious task. In Desert Golfing, it’s in mastering the mind games of a seemingly endless mission. And in Never Alone, it’s about preserving a memory.
Survival is the foundation stone that underpins all video games. They offer a quick and easy reassurance of our capacity to endure, to have second chances, to survive. Even if we fail, if Mario loses his final life on a hill in the Mushroom Kingdom, or if Lara Croft misjudges a leap and falls to her death at the bottom of some forgotten tomb, there’s always another go. Even the most punitive games, such as Steel Battalion, a Japanese game that famously erases your character’s saved progress when he ‘dies,’ allow you to restart the game from the beginning. Video games soften reality’s bite by giving us the reassurance that there’s always another go: the extra life, the time-extend, the ‘continue.’
There is a somewhat grim irony to this idea in the context of the Taiwanese café deaths. If we play video games in order to gain a sense of immortality, or at the very least to practise the art of survival, how tragic when a video game plays a role in the death of its player. In these cases the illusion proves not only treacherous, but untrue.
Nevertheless, it’s an illusion that, for a moment at least, pulls our thoughts away from the ultimate truth: life on this earth is fatal.