In the remote forests below the Ironspike Mountains, there is a stretch of land known by Valoran champions as the Summoner's Rift. According to League of Legends lore, this place is energetically plentiful—the perfect arena for warriors to unleash their powers on each other. There, Evelynn, a blue non-human woman, is hidden in the shadows of the trees. As her enemies pass, she appears from the darkness and summons subterranean forces. Large red spikes erupt from the earth and impale them.But Evelyn is guided by someone else. Above her, outside of Valoran, there is a man named Patrick. "I can play a game for an entire day, completely engrossed in the world that is appearing on my 15-inch notebook [computer] screen," Patrick told me. He is in his early 30s, 6'5", 300 pounds, and currently unemployed in Silicon Valley. Virtual worlds have played an important role in Patrick's life since childhood.Though he denied it for years, today Patrick believes he's addicted to video games. "Room is a mess, debt collectors and friends are calling," he said, explaining what happens to his life when he falls back into gaming. "I smell like shit, and my future livelihood is uncertain—but none of it really matters when I'm concentrating on those 15 inches." Patrick was sober from gaming for a while, but he is currently in a self-defined relapse, which means he spends all day, every day, in a virtual world.Read more: My Sensual Journey into Japan's $90 Million Fake Anime Boyfriend Market
A friend of mine recently built a VR setup in his Brooklyn apartment, and I met him at his home one weekend this summer to experience it myself. He placed sensors around his living room that define the boundaries of the virtual environment; there was a large, futuristic headset and two handheld controllers. I doubted VR would feel real, but when he put the device on my head my knees went weak: I was suddenly floating above Earth's atmosphere, looking down from space. Though I could feel the floor beneath my feet and hear my friend speaking, my body also reacted to the world simulated in the headset. It felt like he was very far away.I smell like shit, and my future livelihood is uncertain—but none of it really matters.
But Rizzo also believes that VR can be helpful in ways beyond clinical application. "There are many people who probably go a week without talking to a human being or anything other than a perfunctory 'please' and 'thank you' carried out at a 7/11," Rizzo said. "There are a lot of lonely people." Maybe they live online for good reason.Mark Silcox is the chair of the department of humanities and philosophy at the University of Central Oklahoma, a co-author of Philosophy Through Video Games, and currently at work on an anthology on the ethics of choosing to live in virtual realities called Experience Machines: The Philosophy of Virtual Worlds. "I want to know whether my fellow philosophers think that it's ever rational (or morally permissible) to prefer spending one's time in virtual realms over the experience of 'real life,'" Silcox writes on his publisher's website, Rowman & Littlefield International.
"I know some people would talk negatively about [compulsive gamers]," Patrick told me. "'They're not benefiting society.'" But though his personal goal is to curb his addiction and enjoy the experience of the physical world, Patrick believes that people who are happily living in virtual reality serve a purpose, too. "They are benefiting society," Patrick assured me. "They're benefiting other people who are existing in their world."Some days I was sure I would be happier on the other end of that portal, but other days I thought that, if I left, I'd miss my life on Earth.
My progression into a virtual world was similar to Patrick's. The story of Diablo II unfolded in a mortal realm called Sanctuary, where tyrannical lords of terror, hatred, and destruction had come to kill and consume mankind. Three Prime Evil beings—Diablo, Lord of Terror; Mephisto, Lord of Hatred; and Baal, Lord of Destruction—were imprisoned within "soulstones," exiled to Sanctuary by lesser demons, and the player's mission was to rid the world of them.When I first got Diablo II, I'd already been playing video games for years. Like Patrick and his friends, my brother and I would meet at home after school to gun each other down in GoldenEye 007, or seek the Triforce in the Legend of Zelda, or battle in the floating island arenas of Super Smash Bros., where we embodied familiar icons pulled from the pantheon of 90s gaming culture. When we didn't win, we'd yell and throw our controllers to the floor, burying our faces dramatically in the sofa cushions.Diablo II wasn't like that. It wasn't something I could pick up and let go after a few hours—it was a world that I chose to live in and believed was better than this one. Everything that I failed at on Earth could be conquered in Sanctuary. I strode from level one toward the ultimate, nearly unachievable, level 99. While I was weak and bullied in my real life, in Diablo II I could slaughter those who rose against me, terrorizing my enemies with the dark arts by summoning undead spawn in player-vs.-player (PvP) duels.Read more: Elves, Anal, and Breeding Fetishes: Inside World of Warcraft's Thriving Sex Club
Evelynn, the blue woman in League of Legends, is an unusual avatar for Patrick. He is a towering, bearded man in the physical world and usually prefers to have his true form be represented in virtual reality. (He uses Evelynn in League of Legends because she is one of the easiest characters to play.) In another game, Skyrim, Patrick is large, male, and carries a broad axe. "I try to play me, but maybe a little bit better version of me," he said.There were several types of characters to choose from in Diablo II—barbarians, paladins, amazons. Sometimes I played as the sorceress, but my first choice—and the character who has stayed with me all these years—was the necromancer. The necromancers of Diablo II were priests in the cult of Rathma whose peculiar aesthetic and dark work with the dead was condemned and distorted by the ignorant majority of Sanctuary. I felt that paralleled my life pretty well.Most of the extra value someone is supposed to get out of the real world is something that can be captured with virtual reality, given the right tools.
By the time he entered high school, Patrick realized that he was "living through" his avatar. The distinction between his real life and the fantasy blurred as one began to affect the other. That happened to me, too, and perhaps it's not uncommon. Silcox told me that his students have begun to dress as their avatars. "They started to dye their hair the same colors as the characters they play in Final Fantasy," he said.A former gamer himself, he isn't surprised that real and virtual worlds can merge. "Playing Myst when it first came out influenced everything about me," Silcox said, referring to the enigmatic 1993 computer adventure game. "My house is essentially decorated in a Myst style; it changed my taste about how I wanted space to look."I was a disaffected teen in the early 2000s, and my interest in Diablo II was part of my flair for all things macabre. Like Silcox's students, my hair in the physical world picked up the ghoulish hues of the virtual crypts my necromancer haunted; at 16 I dyed it black and green. My look continued to darken; when a boy broke my heart, I pierced my bottom lip with two steel rings to mimic the pierced nipples of Andariel, the Maiden of Anguish.
Anyone with parents who yelled at them for spending a summer day playing a video game indoors knows that virtual reality is regarded as resoundingly inferior to real life. "That's always mystified me, the idea that just by virtue of being real an experience has a kind of value all by itself," Silcox said. "It's one of those things I've never felt."Read more: The Women Pushing Gender Out of Gaming
I view what we did in those imaginary worlds as part of my history.
Last summer I drove back to the town where I grew up. I hadn't been there in 15 years, and unsurprisingly, my childhood home had changed. The chipped paint was replaced with gray plastic siding; the birch tree that my father had planted in the front yard was gone. But up the road I could see that my old friend's house was still there.Zack was one of the few kids who stayed friends with me once puberty hit and it became clear that I didn't fit in with normal boys. We used to play Diablo II together. I remember one day after school when he pounded on my front door: He'd run all the way over to tell me that he'd finally found a rare and powerful ring that we both coveted in the tomb of Tal Rasha. Which part of that memory is real?As I looked over towards Zack's house, an old man lifted his head from the truck he was washing across the street. His hair had gone gray, and he was slightly heavier than I remembered, but otherwise he looked the same as when I was a child. I looked back at my old neighbor, knowing that I had changed much more than he had. He called me "miss," and asked if he could help me find where I was going.I looked away from the man and up at my old bedroom window. Diablo II could never uproot the deep feelings of worthlessness I felt back then, but it did give my life purpose and passion during a time when I couldn't see a future for myself in the physical world.Unlike in my hometown, little has changed in Sanctuary. The necromancer is as lithe as he was back then; the cathedrals are still haunted. Diablo and his brothers are still full of hate, and thousands of people like me still journey there, though most have moved on to other worlds.Now I log on rarely, but when I was a teenager I wished that I could play Diablo II night and day. I'd do anything I could to have more time in Sanctuary—avoid going down for dinner, skip family vacations, cancel plans with friends. When I didn't fake sick to stay home and play, I'd wake up early in the morning before school and log on. My computer was right behind that bedroom window. I remember watching the sunrise as I traveled through hell.Watch: This Engineer Is Making Your Fantasy Sports Dreams Come True