Summer Musings Part I

I've been reading a lot of opinion articles on morality in games, realism in games, virtual murder ect. and it's made me realize more than ever that the line between games and reality is becoming very thin and blurry. It's fascinating and almost a bit scary, but it makes me even more excited to be a part of this industry.
Obviously, creating a realistic game world can only be done if you have a deep understanding of the real world. By analyzing our world and attempting to recreate it we may find things we may not have noticed before. It allows us to see ourselves, the way we live and the world in which we live in a new way. The human experience is a confusing thing, therefore hard to replicate, but the harder we try to do so the better we may be able to understand it. (Taking this route in trying to understand life has almost been like a personal therapy for me.) By making a 'realistic game' we are taking our world and turning it into something artificial, something changeable and understandable to us because we built it. Its almost like a science project a child would do when observing the behavior of ants.
But what happens when we look at life as something artificial? something we ourselves have created? Is it the point of view of a god we have granted ourselves or a completely jaded view of the meaning of life? Maybe life as we know it is only that, a game. Soon the question will be 'which came first, the game or the player?'

This almost goes hand in hand with my P4 morality rant.

Anyway...I never thought that my response to "So why do you want to make video games?" would be, "To better understand the real world" but its seems that's where I'm at right now. I think at the beginning of last semester when I was asked that same question my answer was "to create a new world." Funny how things change. Although that still doesn't seem like a completely undesirable thing to do. Maybe I'll do both.