Many of my friends now wouldn't know it, but in middle school, I always expected to do something with my life that was related to math. I did math competitions and worked my way well ahead of grade level through independent study. Something of that changed in high school, but I've still sort of wondered why I was so interested in math, and why I liked it so much; in fact, why I do still like it so much.
I've also sometimes wondered why I like video games so much. There's something about them that makes them easy to go to, no matter how I'm feeling, and I've basically grown up playing them. In the end, I think the two are connected, but how they are takes some telling.
Math is a very concrete thing. It has as many wrong answers as you want, but only one right answer, and if you follow the right steps, you'll always find the right answer. There's no variation, no instability. It makes sense, at least to me.
The problem is that people aren't like that. People are complicated and confusing. There is no right answer to a person. We are variable. We can very easily be unstable, changing, and just plain strange. People are not problems to be solved, not things to be used. We are made in the image of God, and that is a great and a terrible thing.
With that in mind, it's kind of strange that I decided in college to be an author. I'm diving headfirst into a world of characters, who are theoretically my own creations, to do with as I want, but who easily develop personalities of their own that do not always bend to my will, strange as that may seem. There are some things I can't get my tough-skinned mercenary to do, no matter how much I want to, if I'm being true to the characters and to the story. And, beyond that, I have to deal with editors and agents and readers. I have to find someone to take and publish my books so that people will be able to read them. It's hard.
Video games link them together, in a way. The games I like tend to be the ones that have a lot of story to them, especially RPGs. (For those who may not know, an RPG in this case is not a rocket-propelled grenade; it's a role-playing game. Typically, one where you control one character or a small group who do quests and grow in levels as they gain experience and that sort of thing.) I told myself for a while that I mostly played these games for the rich story aspect. There's also an element of simply enjoying the colorful, imaginary worlds that are often created for these games.
And while that is still mostly true, I think there are a couple other reasons. One is that video games are mathematical. They're rooted in computer code, which has to be written a certain way for things to work. They also function, foundationally, on mathematical models. In an RPG, my character will gain another level (a fixed number) after gaining a certain amount of experience (another fixed number), experience which I earn in specified amounts by doing certain things. I complete a number of quests for various people or reasons. My characters equip armor and weapons which have certain statistics to make them stronger and defeat more difficult enemies.
It's all very mathematical, when you look at it that way. I think that helps me. Video games can't just decide not to give me experience for something, or arbitrarily become much harder to kill off my characters (unless that's programmed into the game, in which case I can "expect" it). It's a way that I can pull back from the real world for a little while and just do something that's easy, something that doesn't drain me constantly, that doesn't hurt me at times. I don't know if that's good or bad. It's certainly a trade-off; I miss out on the glory and wonder of individual people, and we are glorious and wonderful indeed, when we can see it. And yet, as an introvert, it's comforting not to have to worry about that for a while.
There's one other thing that's very important, that I touched on in the last paragraph. Video games don't really hurt me; at least, not much, or not often. But in my life, I've gone through a lot of rejection. I've been rejected from doing most of the things I love to do, from working at a summer camp that changed my life when I was a student there, to publishing books, to dating, to playing roles in shows, and it's so hard that sometimes I have to retreat into something that (usually) won't reject me.
But I know I can't stay there. I know I am a person made in the image of God, made for either eternal glory or eternal despair, for either salvation or damnation, and that I am surrounded by others just like me. I have to go back out into the world and be with these people, because, in the end, I am made for relation, not isolation. Math is easy because it's concrete; relation is hard, because it's with other people who are confusing and changeable and strange and not like me. But at the same time, it's so much better than anything else. So I go back out, and I live, and I am hurt, and I retreat, and then I go back out again. And someday, when all is stripped away, I will see my fellow human beings for what they are, and see myself for what I am, and I will see that One of whom we are the image.
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