In Jamil Jan Kochai’s short story “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain,” the teenage son of an immigrant family from Afghanistan plays the titular PS4 game alone in his room. The game, which partially takes place in Cold War–era Afghanistan, has obvious resonance with the narrator’s family history: His father suffers from post-traumatic stress due to having been tortured years ago in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, and his uncle was killed there. The story, at least on the surface, is literally about a character playing a real-life video game (Metal Gear Solid is one of the most famous gaming series in history). As the narrator plays the game, maneuvering the hero (Snake) through a warzone while shooting Soviets, things eventually take a surreal turn: Snake encounters the narrator’s father and deceased uncle within the game. As the narrator plays, his family begins knocking on his bedroom door (he has since barricaded himself inside so as to not be disturbed), pleading with him to come out. Eventually, his father knocks, referring to him as Zoya in hopes that the nickname from the narrator’s childhood will break him from the isolated spell of gaming, so to speak. We read:
‘Zoya?’ he is saying, very gently, the way he used to say it when you were a kid, when you were in Logar, when you got the flu, when the pills and the I.V. and the home remedies weren’t working, when there was nothing to do but wait for the aching to ebb, and your father was there, maybe in the orchard, maybe on the veranda, and he was holding you in his lap, running his fingers through your hair, and saying your name, the way he is saying it now, as if it were almost a question.
The narrator ignores his father, pushing himself deeper into the virtual world, which has become a bizarre projection of his yearning to redeem both his pained father and dead uncle. The story concludes with Snake wading into a dark cave with the father and uncle propped on each shoulder in an attempt to bring them to safety as the narrator’s lonely reflection gleans from the TV screen.
It’s a heartbreaking story, and Kochai does a masterful job of helping us feel the narrator’s pain and understand his unwillingness to live in a reality where he is powerless to heal his father’s suffering or bring his uncle back from the dead. The story can be read as an exploration of generational trauma or a critique of the ways interactive technologies, like gaming, can enable us to escape from psychological and emotional pain. The game becomes for the narrator an illusory realm, one where he attempts to cope with and heal from his family’s trauma. Yet, the game is also the very thing that keeps him isolated from his family, preventing both the narrator and his father from arriving at a semblance of healing through communal presence. This digital fantasy is preferred because it offers the illusion of control, heroic agency, even salvation.
The World Health Organization offers the strict definition of a gaming addiction defined in the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as “a pattern of gaming behavior (‘digital-gaming’ or ‘video-gaming’) characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.” An addiction to gaming is dangerous because it hinders other activities, the way an addiction to drugs or alcohol might leave the addict unable to meet his professional or familial responsibilities. Gaming can become destructive, not because it necessarily directly harms the addicted player (as taking a drug might) but rather because it keeps him or her from studying for school, forming relationships with friends, spending time with a child or spouse, exercising, etc.
This digital fantasy is preferred because it offers the illusion of control, heroic agency, even salvation.
I once read an essay several years ago by Tom Bissell titled “Video Games: the addiction,” where Bissell, an accomplished writer, details his foray into gaming (and also cocaine) and the gripping, intoxicating effect the game Grand Theft Auto had on him. It’s a sobering essay, and at the time it was written (over fifteen years ago now), Bissell was still admittedly in the clutches of a video game addiction. He writes:
Today the most consistently pleasurable pursuit in my life is playing video games. Unfortunately, the least useful and financially solvent pursuit in my life is also playing video games. For instance, I woke up this morning at 8am fully intending to write this article. Instead, I played Left 4 Dead until 5pm. The rest of the day went up in a blaze of intermittent catnaps. It is now 10pm and I have only just started to work. I know how I will spend the late, frayed moments before I go to sleep tonight, because they are how I spent last night and the night before that: walking the perimeter of my empty bed and carpet-bombing the equally empty bedroom with promises that tomorrow will not be squandered. I will fall asleep in a futureless, strangely peaceful panic, not really knowing what I will do the next morning and having no firm memory of who, or what, I once was.
As a writer myself, it’s a haunting and terrifying prospect to imagine inhabiting such a compulsive state of mind, and I too can envision a hypothetical scenario where I’m consumed by playing games while the pleasure of writing and reading dissipates. The slow, often plodding work of reading and writing literature simply can’t withstand the visceral and intensely more engaging experience of playing a sensorially stimulating game. I rarely play games these days, but when I was a kid I played a lot of them. I played them because they were entertaining and fun, of course, but I suspect I also played them because they offered a form of escape from the difficulties and awkwardness of adolescent life: the pressure of doing well in school, of trying to gain the esteem of male peers, of talking to and dating girls, etc. But that was many years ago, and games today are exponentially more immersive and narratively complex. With the sheer number of mainstream and indie games now available, one could literally spend all hours of their day lost within innumerable virtual worlds.
Don’t get me wrong. I think there is a place for games as a healthy form of recreation. Some are quite artistically and technically impressive, and there is something uniquely enthralling about them that few forms of entertainment offer: the opportunity to make choices, test one’s skill, and secure agency in an imaginary world. And they do offer benefits. According to the article “Escaping reality: how to recognize video game addiction,” gaming can “develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills, improve memory retention, enhance visual processing and hand-eye reaction times, build confidence and persistence through challenges, and create bonds with peers and help forge new friendships.”
Acting heroic or doing the hard but right thing in the real world is often messy and confusing, and left unseen and unrewarded.
But aside from the dangers already mentioned of supplanting other healthy activities to one’s detriment, I also think there is another subtle danger, one that is dramatically rendered in Kochai’s story. We can mistake virtual accomplishments for real ones. What I mean is that our desires to do something meaningful in life, to be effective and accomplished, even heroic (a desire that is good and, perhaps, necessary for holiness in a certain light), can be subjectively fulfilled through gaming. And this subjective sense of fulfillment or accomplishment can diminish our desire to achieve it in our real and objective world. In showing virtual courage and perseverance to reach a stage or overcome a challenge in a game, we may feel a degree of emotional satisfaction—a sense that we have done something hard, and in doing so, that we don’t necessarily need to do something hard in the real world too.
Turning back to the story, the only way to actually bring peace and healing, albeit imperfectly, to the narrator’s father is for the narrator to turn off the game, open his bedroom door, and be present to him. It requires the narrator to accept his inability to actually heal his father’s PTSD, to redeem or transform his traumatic past, and to choose to believe, instead, that even if nothing seems to happen, that by simply being with his father he can both offer and receive consolation and healing. Yet, the game allows him to seem heroic, to take on the appearance of having agency, to feel that he is actually doing something good even though, of course, he isn’t. But acting heroic or doing the hard but right thing in the real world is often messy and confusing, and left unseen and unrewarded.
I’m not suggesting we don’t know that gaming isn’t real or that people consciously believe beating a game is the equivalent to some real-world accomplishment (getting a promotion at work, etc.). However, the effect, though slight, can still be problematic. I’m using gaming as an example, but I could have easily pointed to another interactive technology: generative AI. Instead of requesting the counsel of another person, of being honest with someone about a specific struggle, or feeling lonely and seeking connection, we can turn to AI and receive faux counsel, encouragement, and companionship. Instead of engaging a spouse or friend, where we risk being unheard, ignored, challenged, or dismissed, we can opt for AI, which can invariably make us feel that we are understood, worthwhile, and not alone—and all at zero risk. Again, even though we consciously know we’re not interacting with a real person via AI, the subjective feeling of being understood or seen—the compelling illusion of it—can satisfy us just enough to avoid the risk of engaging with a real person. And this creates serious spiritual implications, obviously, because the spiritual life is dependent on our ability to comprehend and interact with objective reality as it is given, not as we might wish or hope it to be. Interactive technologies can exacerbate our tendency to dwell within virtual, fantasy spaces at the cost of living in reality and, ultimately, of experiencing grace.
St. Ignatius emphasized the importance of doing a daily examen for the spiritual life, during which we recount our day under God’s loving gaze, offer him gratitude, identify where we have and have not responded to his grace, and consider how we might live more faithfully moving forward. It is a practice and form of prayer that trains us to remain rooted in reality—to unmask our ideas and imaginings and fantasies that do not align with objective reality and might be leading us into subtle forms of idolatry, to reveal the ways we are seeking to escape from real life with its messy relationships, challenging circumstances, and unclear decisions. And if we are choosing to escape reality, even subtly, then we are missing out on opportunities to encounter God both in prayer and in the company of other people, for it is only in the present moment, the ordinary space of the objective and real, where we can encounter Christ. As Fr. Jacques Philippe writes in his Interior Freedom, “His grace does not operate on our imaginings, ideals, or dreams. It works on reality, the specific, concrete elements of our lives. Even if the fabric of our everyday lives doesn’t look very glorious to us, only there can we be touched by God’s grace.”