My old seminary buddy Bruce Bates linked to a terrific article about a film that takes on the subject of how internet porn has affected an entire generation. I especially liked the comment from the film's writer, director, and star: "Are you watching these images and concluding how this is how real life should be?"
Porn is certainly a serious problem for many many...but I'm wondering how much 'fake' life affects the rest of reality. It's not enough that a woman that doesn't have a size 0 body is now considered chunky in our modern society or that sex isn't always like it is in movies (both porn or mainstream). How much other kinds of fantasy do we live with from the stuff we allow into our homes. It comes in so many flavors:
-Romance novels that make a woman think that prince charming shouold be coming on his white horse to save her from the losers in her life
-TV dramas that make us think that criminal cases can be wrapped up easily within an hour
-Talk radio that makes people believe that their own extreme positions can and must prevail or nobody will win
Though I've not really had an appetite for porn and avoided it as much as possible (I've always found it somewhat disturbing, though in honesty I do know what my lust triggers are) and I've sought to stay as grounded in real life as much as possible, I've noticed that fake life has impacted me as well. I am a child of the first wave of the video game culture. From Space Invaders onward, we've been taught to believe that nothing in life is permanent. First we would put another quarter in, but later on we learned the beauty of switching the home consoles on and off. Don't like how the game is going? The reset button is right there. No problem, right?
I'm wondering if this kind of denial of the results of our games causes more problems than we think. Let's start with a simple game of Pac-Man that isn't going well. You get distracted by the kids, you lose focus for a moment, and soon enough you're dead. Just hit reset, problem solved. But life isn't that easy. Many people daily make horrible choices and think that there are no consequences. As a parent I am daily trying to make my children understand that what we do matters: if my daughter throws a tantrum, holding her to punishment doesn't seem fair to her. If my son spends all of his money on something frivolous (and yes, the frivolity of the marketplace is ever-stunning in the crap that it produces) and therefore has no money later to buy something of substance, not then loaning him five dollars may seem cruel. But consequences exist...have video games tried to convince us otherwise.
A few years ago I became interested in a game called Football Manager and still probably play it too much (finishing 30 seasons...yeah, that's too much). Basically, you take control of the management of a team and see where it takes you. I'm really quite good at working the game, getting the right players, and putting them in the right spots. But this game is so good in part because it leaves a lot of things to chance. Players get hurt, or we lose a match we should have won, or my team owner is demanding unrealistic results and fires me for not achieving them. But early on I learned how easy it was to not live with the results...quit early from the game in which your player gets hurt or you lose to Wigan. Who cares, right? But think about how video games makes us view sports: our team loses winnable games, and we think the coach is a bum. A player gets hurt, and we scream and rant because it's not just fair. Part of the problem of fan behavior in our modern society may come from the fact that we haven't accepted the reality of the results. Because we have no outlet to give us an upset button if, say, Sporting Kansas City loses tonight, we get upset and bitter. Our fake life has made it where we don't want to deal with the reality of life.
I don't know that we can ever go back to the way things once were. Many people even now spend all their time in Second Life or the Sims or playing some other game or watching porn or absorbing a romance novel. The escapism from reality may seem comforting for a moment, but inevitably it makes returning to the real world all that much more difficult.
