Exploring states of being while gaming

Published: January 22, 2017

It was an ordinary evening a few years ago, I was playing the immensely popular computer game Minecraft, digging for treasures and building materials and avoiding or fighting monsters. A game I had played for countless hours, beaten and then coming back to again for more. Then suddenly it dawned upon me. My emotional state controlled what I was encountering in the game. If I let go completely of my preconceived notion of the monsters in the game as hostile, they changed behavior and became passive and didn’t attack my player character. I tried this concept with another computer game, the real-time-strategy game Starcraft II. The opponent would never attack until my first hostile thought or frightened emotion occurred. I felt I could control the state of the game by controlling myself. It felt surreal for me at the time. Have you ever had a similar experience?

My much thought regarding the experience is that there might actually be no real borders in reality, thus the game and the person gaming is essentially the same ‘thing’, something hinted to in mysticism, non-dualism and even physics.