And crucially, in a game you can be anybody. That’s vital, it’s a gift from heaven – to realize your dreams! Yes, in reality you have weak arms and terrible eyesight, and you can barely make it round the track in the school stadium, you shuffle along in a stoop and even the little girls from the junior grades laugh at you.
But in a game you become that nimble hunk with elastic muscles, a square jaw and a heap of skills, from archery and axe-throwing to ‘light magic’ or ‘blood magic’.
And you go on your journey through uncharted lands, you meet friends and foes, you face terrible dangers, join fights, find treasures, save beautiful princesses or great princes – it all depends on your personal choice at the beginning, and no matter how the game ends today, you stay happy because tomorrow your hero will be alive, healthy and full of strength again.
Nothing hurts him, he is always ready for heroic deeds and adventures. He is perfect… the ideal American, to be plain. And here you are – not ideal. And all the adults around you stick your nose in your not ideality. It’s clear they mean well, but it turns out just the opposite, and you’re angry because of it, and get a heap of complexes. And you already very much want to become what you are wanted to be, at least once, in real life. But offline it is impossible because…
Yes, it is simply…impossible, and all! And in the game, so easy. Of course, it is an escape from reality, pure escapism. But fans of computer games are not innovators at all, they weren’t treading any new tracks – all those beatniks, hippies, rockers, bikers and other punks, they ran from reality too, they were escapists too. To live in the real world and not know its problems, this lot came up with their own imaginary world, their ‘Strawberry Fields.’ Of course, the entrance fee was more expensive than for gamers. For gamers, all it costs is money for the internet and time…well, and may be sometimes conjunctivitis, carpal tunnel syndrome and scoliosis. But for them it was necessary to poison their organism with various forms of chemistry, clouding the brain so that sitting on garbage you could believe you are in paradise.
No, the computer in this respect is more honest. The main thing is that there is electricity, and that is almost everywhere and almost always now. There are, of course, blackouts, but they’re about as likely as dying from a meteorite.
A meteorite is a prohibited reality – literally a guest from another world. Here, in Russia recently you had such a gift from the Great Space Fall. I watched many videos of it because in Russia car owners have this excellent habit, or tradition – I don’t even know how to call it – of equipping their cars with dashcams – and I was surprised to see the courage and composure of your people.
Nobody panicked, nobody was running around crying: ‘Oh, my God! Save us, save us!’ People just looked into the sky, they were filming, discussing it, and then when the explosion blew and the windows in lots of houses, offices and schools were shattered, everybody just made sure everyone was safe. Nobody died! All got help in time. While watching the video, I even had a feeling that they were training videos, and everybody was prepared.
I remember one particularly amazing video. The class teacher, seeing the flash outside the window, orders the children to hide under their desks. The explosion knocked out all the windows, but no child was injured, not one cut! The children leave school in an organized way, and they’re even laughing…
I reflected on such a reaction, and realized that for you, Russians, escapism isn’t necessary and even harmful, because you already live in another reality…
Your world can’t be destroyed because you’re always ready for any surprise, because no rules nor regulations for life exist.
Churchill wrote about you: ‘Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ Perhaps it’s like that, but it seems to me that you shouldn’t look for hair on a tortoise shell and horns on the head of a hare – everything is simpler.
Your reality is similar to computer, a virtual reality. It is the world of inexplicable things and acts, the world of boundless opportunities. I don’t know how the philosopher Thomas Carlisle got scent of all this in the middle of the nineteenth century, but he wrote then: ‘Russia is indifferent to human life and to a current of time. It is silent. It is eternal. It is indestructible’.
That’s an exact description of the virtual world, the world of the computer game where fatalists ready for everything live! Here the Russians, I guess, approach living by the Buddhist principle: ‘Do what needs to be done’ and ‘come what will’. When I understood that, not so long ago, during my life in Hawaii, I became fascinated to look at your country with my own eyes. However, I am getting ahead of myself.
At the beginning Americans were engaged in hewing a civilization on wild land. They had to win a piece of the earth from the wood, the prairie, and heathlands, to fence it off from wild animals, to banish or exterminate Indians and predators, to build a house, to plant European plants. That is the United States – a created world.
It’s largely artificial – but not virtual – because everything is firmly regulated here and everybody lives guided by an infinite number of laws including unwritten ones. If you walk down the street in any American town and don’t smile at passersby in response to their dutiful ‘smiles’, you’ve already broken these laws, and the world around won’t be polite to you. So you sometimes get a strong wish to run away from all this – especially at fifteen years!
So that’s why I played. For hours, at nights, days around the clock. I didn’t go to school. I simply couldn’t. The moment I had to leave the house was real torture for me. It seemed to me that everyone I met in the street, from children to police officers and road makers, was aware of our family problem, and felt sorry for me, and I owed something to all of them, and I felt like a target – and here I was, a hair’s breadth away.
I didn’t want them to feel sorry for me. I wanted to go on living here as if everything was the same, as though nothing had happened. Mom had left, Judith had left – so why were Pa and I left on the ashes, on the ruins of our family? We needed to go somewhere too, and it didn’t matter where, just away from here.”
09:57 P.M._
The Lawyer stretched to the remote control to switch off the TV. There was some night show. But suddenly, the door leading to the corridor swung open and in the doorway, completely filling it, was a real mountain of a man in a black suit with a tie.
He had huge red hands, so broad-chested and tall he reminded me of a two-door bar refrigerator, yet his shaven head grew directly from his mighty shoulders and seemed disproportionately small. The overall picture was completed by the headset attached to his left ear and the radio set sandwiched in his left hand.
“Gentlemen,” the man-mountain said with an unexpectedly high-pitched voice. “I ask you to remain where you are. We have an emergency situation.”
Kold jumped up, overturning a chair, and moved back to a corner. The man-mountain stepped into the room and stood beside the door. After him several members of spetsnaz in masks and grey ‘city’ camouflage slipped in like fleeting shadows, armed with small submachine guns with extra thick barrels. Two raced into the bedroom, while the others – five or six of them – took up positions around the table, directing their weapons at the door.
“Look, what is going on?” the Lawyer asked, trying to speak quietly and calmly.
“Maybe an unauthorized penetration,’” Mountain replied without looking at him, squeaking in ultrasound. “Keep calm, gentlemen, I am asking you. Mr. Kold, sit down; it will be more convenient for you at the table…”
The radio set came to life, made several rustling sounds, croaked a muffled phrase and then went calm again.