Are video games STS?

[Bring4th_Austin]

I've always been greatly interested in this topic. A couple of threads I've created on the matter:

Shadow and Responsibility in Video Games

2006.03.28 - Q'uo on Online Gaming

Also, we recently talked about competitive sports on the podcast, which has a lot of relevant themes to video games. And I relied on my knowledge of competitive gaming (since I'm a doofus when it comes to sports) to offer my reply: Episode #32

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In simple words, I would say that competitive video are not innately polarizing for service to self. I tend to agree with Jade that it does involve actions, desires, and feelings that are service to self in nature. In competitive gaming, we are engaging a particular skill in order to outperform or subdue another person. Speaking from personal experience, the sheer rush of being the best at a game and consistently winning over others is a sort of power high. I feel powerful and dominant, primal feelings.

But engaging these things through video games isn't polarizing in a service-to-self sense, I don't think. I see two primary ways in which this affects us:

1) Engaging these feelings may be coming from a place of indifference, a lack of consciousness of what we are truly doing or experiencing. There is a sort of sleepy feedback loop where we have these desires and experiences of power and dominance, but they're not fully brought forward to the conscious mind and processed and analyzed.

2) We may engage these feelings in a more conscious manner, exploring these aspects of our psyche and determining how we may relate to them. We are, as Ra would put it, "investigating the feelings of power."

I think the former is much more common, but there is great potential for self-discovery and evolution in the latter. An investigation of these things, especially when played out in such a safe and regulated outlet such as video games, can be a part of the path of the positive entity. If we were investigating these feelings of power over others through real violence or real warfare, then I do think the consequences on our polarity would be much greater. But as a society, we realize that these things are a part of human nature, yet not something that we should allow to run out of control and cause harm on other people. It's something that needs an outlet to be explored, otherwise it would stay repressed and likely express itself in much less healthy ways.

I do think that at a certain point, a conscious recognition of the feelings of power over others can grow to a more healthy compassionate competition, and comradery can grow between opponents. People competing against each other may see the others as less of an enemy and more as a friend who is helping them to grow in their passion, helping them to express their feeling of power not necessarily over others, but a power of inspiration that comes when you do something you love. But, I do think it can go the other direction as well. A person may be indulgent in the feeling of dominating others through power in their gaming and taste the negative polarity as well.

Not that being good at video games and indulging in feelings of dominance is necessarily polarizing to the point of harvestability to the negative entity. I think that if a person experienced these feelings and decided to pursue them as a means of personal evolution, they would likely grow far beyond video games in how they decide to dominate others. I really can't accurately speculate at how common this is, but I doubt it's common at all.

I do want to say that it's possible and perfectly acceptable for a positively polarizing individual to engage in video games as a manner of "sleep," as in number one above. Even if we aren't diligent in examining the catalyst we receive from games, playing games as a means of feeling power over others doesn't cancel out all other positive work one may do in life. And it's possible for the feeling of dominance to begin and end all within the video game, with a person maintaining a realization that the people they are playing against are deserving of the love and sovereignty of the Creator. I don't think it is at all detrimental. But I do think it is relying on our "lower nature" as a means of exciting the self.