~Identity, The Internet, and Computer Gaming
A little Background...
I have lived about 20 years, all in the last part of the 20th Century since
the birth of a man, which itself took place some 30 centuries into human civilization.
I am one of close to six
billion people living on the earth right now, a number that, while much smaller
in the past, may well be every bit as much larger from now on.
Some people say that throughout
the past several thousand years, the life of a human being has been roughly
the same-at least in all the important parts. Wealthy or impoverished, modern
or ancient, surrounded or mostly alone, most people still feel the same emotions,
have the same desires, and ask the same questions.
For someone like me, though,
that makes some knowledge of the countless real or imagined human lives no
less appealing.
As a child, I played with Legos and let my imagination run, placing myself
on another planet, on this one throughout our past, or in my own town, just
a few years and a divorce back and then forth again, wondering what life might
have been like, if I wasn't quite me.
Legos and fantasies get outdated,
though, and I moved on to books, daydreams, and writing. Tolkien took me to
an Age that never was, while I took myself to worlds that would never be-except
in my own imagination. All, of course, strictly bounded by the infrastructure
of public education.
These specifics, too, grow
old, but even now, Grown Up and searching for the imagination I fear I lost,
I am a child of fantasy, wishing for lives I never had, soaking in lives others
choose to let me see.
And so, this semester in College has been a fantasy in itself, for what have we been asked to do the entire time but inhabit other lives? This is something I've made a practice of for years, and now I am asked to do it. And, for the first time, examine myself as I do.
So I set out once again on a long-familiar quest.