Video games are a common refuge for the white boy and man in modern society. This topic is something I’ve long thought about, it came up in a chat and I thought it a perfect time to explore further.

Intelligent white men have no real outlet to build and create in society anymore. The meme that we were "born too late to explore the planet, born too early to explore the stars," is a succinct expression of this. Video games serve as the perfect escape from the monotony of reality and allow the player to build, explore, and battle.

When I was in high school, I had a mild addiction to Halo 2, Halo 3, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. These games filled desires that could not be met within the confines of society, particularly for a teenager in high school. 

I craved, many of us do, action, danger, risk, reward, the chance to struggle and emerge. Society has largely robbed us of this.

Through the Halo franchise, I was given the chance to engage in combat alongside my close friends, face off against other groups, seen as out-groups and enemy tribes. There is nowhere in modern society that allows for this desire to be met. The desire to engage other groups in combat or competition, to strategize, plan, execute, and defeat them. Perhaps this is what so many people find equally enthralling and addictive about college and professional sports, it allows the desire for combat and competition to be vicariously satiated. The observer sees “their team” (Basking in Reflected Glory is the psychosocial concept at play here) taking on an out-group team, some other city or university or perhaps country, mirror neurons fire (another important psychological concept at play in this theory), and the need is met. But of course, these surrogate activities will always be less rewarding than an authentic experience. 

A friend of mine I grew up with had a Friday evening ritual, after the school week or work week had ended, we would order pizza and play Halo together. We'd have our soda, electronic music playing in the background, and would battle other players into the early hours of the morning until our motor skills grew too weary to win consistently any longer. Some of the more exciting moments in our friendship together were during intense matches of 2v2 or 4v4 in Halo, where the score was close near the end of the game, and we had to develop a strategy and make plays in real-time with many moving parts. We would yell commands back and forth at each other, relay information about weapon spawns, what enemy was where, what weapons they had, where our team was, what weapons they had, any power-ups in play, vehicles being used, while taking in dozens of factors we would calculate and communicate the actions needed to win, and then execute. 

In one particularly memorable 4v4 match on one of our favorite Halo 3 maps, Guardian, the score was 47-47, the enemy killed our two compatriots, making it 47-49 as the gameplay clock was nearly expired. Our opponents needed just one kill to win, we needed to kill three of the four of them, with only two of us alive. The situation was desperate. We saw an opening, an unguarded portion of their tower position, “what do we do?!” I yelled; my buddy replied “For Kvatch” referencing a somewhat obscure battle cry from The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. I saw him make his way through the side tower entrance, I went to the front entrance, we laid siege to their tower, the game ended amid the confusion of grenade throws and Battle Rifle dispatches… a moment of unknown passed… “Victory!” was announced. We jumped from our seats in excitement. The feeling of nearly losing and then coming back to win in the last seconds of the game was honestly thrilling. We came together as friends and defeated the other players in such a climactic fashion. The thrills from that match alone would be difficult to replicate, particularly late on a Friday night. 

In Oblivion, there was a massive open world to explore. The chance to adventure, acquire wealth, develop new skills, obtain influence and power. A vast world that allows you to wander through dense forests, deep caverns, ice caves, snowy alpine terrain, lakeside villages, medieval-style towns, and castles is something that cannot be done for most of us. But you can in The Elder Scrolls series of adventure games. You can meet interesting characters with more interesting lore, uncover mysteries, help distressed citizens, accumulate riches, become stronger, faster, a better archer and swordsman, you can uncover secret societies of vampires, and help spirits find their final resting place. 

Of course, it is all fake. It wasn’t a real victory in any meaningful way. The houses I bought with video game gold are not real, all of my skills acquired in-game do not translate into anything meaningful. 

If you are longing for adventure and danger, risk and reward, how do you achieve such a thing in our society, especially as a white man? These video games seem to be filling desires that are deep within us, something primordial perhaps. Of course, it must be noted that the ability to gain riches and power in a video game is tremendously "nerfed" compared to the real world, even in a world where such a thing was possible. The dangers of exploring caves or an alpine forest are very real, in the game, they are anything but. 

Kids who might have once been great architects and city planners are now relegated to Minecraft and similar games as an outlet for their creative and constructive tendencies. Elegant buildings and lovely cityscapes in the real world have been replaced by the International style where roadways and walkability and human-scaling seem to be either an afterthought or shunned entirely. Thus, our people with such proclivities will naturally experience tremendous dissension with the real world, opting perhaps to find escape in a fantasy world where they can create as they may have been intended.

How does one do that now? Other than perhaps attempting to climb a corporate ladder filled with diversity quotas? Becoming a goofy YouTuber (read: court jester) seems to be a goal of many children in America today. The opportunities are limited, making the video game allure tremendous and thus dangerous. Our instinctual underpinnings remain, but we are being boxed out of society. An era rife with diversity initiatives and an increasingly oppressive corporate “culture” makes for hostile environments for our people. Opportunities for adventure, wealth, glory, skill, beauty, power, discipline, and honor grow thin. Worse, they are even shunned in modern society. Video games provide a quick fix, a pseudo-solution, a surrogate activity to a very real problem.

Many of us long for an era and lifestyle that simply put, is only accessible virtually. Be it by design or by happenstance, I’m not sure. What is perhaps often viewed as a refuge for losers and NEETs might be something much more interesting and troubling when looking at video games in terms of their purpose within the total society. 

It is my belief that the desires filled by video games are something that has been expressed in various ways in the past, and the “video game question” is something more profound and interesting than a case of bored weebs with poor social skills. 

These passages come to mind:

From Mishima: A Live in Four Chapters, “The average age for a man in the Bronze Age was eighteen, in the Roman era, twenty-two. Heaven must have been beautiful then. Today it must look dreadful. When a man reaches forty, he has no chance to die beautifully. No matter how he tries, he will die of decay. He must compel himself to live.” 

From Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, “We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives.”

Yukio Mishima said quite accurately that “We live in an age in which there is no heroic death."

Julius Evola wrote, "The blood of the heroes is closer to God than the ink of the philosophers and the prayers of the faithful."

All four represent a longing for an era that does not and perhaps cannot exist contemporarily. Perhaps we are the remnants of a warrior and explorer class that no longer has any use, suffering through our existence until we are ultimately erased by the forces of time and evolution. The process is called “relaxed selection,” an evolutionary phenomenon where traits that are no longer needed in a certain environment, that may have been useful once, in a different environment, become obsolete and are no longer selected by the species. Perhaps the opposite is true, maybe in the coming years and generations the only thing that will matter as pressures mount are the traits that make for great warriors and builders. Time will tell.

Un-ringing the bell of modernity seems unlikely if not impossible, one cannot help but think there is something more out there, some great adventure, some grand quest for wealth and power. For my own sake, and all of ours, I hope that adventure is somewhere to be found. Turning a race of explorers, builders, warriors, and conquerors into lemmings sitting in rush hour traffic after 9 hours in their cubicle or customer service job seems to be a tremendous waste of raw talent. Maybe society has advanced to such a degree that the old ways are obsolete, maybe our oldest enemies have engineered a society that the old ways would be sterilized out of fear. I’m not sure. Perhaps some combination of the two. 

I believe there is more to it than pure escapism. Which I completely understand, I often find myself needing an escape from this clown society too. One can only see so many BLM murals and nearly be in so many car accidents caused by Somali women in hijabs before fatigue sets in and your day is ruined. 

The most significant problem is video games provide a false sense of accomplishment, we can become far too wrapped up in our virtual existence and allow our real life one to slip into vacuity. My friend and I have had many interesting and exciting real-world experiences as well, difficult hikes, long bicycle rides and runs, foreign travels, bodybuilding, construction projects, helping each other in our careers, things that do translate into meaningful skills and economic benefits. Those wins are always slower, more deliberate, and require a longer horizon, naturally. Yet the allure of the virtual escape remains.