When I was a kid, my parents would complain that I talked about games “as if they were real”. At the time, I didn’t understand why they’d think that. Obviously Super Mario World was not real and I had never, to my knowledge, implied that it was. I think what it is though is that, in talking about one’s experience in a game, you refer to the things you do.
There’s always been this talk about immersion and how gamers can’t tell reality from imagination. That we get submerged in games and, somehow, cannot decipher where the narrative of the game ends and where our own interaction begins. That in playing Super Mario, I am him and he is me.
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