During one of the darkest periods of the last few years, I was working on a failing startup. All the front-end work was done and "good enough", and I was waiting on my cofounder to finish up a few last infrastructure tweaks so we could launch. I had less than a couple hundred in my bank accounts, was barely making rent, and was basically in a holding pattern.

So, I started playing Fallout: New Vegas. I clocked like 120-140 hours in two weeks. I beat the game, I beat the expansions. I had a blast.

I think the problem with the video games is that they often offer a certain kind of refuge. You're a hero, and more importantly, you make tangible progress.

Playing CS or Quake or UT or Payday, you are playing a round, and everything lives and dies in that 12-20 minutes of your life. Everything is simple: strafe left, fire, reload, pickup, die, respawn. It's a beautiful three-dimensional puzzle in planning space, and at least for me is nearly a meditative state. I'm a big guy, and when I played Mirror's Edge, I quite literally cried because I was getting a chance to experience a freedom of movement only my skinny, small friends who practiced parkour could accomplish. I was free.

Playing RPGs is similarly relieving: I'm the Courier, I'm some guy left for dead in a pit in the ground, and I've got to piece together how I got there and how to bring justice to the person that put me there. I've got a neat little checklist of things to accomplish, fairly straightforward ways to check off those things, and a continual sense of "oh, okay, if I do this, then this happens, and then this." At a time in my life where things were most uncertain and the way most unclear, I could fire up New Vegas and see a logical progression of actions and accomplishments.

What do we get in the real world?

Well, it's not the people--it seems like pretty much everyone exists mainly in a state of consumption, alternating between work and home and social media or texting.

It's not heroics--the only wars being fought are unjust and unending police actions against the third world or our own citizens, and even as experienced developers we, searching for ever-more professionalism, realize that a team is not made of a hero and ensemble cast but instead a group of cooperative individuals with humility.

It's not even a clear causal universe: I write several KLOCS of code and deliver features, my sales don't increase. My friend doesn't take out ads, his sales increase. My cat plays outside, it gets hit by a car and dies behind a radiator waiting for me to come home. My other friend hangs outside in a parking lot, and a wild kitten appears. There's no sense to it, only random chance.

And so, does it really surprise anyone that we'd prefer our virtual worlds to this situation?