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Digital Games and Escapism

Gordon Calleja Games and Culture 2010 5: 335 originally published online 7 May 2010 DOI: 10.1177/1555412009360412 The online version of this article can be found at: http://gac.sagepub.com/content/5/4/335

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Digital Games and Escapism

Gordon Calleja1

Games and Culture 5(4) 335-353 The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1555412009360412 http://gac.sagepub.com

Abstract Digital games are often viewed as being inherently escapist on two counts. First, they are the shining proponents of cutting edge virtuality, embodying the alluring unreality of something erroneously conceived of existing on the other side of a screen. A second reason for associating games with escapism relates to a common perception of play and games as opposite of seriousness and work and somehow set apart from the ordinary, everyday life. The paper discusses the nature of escapism and relates it to the above theoretical issues which contribute to a view of digital games as inherently escapist. The paper proposes a renewed view on digital games and escapism that takes into account their distinctive qualities and their role in everyday life. Keywords escapism, magic circle, virtual, real, games, engagement

Introduction
In an increasingly technological society removed from the physical needs of sustenance, escapism is generally seen as a negative phenomenon, both within academic and popular views. As theorists like Tuan (1998) and Evans (2001) have observed, escapism is often viewed as an avoidance of the real, in its varied manifestations: real work, real friends, real facts, in other words, the real world. But reality is a thorny concept to deal with. It tends to appear more as the opposite of other

IT-University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Corresponding Author: Gordon Calleja, Center for Computer Games Research, IT-University of Copenhagen Rued, Langgaards Vej 7, Copenhagen 2300, Denmark Email: calleja@itu.dk

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intangible concepts than as a stand-alone phenomenon in itself. In the digital age, the real appears most often in binary contrast with the virtual. The relationship between the virtual and the real, like that between escapism and reality, is seldom questioned. Digital games are often seen as suffering from a double binary of unreality: their virtuality and their gameness. The latter view is not only present in popular discussions of games but also finds support in current scholarship in the concept of the magic circle. The magic circle assumes a separation between games and the real world, imbuing games with a sense of artificiality that is often seen as one of their defining elements. If some physical games are absolved from the avoidant negativity of escapism by virtue of the physical exercise they involve, the monetary rewards they yield or the social status attributed to them, digital games are scarcely ever afforded this luxury. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that digital games are considered the epitome of contemporary escapism. This direct association of digital games with the trivial, if not downright negative, connotations of escapism displays a lack of informed understanding both of the specific qualities of digital games and the conceptual underpinnings of escapism. The first part of the article discusses the ontological underpinnings that contribute to seeing digital games as inherently escapist. This will be established through a critique of a perspective that places virtual environments in binary opposition to an external real and the related notion of the magic circle that views games as being separate from the real. The second part takes the discussion on a phenomenal level arguing against the idea that games are escapist by the virtue of their being designed to be engaging. The article ends with a renewed view on digital games and escapism that takes into account their distinctive qualities and their role in everyday life.

The Binary Illusion

There seems to be a straightforward association made between digital games and escapism that plagues both popular and academic discussions. I say plagues here because the implications of this taken-for-granted perspective on digital games as inherently escapist are scarcely positive. As Evans (2001) and Tosca (2003) have argued, the negative connotations of escapism contribute to an all too common (at least outside game studies) view of digital games as trivial activities of pure waste disassociated from a more worthy reality. In this part of the article, I will argue that this association of digital games with escapism is problematically reinforced by two binary relationships that underpin the formal qualities of games. The first binary positions the virtuality of digital games in contrast to a world of physical reality. The implication here is that digital games are imbued with unreality by virtue of their being computer generated. The second binary, which is more overtly stated in game discussions, is the supposed artificiality that, for some theorists (Juul, 2005; Salen & Zimmerman, 2003), defines games. This artificiality, referred to by the term magic circle, conceptualizes games as
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being separate from everyday reality and thus contributes to their association with a negative view of escapism.

Virtual Frontiers
The Internet and 3D virtual environments have been characterized from their earliest days by their separation from the real world. Barlow and Kapor (1990) were two of the earliest writers to adopt the rhetoric of the frontier to describe the Internet:
Over the last 50 years, the people of the developed world have begun to cross into a landscape unlike any which humanity has experienced before. It is a region without physical shape or form. It exists, like a standing wave, in the vast web of our electronic communication systems. It consists of electron states, microwaves, magnetic fields, light pulses and thought itself . . . . In its present condition, Cyberspace is a frontier region, populated by the few hardy technologists who can tolerate the austerity of its savage computer interfaces, incompatible communications protocols, proprietary barricades, cultural and legal ambiguities, and general lack of useful maps or metaphors.

The application of the frontier metaphor to cyberspace was taken uncritically from cyberpunk fiction and fostered the idea that virtual worlds lie on the other side of a geographical boundary that separates them from the real world on the other side of the screen. The image of the hardy technologists venturing into an austere and savage landscape appealed to the imagination fuelled by Gibsons Neuromancer, published in 1984. There is an uncanny resemblance between the register used here and that used by Gibson in his fiction. The fictional image of cyberspace presented in Neuromancer became a fact looming on the foreseeable technological horizon. The frontier rhetoric became a common trope of writers describing new technologies like Rushkoff (1994), Rheingold (1993), Mitchell (1995), and others in the nineties. The comparison with the frontier also appealed to the early days of settlement of America, the excitement enhanced by the potential dangers of this newly discovered wild landscape:
The early days of cyberspace were like those of the western frontier. Parallel, breakneck development of the Internet and of consumer computing devices and software quickly created an astonishing new condition; a vast, hitherto-unimagined territory began to open up for exploration. (Mitchell, 1995, p. 109)

The rhetoric of the frontier is problematic because it positions the virtual in a binary opposition to the real. Fundamental concepts like the relationship between the real and the virtual underpin any discussion of digital media, and it is thus crucial to consider carefully the assumptions they entail. In the context of escapism, this binary division places virtual environments (of which digital games are a subset) on the
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other side of a boundary whose crossing implies escapism. This sort of logic leads to normative assumptions that misrepresent our engagement with virtual environments as being necessarily escapist, without considering the particular qualities of the specifically situated engagement. This tendency of viewing the virtual as opposed to the real is still common, both in popular and academic discussions on virtual environments (and hence digital games). In Synthetic Worlds, Castronova (2005) takes issue with the term virtual worlds and argues for a replacement of virtual with synthetic. He outlines how the rise and fall of the hype around virtual reality created a negative association with the term virtual:
Finally, while being conservative in writing is one decision imposed by the nearness of this book to early VR writing, another is the importance of avoiding words like virtual. That word points a misleading finger from the game worlds back to the earlier VR paradigm. As I have said, no such connection is warranted. And therefore where I use virtual in this book, I just mean rendered by a computer: a virtual world is a world rendered by computer. (Castronova, 2005, p. 294)

The solution to the misrepresentation of the virtual in such discussions is not to remove the term from use or relegate its signification to its least interesting use. Castronova (2005) argues that we should move away from the virtual/real binary by replacing virtual with synthetic. Synthetic is useful in highlighting the designed nature of virtual worlds, but in so doing creates another binary, between the man-made, crafted synthetic world, and a largely unmodified reality that has been in existence for a while, which he refers to as the Earth (p. 294). The problem with binary oppositions is that they create either/or relationships that ignore the richer middle ground. As Haraway (1991) has argued, contemporary culture is best expressed in terms of hybridity, of dialectic relationships between poles of difference, rather than reductionist dualisms. Castronova (2005) does remain caught in the binaries he identifies as problematic. Synthetic Worlds is steeped in such relations, in many instances, characterizing interaction with virtual worlds as a form of encroaching migration from the Earth onto a domain that is distinct from it. This topic of migration is picked up again by Castronova (2007) in his subsequent book Exodus to The Virtual World, where he rekindles the frontier rhetoric by arguing that virtual worlds are creating an unprecedented form of mass exodus from the real world that will fundamentally transform both:
The exodus puts us back in touch with a phenomenon we thought we had lost forever: the frontier. Virtual worlds are new lands. Several writers have said that the internet is a new frontier, but we havent been able to see the implications until now. The bottom line is this: when people move from one country to another, both countries change. As synthetic worlds emerge, our real world will return to the situation that America experienced in the first three hundred years of its history. (p. 14) 338
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According to Castronova, virtual worlds engender a form of continuous migration (Castronova, 2007, p. 71), which involves a back and forth movement between the starting point and the place migrated to. He claims that we only need to make a simple modification to our current, old-style notion of migration for it to be applicable to the virtual exodus (p. 71): reduce the cost of moving between worlds to zero. If there is no significant social, monetary, and time cost involved in migrating, what exactly defines migration? How do we differentiate migration into the virtual world from any form of activity that regularly engrosses our attention? Would reading, as a regular, engaging activity, count as a form of continuous migration into a fictional world? What about a weekend trip to a Crete? As Tuan (1998) argues, a migration is such because it involves a cost, it involves risk; it involves a wholesale physical, cultural and social displacement for an extended period with all the confusion, excitement, and challenge that entails. But the problem here goes beyond a definition of migration, but the underlying binary of here (real world)/there (virtual world) makes the conception of migration between distinct places possible. This taken-for-granted opposition of the virtual to the real makes the association of virtual environments with escapism a logical next step. If the virtuality of digital games lies on the other side of a boundary, crossing that boundary becomes a form of escape. That boundary is tied to an understanding of the virtual that is limited to the computer generated and thus not physically real. The analytical richness of this distinction is somewhat poor. What is the utility of comparing a 3D model of my living room to the actual living room, for example? The difference in physicality is scarcely a comparison worthy of academic scrutiny. The more interesting overlaps surface when we consider that both computergenerated and physical living rooms are designed artefacts with very specific qualities and affordances, and it is here that virtuality, as a theoretical concept, proves most useful. The opposition of the virtual to the real is a relatively recent idea. Marie-Laurie Ryan (2001) locates the origins of what she calls the virtual as fake in 18th- and 19th-century discussions of physics and optics. The connotations of illusion and inauthenticity associated with the mirror image carried over to the virtual. Ryan identifies two perspectives on the virtual, what she calls the virtual as fake and the virtual as potential. The latter finds its strongest expression in the work of Levy (1998), Serres (1994), and Deleuze (2004). The virtual here is not viewed in opposition to the real but as a constituent of it. The virtual is characterized by movement and creative transformation. It is a force whose coming into being, its actualization, is never fully determined at its origin. The virtual is an event, a processual generation of an outcome through the interaction of a multiplicity of elements and contexts. Levy (1998) characterizes the move ment between virtual and actual as a resolution to a problem not previously contained in its formulation (p. 25). Virtuality can therefore be understood as a form of existence related to a transformation of time and space. The virtuality of a virtual community radically shortens
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the geographical distance between the participants and the speed of communication. The community is not pinned to a physical location but can be accessed from any terminal that provides a suitable gateway. The actual, represented by the material context of the participants, is transformed into a contingent variable, subservient to the new focus: the participants shared interests and passions. The utility of the concept of the virtual applied to digital games and other forms of virtual environments lies in emphasizing their creative potential for actualizing a theoretically infinite range of possible experiences. The ontological value of these experiences are very much of the order of the real, not its opposite. Virtual worlds are not the sites of migration from the real, as Castronova claims, but artefacts that are intimately woven into contemporary reality. Accessing virtual worlds, like any other form of virtual environment, does not automatically imply escapism, much less escape. Erasing the boundary between the virtual and the real is a first step toward exorcising the commonly held, but erroneous assumption that digital games, as forms of virtual environments, are fundamentally escapist in nature.

Magic Circles
The first problematic binary dealt with the virtuality of digital games; the second deals with their gameness and relates to the concept of the magic circle. Initially coined by Huizinga (1955) in Homo Ludens, the magic circle has been widely adopted by Game Studies theorists (Juul, 2005; Salen & Zimmerman, 2003) to articulate the spatial, temporal, and psychological boundary between the games and the real world. The context of its contemporary deployment varies somewhat from Huizingas (1955) original use that emphasized the cultural pervasiveness of play:
All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course . . . . The arena, the cardtable, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e., forbidden spots, isolated hedged round, hallowed within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart. (p. 10)

For Huizinga (1955), the term refers not solely to games but to a number of social contexts where social rules distinguish one particular type of social space from another. An important aim of Huizingas work was to propose that play is not an activity that is limited to games but a salient aspect of all facets of human culture. A number of theorists in Game Studies have taken the concept of the magic circle out of its original context which emphasized cultural pervasiveness and deployed it to signify a separation from reality:
Although the magic circle is merely one of the examples in Huizingas list of play grounds, the term is used here as short-hand for the idea of a special place in time and 340
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space created by a game. The fact that the magic circle is just that-a circle-is an important feature of this concept. As a closed circle, the space it circumscribes is enclosed and separate from the real world . . . . Within the magic circle, special meanings accrue and cluster around objects and behaviours. In effect, a new reality is created, defined by the rules of the game and inhabited by its players. (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003, pp. 95-96)

Juul (2005) also adopts the use of the magic circle but differentiates between its status in the context of what he calls physical games like football or tennis and digital games. He applies the magic circle in a more specific formal capacity in terms of game space. According to Juul, physical games and board games take place in a space which is a subset of the space of the world: The space in which the game takes place is a subset of the larger world, and a magic circle delineates the bounds of the game (p. 164). The boundary can be made up of spatial perimeters and is often also temporally defined. The game can be limited to a specific area such as a tennis court or fencing piste or woven into the everyday world such as the case in live action role-playing games (LARPs), treasure hunts, and other forms of pervasive gaming. Here, the spatial perimeter is less defined than the temporal one. The spatial and temporal boundaries of the magic circle, in physical games, are upheld by a social agreement clarifying the interpretation and validation of actions, utterances, and outcomes; in other words, the rules. But in the case of digital games, where is the magic circle? Juul (2005) traces the magic circle of digital games along the hardware devices that enable their representation:
But in video games, the magic circle is quite well defined since a video game only takes place on the screen and using the input devices (mouse, keyboard, controllers) rather than in the rest of the world; hence there is no ball that can be out of bounds. (pp. 164-165)

Juul (2005) goes on to compare the magic circle in physical games with that in digital games based on the spatial qualities of each. With physical games, the magic circle separates real-world space from game space while in the case of digital games the magic circle separates the fictional world of the game from the game space. The latter is based on an assumption that the space of a game is part of the world in which it is played, but the space of a fiction is outside the world from which it is created (p. 164). In the case of digital games, the utility of the magic circles function as a marker where rules apply loses its analytical relevance. In physical games the distinction is needed because the game rules are upheld socially. Actions that take place within the marked area of the game, if this exists, are interpreted differently from actions outside that area. In digital games, the distinction is void because the only space that one can act in is traversable space. The stadium stands in FIFA 05 (EA Sports, 2005) or the space outside the combat area in Battlefield 1942 (Digital Illusions CE, 2002)
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cannot be traversed. The interpretative role of the magic circle as spatial marker is redundant when applied to digital games. The concept of the magic circle has also been applied to the experiential dimension of game play. Within game studies, it is often taken as given that game play involves entering what Suits (1978) has called the lusory attitude. There are distinct problems with viewing the game space as somehow separable from the everyday when viewed from an experiential perspective. Any attempt to create a clean demarcation between the game experience and the experience of the world (supposedly) external to it will be severely challenged to explain how the players personal and social histories can be excluded from the game activity. It is hardly possible for the game space to block out the complexity of social and personal relation. The lived experience of the players invariably informs, to different degrees depending on circumstance, the experience of the game and vice versa. The clear demarcation of game space from nongame space becomes even more problematic when contemporary developments in digital games, like massively multiplayer online games (hereafter referred to as MMOGs), are considered. Activities like planning and coordinating 40 man raids in World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004), which include several hours of tedious farming1 of items that will be needed to ensure the success of the raid, are often viewed as boring chores rather than pleasurable play. Nick Yee (2006a) has collected a wealth of quantitative data on MMOG players and in a recent article published in Games and Culture, he observes how MMOG playing can often feel like a second job:
The average MMORPG2 player spends 22 hours a week playing the game. And these are not only teenagers playing. The average MMORPG gamer is in fact 26 years old. About half of these players have a full time job. Every day, many of them go to work and perform an assortment of clerical tasks, logistical planning and management in their offices, then they come home and do those very same things in MMORPGs. Many players in fact characterize their game-play as a second job: It became a chore to play. I became defacto leader of a guild and it was too much. I wanted to get away from real life and politics and social etiquette followed me in. (p. 69)

Further examples of the limitations of the magic circle come in a host of other forms: companies employing people to farm in-world gold and sell it on e-Bay or offer character leveling services, social and cultural issues that crop up whenever you have masses of people interact in persistent environments, virtual worlds that require real-money expenditure for the acquisition of virtual goods, such as Second Life (Linden Lab, 2003) or Project Entropia (MindArk, 2003), and more. Dibbell (2006) has written a compelling account of his forays in trade of virtual assets and gold. To investigate the phenomenon often referred to as real money trade or the exchange of virtual world items for widely accepted currency, Dibbell embarked upon a year long stint buying and selling property, goods and gold in the popular Ultima Online (Origin Systems, 1997) MMOG. Dibbells Play Money is a self342
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reflexive meditation on the wide spectrum of experiences that MMOGs enable and the profound impact these experiences can have on a persons life. Dibbell describes how his engagement with Ultima Online transformed from a form of entertainment to a full-time job. He uses his experiences to foreground the inadequacy of the magic circle and the application of the work/play binary to MMOGs. Malaby (2007) affirms these observations in his article Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games, where he argues that game studies need to move beyond the a priori association of games with concepts such as fun and play. Malaby draws on a series of anthropological studies of play in various cultures to support his view that the separability of games from everyday life and the related separation of play from work are not empirically tenable concepts. In Malabys own ethnographic work with gamblers in Greece, it was clear that players of various games did not view games as separable from everyday life on the grounds of their being games. Here, we have an example of how an aspect of the models of Juul (2005) and Salen and Zimmerman (2003) does not hold up to practical application. The idea that games must have negotiable consequences is severely problematized when consequences are related not only to material gains but also to social issues like reputation and honor. In Malabys ethnographic work, it was clear that even in nongambling contexts, issues of cultural standing and social network are in fact highly consequential for the players involved. This runs counter to Roger Caillois (1962) view of games as activities of pure waste (p. 5) where the pure space (p. 6) of the game should not be encroached upon by the outside world. All of the issues discussed above frustrate attempts to set firm boundaries between game and nongame, work and play. As useful as a neat separation between game and nongame might be from an analytical perspective, the above arguments and examples, derived both from theoretical and ethnographic work, demonstrate the severe shortcomings of such a concept when applied to the study of games, particularly in contemporary developments of multiplayer digital games. Copier (2007) stresses the fundamental problems that the magic circle gives rise to:
The concept of the magic circle refers to a pre-existing artificiality of the game space that, combined with the strong metaphor, creates a dichotomy between the real and the imaginary which hides the ambiguity, variability, and complexity of actual games and play. (p. 139)

As Copier points out, the magic circle creates an a priori condition of bracketing from the real world that misrepresents their complexity. The fact that this artificiality is seen as a defining element of games increases the severity of the issue. With this commonly held assumption in place, it is not surprising that games are seen as inherently escapist. If they belong, by their very definition, to the domain of unreality, any engagement with them is a move away from the real. And as we discussed earlier, any departure from reality across the boundary that defines its many binaries is an act of escapism. As escapist activities removed from reality, they become imbued with triviality and other, usually negative, connotations of escapism. This becomes
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doubly problematic in the case of digital games where the normative assumptions of the game/nongame binary are combined with those of the virtual/real binary:
Play becomes a method to escape reality by entering a new and computer generated reality . . . . Games are about immersing the players with different forms of entertainment that creates an escape from reality. (Dymek & Bergvall, 2004)

Now that we have considered the ontological grounds upon which games tend to be seen as inherently escapist, we turn to the phenomenological association of games with escapism by focusing on the problematic equivalence of escapism with engagement or immersion.

An Engaging Escape
On the phenomenal level, the level of engagement required by the ergodic (Aarseth, 1997) nature of games (Calleja, 2007b) is often seen as a source of escapism in itself. The following quote by Messerly (2004) exemplifies this view that equates escapism with engagement without exploring the varied complexity of the latter:
Escapism is the primary appeal. Moreover, as the graphics get better and the game play more sophisticated, playing becomes even more engrossing. It is easy to understand why anyone would want to escape our difficult and complicated world and fall into a vivid, compelling game environment. One can live there with little or no interaction with the ordinary world. (p. 29)

Games are seen as being escapist because they make it so easy to lose track of time, so easy to ignore other things that could be done or should be done instead. They are designed to be engaging and are sought by players because they are engaging. Of course, other forms of media are also designed to be engaging, but the feedback loop that games set up between the media object and the player extends the capacity to be engaged by virtue of the need for players to act and to explore the represented text and the algorithmic structures that animate it. Players are beckoned to push the limits imposed by designers, to improve their dexterous and cognitive abilities, and to be emotionally affected by the digital game. Games afford the ability to communicate with, compete against, and collaborate with remotely located players or friends in their living rooms. It is not merely a matter of games being engaging but of games affording a variety of ways to be engaged. To understand why games are so appealing, it is not enough to claim, as Messerly does, that games are escapist, immersive, addictive, or fun. This creates a circular argument that does not go very far into understanding the forms of engagement that they afford. Game involvement is not a single experiential phenomenon but a multiplicity of overlapping and fluid forms of engagement (Calleja, 2007a, 2007b). Saying that games are escapist determines the mode of interaction with them, rather than describing a possible aspect of the engagement in any meaningful
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way. The following sections will discuss cognitive and emotional dimensions of game engagement and consider how these relate to escapism. As Johnson (2005) has argued, games are great at presenting players with cognitive challenges of all sorts, often needing to keep in mind a number of nested objectives that need to be completed in specific sequences. Beyond the thin layer of the surface sign lies a depth of interconnected problems that players strive to solve. Games involve all forms of goal-directed decision-making going from making planetary invasion plans involving hundreds of remotely located players to deciding which player on the transfer list in a football game will work best as a right winger. (Calleja, 2007b). This aspect of engagement emphasizes the need to look beyond the visual representation when trying to understand games. Although, on the surface, the game may have the appearance of an illustrated childrens fairy tale or a muscle-bound bloodfest, the feedback loop that captures the players attention for extended periods of time is made up of these affordances for pattern seeking, problem solving, and decision making. Once one looks beyond the veneer of representation, games have the potential to stimulate cognitive skills that can be useful in everyday settings (Beck & Wade, 2004; Gee, 2007; Johnson, 2005; Wark, 2007). It is no surprise to read of senior position job applicants having their MMOG guild leading experience considered in positive terms:
A guild is a collection of players who come together to share knowledge, resources, and manpower. To run a large one, a guild master must be adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating, and recruiting new members; creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes. Guilds routinely splinter over petty squabbles and other basic failures of management; the master must resolve them without losing valuable members, who can easily quit and join a rival guild. Never mind the virtual surroundings; these conditions provide real-world training a manager can apply directly in the workplace. (Brown, 2006)

The similarity between the underlying structures of games and serious activities rests on their commonality as designed algorithmic artefacts. Accounting, recruitment, stock management, or market speculation all depend on a finite set of practices codified by the regulations of the relevant corporate context and having a set of recognizable objectives. Games are similarly structured upon an algorithmic logic that codifies the potential avenues of action leading toward the resolution of a series of nested objectives. This is not to say that the repercussions and magnitude of complexity involved in the above-mentioned jobs are similar to those of games, but the engagement with the individual problem-solving activities may bear considerable affinities. The cognitive, emotional, and kinesthetic feedback loop that is formed between the game process and the player makes games particularly powerful media for affecting players moods and emotional states (Bryant & Davies, 2006; Grodal, 2000). For those suffering from a lack of excitement, games offer an immediate
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channel of emotional arousal. Conversely, for those whose work or personal lives are too hectic, their compelling nature makes them ideal for shifting ones attention to a performative domain that suits the players needs: vent frustration through intense first-person action, get absorbed in the cognitive challenge of a strategy game, or stroll leisurely in aesthetically appealing landscapes. The appeal of beautifully rendered environments can be particularly powerful when contrasted with unattractive everyday surroundings. Excitatory homeostasis is a term within media psychology that refers to the tendency of individuals to choose entertainment to achieve an optimal level of arousal (Bryant & Davies, 2006, p. 183). If ones emotional state is considered negative, understimulated persons will tend to choose media content that is arousing while overstimulated persons tend to choose calmer media content. Games offer a variety of participatory means of affecting mood as well as allowing players to tweak game settings to bring about the desired affective change. The designed pacing of mood affect varies on the genre and expected target audience. MMOGs, for example, are dependent on extended participation of players in their vast geographical expanses and thus designers need to provide places that create positive emotions for their inhabitants. The creators of World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) placed considerable importance on creating appealing regions with varying palettes of tastefully blended colors and a design policy that aimed to appeal to the masses. Eight million paying subscribers confirm the wisdom of Blizzards design. There is a particular kind of attraction to inhabiting beautiful landscapes, wherein one can roam without the stringent pressure of other games, that can have stronger affective qualities than viewing attractive images in nonergodic media. But some players find other forms of affective arousal appealing. The action FPS F.E.A.R (First Encounter Assault Recon) (Monolith Inc., 2005) is designed to maximize excitement by combining the captivating, fast-paced characteristics of FPSs with hair-raising techniques borrowed from the horror movie genre. Players progress through F.E.A.R by following a linear plotline that takes them from one environment to another. Although there is no possibility of veering from the episodic nature of level progression, the environments themselves can be explored in any way the player likes, with specific events triggered the first time an area is crossed. The game alternates between combat situations and paranormal horror scenes, which may require a specific reaction from the player to overcome, and less active sequences that are meant to further the plot and often make players jump 3 ft off their seats. This is just one perspective on the ways F.E.A.Rs designers use aspects of the game to affect the players emotional state. As the success of the game confirms, players look for different sorts of experiences in games: the pleasure of aesthetically beautiful and peaceful places like those described by the World of Warcraft participants, the appeal of visual styles borrowed from other popular media or the exhilaration brought on by startling effects of horror games such as F.E.A.R. At times, players will sacrifice great game play for the chance to have experiences in specific
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settings they find appealing. More powerful graphics, audio, and physics might not be a determinant of good game design, but the appeal of representational strategies points to other considerations. Salen and Zimmerman (2003) are among a number of game designers who deplore the trend toward improving representation at the cost of innovations in design. There is no doubt that these game designers are right from the perspective of creating interesting game systems. But we must not forget that digital games do not only attract players looking for interesting and cleverly designed game systems but also attract armies of players whose interest is to live a specific, packaged experience: a Formula One car driver, a World War 2 sniper, the manager of a football team, or a murder victim on the Orient Express. Digital games are not only algorithmic game systems but also digitally mediated experiences that aim to satisfy the desires generated by movies, literature, or free-ranging fantasy. As Cskszentmihalyis (1990) extensive research on optimal experience has shown, long spells of mental stagnation have disastrous effects on our well-being. Rather than a pathological disavowal of duties, escapism can be an important means to regulating our emotional states and enable us to sustain an otherwise unbearable situation or to turn a tedious stretch of time into a cognitively and emotionally engaging activity. This evocative power of representation is one of the main reasons why fictions are often seen as being escapist. Some escapist activities have the particular quality of being set within aesthetically pleasing environments that have a certain consistency in their logic that makes them believable as places, whether they draw their representational qualities from the physical world or the media. The conjunction of such represented worlds and the engaged consciousness of the affected reader/ player can lead to a sensation of inhabiting them, not necessarily because the reader enters another realm but because that realm becomes part of their immediate surroundings, infusing the immediate environment with the qualities of the represented environment (Calleja, 2007b). This intensity of involvement is not a symptom of negative escapism, as is too often assumed, but a form of engagement that is inherent to finely crafted worlds. If researchers (Gelter, 2007; Guasque, 2005; Yee, 2006b) continue to consider this experiential phenomenon as a form of escapism, it would be worth bearing in mind that, as Evans (2001) and Tuan (1998) argue, it is a crucial part of our everyday life and culture.

What Are We Running Away From?

The notion of escape presupposes movement. It entails a shift from an environment or situation to one that is perceived as being more favorable. Leaving a rough neighborhood to avoid the threat of danger, migrating from a war-torn country to a more stable one, or fleeing an armed assailant to safeguard ones life are all examples of escape from undesirable or downright dangerous situations. The imperative here is an attempt at a permanent move away toward a more desirable state of affairs.
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Escapism similarly presupposes movement to a more desirable place or situation but, unlike the unidirectionality of escape, escapism also implies an eventual return to the point of departure. The escapist is grounded in a location or social context that they return to. The escapee, however, aims for a permanent, or at least long-term, change of situation. What both have in common is the striving for a betterment of a current situation. For the escapee, positive change comes from a wholesale shift, while the escapist hopes for improvement of the original situation upon return or, at least, a temporary lightening of current burdens. There is, of course, no guarantee of the positive nature of this change, nor that any change will actually occur, but often the expectation of bettering ones present situation is there. Escapism does not require a specifically negative situation to rectify. It also plays an important part in breaking away from stagnation and is often a favored antidote of boredom. Escapism is intimately related with the uniquely human faculty of imagination. The flights of fantasy commonly associated with escapism are made of the same stuff as the most intricate corporate plan or any formation of a solution to a problem at hand. Mental imagery allows us to retain in consciousness past experiences and potential future actions as well as the present moment. Our ability to imagine also inspires our emotions and passions, motivates our lives and, in short, defines who we are. Imagination allows for the possibility of mentally detaching ourselves temporarily from the present moment, a defining element of escapism. Indeed if we think about it, many cases of escapism are in fact ways of exercising our imaginative faculties. Tuan (1998) similarly links escapism with imagination and views them as defining elements of culture and humanity:
Culture is more closely linked to the human tendency not to face facts, our ability to escape by one means or another, than we are accustomed to believe. Indeed, I should like to add another definition of what it is to be human to the many that already exist: A human being is an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is. Humans not only submit and adapt, as all animals do; they transform in accordance with a preconceived plan. That is, before transforming, they do something extraordinary, namely see what is not there. Seeing what is not there lies at the foundation of all human culture. (pp. 5-6)

For Tuan (1998) then, escapism is not a negative avoidance of the necessary real but very much part of human reality. The question of reality is as old as philosophy and it is beyond the scope of this article to take a position in this debate, but it would nevertheless be useful to convey Tuans notion of reality in relation to escapism. The real is contrasted to the imaginary, the forged, the fictional, the computer generated or, more generally, the mediated. Reality can stand for the indifferent presence of nature: mountains, rivers, and oceans are real. Storms, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis are real. A bull charging straight at you is real. Here nature is contrasted to the man-made, the designed. But the man-made is also often considered real. The White
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House is real, the Danish Kroner is real, Sony Corporation is real. And within the tangled web of human society, certain activities are more real than others: having a full-time job is real, graduating from college is real, winning the football World Cup is real. On a more personal level, my sense of home is real, headaches are real, and the love I feel for my partner is real. All the above objects, places, activities, and feelings are real yet very few of them, if any, are universally so. Reality is thus always relative to the social, cultural, geographical, and personal context in which it is discussed. There is nothing natural or self-evident about the real. As Tuan (1998) argues, one form of the real is that which makes itself felt on the individual. This can take the form of a natural phenomenon or a socially created one. The most immediate form of reality, and that which is often taken as the baseline for the real, is that which makes an impact upon the individual often in a negative way:
Reality in this sense is intractable, and it is indifferent to the needs and desires of particular individuals and groups. Facing reality, then, implies accepting ones essential powerlessness, yielding or adjusting to circumambient forces, taking solace in some local pattern or order that one has created and to which one has become habituated. (p. 7)

This sense of the familiar is another form of reality, what Tuan calls local pattern or order (p. 7). This is a real that is nurturing, all-enveloping, and understandable. The legibility of this form of real makes it comforting because it allows for decreased contingency. Tuan (1998) importantly emphasizes that both the natural and the designed belong to the real. The chief determinant of the real is lucidity:
What one escapes to is culturenot culture that has become daily life, not culture as dense and inchoate environment and way of coping, but culture that exhibits lucidity, a quality that often comes out of a process of simplification. (p. 23)

If reality is relative to context, it is reasonable to argue that a phenomenon that is defined by the avoidance of reality is also relative to context. Once the universality of the real is undermined, so is the universality of its avoidance. This is a crucial step in our understanding of escapism. If escapism is relative to context, it stops making sense to label any specific type of activity or artefact as being, in itself, escapist. An activity can only ever be seen as escapist from a particular context of a particular individual. If I sweep floors for a living, I would be inclined to yearn for a more creative activity, like say, being a fiction writer. Fiction writing, for me, might be a form of escapism from the daily drudgery of floor sweeping. For the published fiction writer, who needs to produce enough novels each year to feed her family, writing is the everyday chore, possibly even a form of drudgery, particularly when the writing stops flowing. She puts off her writing by doing house chores, sweeping the floor of her study is her form of escapism from writing. It gives a concrete task that does not require the effort of original ideas and the stress of placing ones creative work to the critical eye of the masses. Sweeping for the writer yields satisfaction of task
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completion. Writing sates the sweeps yearning for creativity. Both are forms of escapism, in the general understanding of the world, yet neither is defined as such in itself. So are digital games escapist? Not any more than any other engaging activity. Having said that, if we consider digital games as forms of simulated experience, it is fair to say that their most distinct escapist trait is their ability to provide such a variety of designed experiences not their addictive or immersive nature per se. Perhaps, they are treated with so much caution not only because the individual game can be highly engaging but because there are games to suit most forms of escapist desires. Digital Illusions CEs (2008) Mirrors Edge emphasizes the acrobatic thrills of Parkuor, thus simulating the speed and momentum of movement that overcomes the restrictions of urban environments. It appeases the escapist desire to overcome horizontal and vertical barriers with the elegance and adrenaline rushing energy. Medieval Total War 2 (Creative Assembly, 2006) provides both an escape to a well-researched historical setting and a deep cognitive engagement with the strategic complexities of its turn-based campaign and real-time battles. MMOGs like World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) offer an escape into beautifully designed lands to be explored and new (human) players to meet and share ones experiences with. The clever simplicity of Tetris (Pajitnov, 1985) draws players by appealing to their ability to focus on mental rotation, pattern recognition, and spatial ability. However, we could extend these examples into any other activity the individual finds more appealing than the task at hand or the lack thereof; from cooking to accounting or DJing. If the relative nature of this conception of escapism seems overly broad, it is exactly because escapism is an important and unavoidable aspect of our culture (Tuan, 1998). Escapism is the homeostatic force that defines our culture and being, and if digital games enable such a process, it is because they are able to simulate experiences beyond the ludic and agonistic. In concluding this article, I would like to make a clarification. In opposing the idea that digital games are inherently escapist, I am by no means claiming that they can never function as means for procrastination and avoidance of more unpleasant duties. Rather, I am arguing that no particular medium or activity can be labeled as being escapist in itself. The value judgment implied in the term escapism is always dependent on the context in which it is exercised not the form of activity itself. Working late hours to complete an appointed task can be seen as a positive exertion of willpower, productive efficiency, and discipline. Or it can result in the neglect of family or other pressing matters that the laborious employee prefers avoiding. One can be just as readily escapist through their job as they are playing a game. As Raboteau (1995) and Tuan (1998) both point out when discussing the subject of escapism, what we should be weary of is not escapism in itself but of losing sight of the interconnectedness of both worldsthe ordinary and the wondrous (Raboteau, 1995).

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Notes
1. Farming refers to the activity of mechanically harvesting resources or repeatedly killing mobs that are known to drop items, materials, or gold as a goal in itself. 2. MMORPG stands for massively multiplayer online role playing game. This term is sometimes used interchangeably with MMOG or massively multiplayer online game. The former is a subset of the latter that includes other MMO genres such as MMOFPS or massively multiplayer online first person shooter and MMORTS, massively multiplayer online real time strategy. I will be using the term MMOG to refer to all these genres of online games.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The authors declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article. Funding The authors received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article. References
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Bio
Gordon Calleja is Assistant Professor and Head of the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT-University of Copenhagen. He teaches game analysis and theory at post-graduate level. His research focuses on player experience, game ontology and narrative.

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