Pain

Pain is a sensation that you’ll always be exposed to. It’s constantly stalking you, whether you know it or not. It can hit you suddenly and take you by surprise and can disappear as quickly as it appeared or stay with you long afterwards, watching, waiting. Physical; emotional; spiritual; psychological; it doesn’t matter. It’s with you for perpetuity and if you’re not suffering at this current moment, you certainly will in the future.

It eats at you from the inside: it never goes away and it never ever stops. Yes, you’ll have days where you feel fine, but they’re always balanced out by the inevitable bad ones when you feel you’re no longer in control. It manifests itself in myriad ways, always discovering a new method to assault you with and keep you on your toes. It comes and it goes, but it never really goes: it lurks and lingers, hiding until the time is right to make an appearance and once again make you its puppet.

Pain does not exist in videogames. Yes, your character can get injured and perish, but other than only one prolific example of a character being killed off for good during gameplay, the effect is temporary: you’ll always come back for another shot at life. If you get shot, you can take cover and be ready to go again in matter of seconds…

… get the living piss beaten out of you time and time again, but always be ready to take another pasting…

..and have all your limbs broken, your chest compacted and be concussed beyond belief, but a few medkits or a sleep later, be back on feet and ready for action.

Reality is not like that: if we get injured, it takes days, months, years to recover and even then we may be afflicted with a condition for the rest of our days. There’s no instant healing and bouncing back: we take time to regenerate and even then we may never recover fully. We have no health augmentations, boosts or bonuses: once it’s gone, it’s gone. Sure, there are instances of characters in games being afflicted with painful conditions, but these tend to only flare up when the plot demands it: they don’t have to deal with the consequences of living with such conditions day in and day out.

And so we live out our meaningless, uneventful existences bearing such a burden, counter to the miraculous healing abilities of our digital counterparts. If only they knew how lucky they were…