If you got to live inside a video game world, which one would you choose?
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Every now and then, one of these daily writing prompts reminds me that I’m probably not the intended audience. Today’s question makes a couple of assumptions. First, it assumes that I play enough video games to have a favorite video game world. Second, it assumes that if I were offered the opportunity to live in one of those worlds, I’d actually take it.
Neither assumption is particularly accurate.
I do play some games. There’s Wordle, Connections, Strands, Puzzle Page, Elevate, Draft Showdown and PGA Tour. Most of those are more intellectual pursuits, though I do enjoy the sports games. But I’m not particularly interested in living in a world where I spend every day trying to figure out a five-letter word, and I don’t think I’d enjoy spending the rest of my life trying to figure out why four seemingly unrelated words belong together.
The truth is, I’m not all that impressed with the false reality of video games. And perhaps it’s because of what I do for a living, but I find this question a little more troubling than entertaining.
The World We Actually Live In
As a teacher, I spend a good portion of my life listening to people talk about how we need to improve our children’s reading scores. But our children don’t really read meaningful texts anymore. They read excerpts. They read passages selected because they lend themselves to particular questions on standardized tests. And somewhere along the way, we’ve lost sight of the fact that reading is supposed to be about more than answering questions correctly.
I want my students to read The Odyssey, not just a few passages from it. I want them to experience To Kill a Mockingbird and Romeo and Juliet, not simply identify the theme of a paragraph extracted from either one. I want them to appreciate literature, to get caught up in a story and to discover that a book written long before they were born might actually have something to say about their lives.
Then there are the math scores. We spend a considerable amount of time talking about how to improve those, too. I’m an English teacher, but occasionally a little basic math comes up in my classroom. You would be amazed at how long it can take to get an answer to something as simple as 71 + 15. What should take a few seconds of mental arithmetic can become an ordeal involving fingers, calculators and a surprising amount of uncertainty.
And history? We don’t talk nearly as much about improving our children’s skills in that area, and sometimes I wonder if that part of their education is simply vanishing. Ask a teenager what happened in 1939, and there’s a decent chance you’ll hear, “Slavery.” Never mind that slavery in the United States was abolished more than 70 years earlier. Never mind that 1939 was the year Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. The events that shaped the world these children live in are increasingly disconnected from their understanding of that world.
But ask them which video game universe they’d love to live in, and I’ll bet quite a few of them could give you a shortlist. They could probably tell you the history of those worlds, too, along with the names of the principal characters, the geography, the weapons and the various ways to defeat the bad guys.
Somehow, we’ve managed to raise children who can become experts on worlds that don’t exist while struggling to understand the one that does.
At Least He Had an Imagination
I remember a kid I knew growing up who used to come up with some of the most ridiculous things I’d ever heard.
“What if you had a mouth in the top of your head?” he would ask. “That would be cool because you could put your food in your hat and keep eating while you fought off the bad guys.”
Or there was this one: “What if you had an eye in the end of your finger? You could stick your finger around the corner and see the bad guys coming.”
I don’t know why he was so concerned about fighting off bad guys, but I do remember thinking that these were some pretty goofy ideas. Looking back, though, I have to give him credit for something. At least he had an imagination. He was creating these ridiculous scenarios in his head, identifying problems and coming up with some rather unusual solutions to them. Nobody had programmed those ideas into a game for him. He had to come up with them himself.
A less imaginative version of his spirit seems to live on in many of today’s teenagers. They still have the desire to escape into the unreal, but they don’t have to do nearly as much of the imagining. Someone else has created the world, the characters, the problems and the possible solutions. All they have to do is turn on the game and step into it.
I’m not suggesting that every video game is devoid of intellectual value. Some require a great deal of strategy, creativity and problem-solving. Nor am I suggesting that children shouldn’t have the opportunity to play and enjoy themselves. Good grief, I watched more than my share of television growing up, and I’ve spent plenty of time playing games as an adult.
But there’s a difference between spending some of your time escaping reality and spending so much of your time there that you’re not adequately equipped to function in the real world.
Who’s Doing the Hard Work?
That’s the part of this that concerns me most. While so many of our children are immersing themselves in things that build little lasting worth or value, someone else is doing the hard work. Someone else is creating the technology, developing the games, writing the code, designing the worlds and figuring out how to keep our children engaged for just a little longer.
And those people don’t necessarily have our children’s best interests at heart. They’re in business to make money, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But if they can make more money by convincing a teenager to spend six hours inside an imaginary world instead of two, what incentive do they have to encourage that teenager to put down the controller and pick up a book?
Meanwhile, somebody still has to grow our food, build our homes, teach our children, perform our surgeries and make the decisions that will shape our future. Somebody has to understand mathematics and science. Somebody has to read and comprehend the documents that govern our lives. Somebody has to understand the mistakes of the past well enough to help us avoid repeating them.
And at some point, those somebodies are going to be the children we’re educating today.
The real world is going to require quite a bit more of them than the ability to defeat a virtual opponent or accumulate an impressive collection of virtual possessions. It’s going to require knowledge, skills, productivity, responsibility and the ability to interact meaningfully with other human beings. And none of those things can be neglected indefinitely without consequences.
Give Me This World
I love a good story. I’m a writer and an English teacher, so I certainly understand the appeal of imaginary worlds. I’ve spent considerable time in some of them, and I’ve encouraged my students to visit many of them, too. But the best literature doesn’t just take us away from the real world for a little while. It brings us back with a better understanding of it.
I don’t need to live in the world of The Odyssey to learn something from Odysseus. I don’t need to live in Maycomb, Alabama, to understand what Atticus Finch was trying to teach his children. Those stories have value precisely because of what they can teach us about the world we actually inhabit.
So, which video game world would I choose to live in?
None of them.
I’m far more interested in helping the next generation learn how to live in this one. I want them to read great books, understand their history, do a little math without reaching for a calculator and know how to have a meaningful conversation with another human being. I want them to exercise their imaginations and create something that didn’t exist before, rather than simply disappear into something somebody else created for them.
And I want them to discover that the real world, for all its problems and imperfections, offers more opportunities for adventure, discovery and accomplishment than they might ever have imagined.
We have enough people trying to escape reality. What we need are more people equipped to improve it.
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Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.
