Why playing the Sims kills you?

            By the title of my article, I promised to put the light on the biggest question of your sweat childhood. Don’t be ashamed, I know that the Sims, this virtual reality game, had a compulsive attraction on a great part of you when you still had a strand of hair falling on your eyes and braces. Why does the time spent playing on your computer with your virtual friends destroyed a part of you? Be patient. You will understand in a minute.

         

   First, let me talk about Heidegger, who is pretty easy to understand behind his complex words such « Dasein ». What is a Dasein ? In Being and Time, Heidegger explains that every human being have a Dasein. This concept does not refers to a « person », to the mankind, it is a quite new concept that actually means « being there ». In fact, your life has an essence, which is determined by your existence, by what you live, and this existence itself is determined by your Dasein. It is a state of you when you ex-ists, when you stand outside of your body, when you reach transcendence. It is the first state of anything, just an activity that you do not relate to words or to your experience.

Being is commonly known as reality. To Aristotle, being is a substance, that unifies people’s attributes. It is a whole of you. But to Heidegger, you are not being neither through your body nor your rational thoughts, only through the Dasein. Being is just the first step of the perception of the elements.

And that’s where comes Merleau-Ponty, who tried to precise what Heidegger wrote. Merleau-Ponty theorized then few ideas about perception and ontology in his book Phenomenology of Perception. To him, phenomenology is the art to find definitions to essences of perception and consciousness. It is a return to the things themselves, a rejection of science. And perception is « a play of colours, noises and tactile sensations » which have no meaning first, and which are immediately afterwards put back into the world as we learnt it. It is « the background from which all acts stand out ». In fact, the perception of Merleau-Ponty is the Dasein of Heidegger. The perception is an access to the truth whereas the experience of the real is imaginary. Science is just an interpretation of the world, like everyone has his own view of the world because of his different experience.

For example, let’s imagine that a Spanish boy and a French girl are looking at the same tree at the same moment. Before to see it with a different eye because of their own experience and before that the Spanish boy calls it an « árbol » and the French girl an « arbre », they perceive the same tree, with the same characteristics, and only enjoy the very essence of the tree before to connect it with what they calls « reality ». The truth is that to communicate, we impose to ourselves to conceptualize in a word everything that we live, but as a result, it seems that everyone mistakes this superficial world with the real one, the one in which you are being. Translations destroy a thing as it really is. That is the reason why Hiedegger did not want « Dasein » to be translated. « Being there » can not be translated.

Moreover, Merleau Ponty seems to argue that the history of philosophy hides us the truth. Indeed, just like with the phenomenon of words, you only see the world through concepts that previous philosophers theorized. But you never come back to the basis, the Dasein. You are never being because you live in a society which provides you a certain culture that is the link between you and the world and lock you up instead of making you free. You are being free at the moment when you can perceive the world and free your Dasein.

Recently, you probably heard about the movie « Back to the future » as it took place in October 2015 and that no newspapers have missed to remember this. This is a good occasion to illustrate this idea of a society that dictate your superficial perception of the world. Let’s imagine a minute that you could go back to the sixties and that you would see a flower (yes, I’m in a nature mood). As the sixties are the hippie epoch, the first thing you may do would be to put it in your hair to say no to war. Because making war is bad, and making love is much better. At the contrary, if you see this flower in 2015, the first thing you will do would be to take a picture of it and to post it on instagram with the hashtags #beautiul #nature #flowers #loveflowers #nofilter. And that would be your way to say the to the world that looking at a flower is much more better than fighting with a Kalashnikov. But in both situations, even if you do not think about this flower the same way because this is not the same era, you perceive it the same way. Just because it is you. Just because it is your Dasein. Each time, your Dasein perceive the flower the same way, and you’re being the same. It is only when rationality and culture comes back to your mind that you decide to see it differently.

            In fact, we should try to connect harder and more often with our soul. Socrates said « What do you think, you, without taking care of the common law, of what you’ve been told or of the official speech? Answer with your own soul ». Marc Aurèle meditated every morning and every night to try to be again, without his society’s considerations, to try to return to his Dasein’s thoughts. Consequently, maybe the key of the existence would be a kind of Buddhism? But as Kant said « without sensitivity, nothing would be given to us, and without the thinking, nothing would be thought. Thoughts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts, blinded ». Therefore, being would also be to share things with others, to understand what we live so that we could think about that. And to do that, it is necessary to overweight the Dasein and to make the link with this imaginary reality.

But still, if we consider Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty theories, the one that just want to be aware of all the news, of quick information that medias provides us, that falls onto us everyday, is not the one that is being. Because he can talk about many things but only in a superficial way. It will never be the truth, because it will be distorted by many concepts, many previous theories, many blended perceptions of the world. The one who is being is not the one that can write a text in two parts and two subparts, as we learn to do in Sciences po. Instead of paying attention to divide my text blog in wise sections, if I want to exist now, I should probably try to feel my grey computer under my fingers, not to tell me that this is just a « computer ».

            And this is already the time to conclude and to come back to this mysterious question: Why playing the Sims kills you? Well, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty suggests us to perceive the world as the Dasein perceive it, to be and to ex-ist. The understanding of the existence and science could not help you to reach this goal. Living through concepts and choosing to see the world as it is given to us and not to feel it by ourselves means that we negate our existence and the essence of our existence. In other words, if you live through other feelings than yours, through other lives, other perceptions, like in video games, in particular like in virtual reality games and so like in the Sims, you forget to be. So, burn it.