A rough foreword and some additional notes on the composition

So as not to be misinterpreted, it may be best to begin with a preface and state explicitly that: I am not inherently against video games. To be anti-video game would also mean to be anti-literature, anti-film, anti-music, and anti-culture as well. I feel that gaming is a budding (if not currently corporatized)  art form that has a lot of potential to produce beautiful and transformative experiences never before imagined. I even play and enjoy certain games from time to time, though not as often or enthusiastically as in my youth. However, there is a given order of importance where necessity takes logical precedence over novelty – an order that today is commonly inverted.  Gaming is a form of entertainment and pleasure, and thus is no different from any other indulgence done in excess or to serve palliative, therapeutic purposes. This specifically is the problem I aim to elucidate.

Twisted Roots

       

    In the spectrum of all conceivable relativity, I had a ‘happy’ childhood. It is safe to say that life was pretty dang alright until around the age of ten when my parents separated and things took an undesired change. I remained with my mother, while my dad, conveniently out of work, did not pay child support. Within a few years my mother had exhausted all of her savings paying off legal fees from the prolonged divorce, and we had to relocate to a small down just south of the Oklahoma border where I could be taken care of by my aunt on work days (my mom was a flight attendant for American Airlines out of DFW), and where the living expenses were substantially cheaper. 
       Before, when my parents were still together, I was never allowed to play video games at home. My dad referred to them as “brain cancer,” and though my dad was mostly a very clever idiot, he would, from time to time, drop proverbs and epithets such as this that became ironic to me down the road, and so held some merit of wisdom (if outside of the context employed at the time).  While I did get to play games when visiting friends, it was permitted to have a console of my own, at least not until later on after the split.
       The Christmas after we moved (I think it was in ‘96 or ’97) my mom bought me a Nintendo 64 that came packaged with Mario 64. When I saw what had been hidden under the wrapping paper, I nearly wept with joy, and hugged and thanked my mom profusely. It took us an hour to figure out how to hook it up to the bulky Panasonic family TV, but we finally did, I got to play for a couple hours that Christmas night and it was thoroughly magical. One week and 120 stars later, I was forever changed. All the games I’d experienced prior had been 2D: Super Mario World, Mega Man X, Mortal Kombat, a slew of Genesis side-scrollers. Naturally, this new dimension- which was just as fun and surprisingly easy to control - blew my eleven or twelve year old mind, as I'm sure it did for many. I remember renting game after game from Blockbuster, eager for new releases and heartbroken when a sought title was checked out. Occasionally I’d even use my allowance from chores to buy games of particular interest: Star Fox 64, Goldeneye, Mario Kart 64, Banzo Kazooie, and so on. In the end I had a collection of probably forty cartridges, and given the sparse library the 64 had, I like to think that was pretty impressive.
     From there, I began collecting gaming magazines (Nintendo Power, EGM, Game Pro, Game Informer, and my favorite, GameFan), browsing gaming news sites and forums (thegia, planetgamecube, gaming-age), and more or less living inside game-related IRC chats. It was through this online subculture that I started gradually learning to separate what games were truly good ones - games with stirring atmospherics, compelling characters and stories, refined art and memorable music - from games that were, well, just kind of mediocre, fodder for entertainment. This conscientiousness of quality propelled my passion further and from that era on, I was officially a ‘hardcore’ gamer, as they are called.
       The first RPG I ever played was Chrono Trigger, admittedly on snes9x, a Super Nintendo emulator.  I was 15 at that time and to say that this adventure had a very, very profound effect on me would be an understatement. No, it was an out of body, almost religious experience, and I still to this day consider it to be one of the best games, if not the very best game, of all time. Through Chrono Trigger, I discovered Squaresoft in their golden era, and with this new adoration for jRPGs, I was more hardcore about interactive fantasy than ever. The seriousness had become obsession and retrospectively, looking at the circumstances of my life at that juncture, it is obvious why. Gaming was the perfect form of distraction for someone my age with my problems at the time.
       But then something happened in the early oughts, at the peak of my fanaticism. Over the course of a few years, around the demise of the Dreamcast, the industry changed and it seemed even my favorite companies had become concerned only with making a profit, as opposed to making magical transcendental experiences for those playing. Casual gamers began to outnumber the hardcore ones, and even in my sacred online communities, there was a noticeable conversion. People went from talking about games like ‘Oh, wow, that games great!’ to ‘Oh, wow, that game has great graphics.’ Even from a design standpoint, the visual appeal of newer games seemed bankrupt due to the rising popularity of the ‘filmified’ veneer of realism, which just looked silly then, and still looks silly today to some degree. Where once there was artistic stylization to account for hardware limitations, a majority of modern games brought to the 128bit table a splendidly dull array of explosions and polygonal breasts; booms and boobies with more sculpting and physics than whole environments within the same games. Structural composition had been substituted for superficial gloss, and any maven of the arts can tell you how wrong and arear such prioritizing is.  Though I didn't know why for a few years, this devolution really saddened me and once these trends had become standard procedure, my interest in games started to wane. 

Blinded by the Glow : Gamer Psychology (and the Absent Self-Awareness Of) 
           

         There’s many psychological-causal facets to consider about why people play games, why they enjoy them so much, or really just why there is such a gigantic user base for video games in general, but I don’t want to get into them in too much detail here. However, most of these attributors can be reduced to a lowest common denominator, and I’m sure every serious gamer plays games for at least one of two primary reasons. One, games offer experiences that aren’t possible in the mundane parameters of real life and two, they allow people to engage in a more preferable reality that is offered by the fantastic nature and simplicity of these created worlds. This is not revelatory. But whether it’s for the purpose of recreation or the purpose of escapism, the player is being distracted from his or her own life/self, and very few people actually realize how detrimental this can be given the framework of the modern world. We’ll get to that later. 

        Because of what is offered by the experience, I think anyone who is or has ever been a hardcore game-enthusiast, has probably - at some point - fantasized about how cool it would be to ‘live’ in a game world. Maybe only in the form of a daydream while you were in school or on the toilet or whatever, but I imagine a lot of people  dealing with problems at home or just middle or high school think, man, my life sucks, wouldn’t it be really great if I was in…. like, say… Hyrule or something, or were Link from Zelda, instead of Johnny Doe, who is skinny and has acne and gets stuffed into lockers [do kids even do that kind of thing anymore? Sadly, they did back in my school days]

      When the “VR” “revolution” “happened,” it seemed like these kinds of fantasies might soon be possible. Though they never materialized, at least not as initially promised, the technology was always expanding and the possibility and demand remained present. Now it seems at long last that the VR movement is right around the corner, actually, not just out of wishful optimism. We are beginning to see tangible, functional augmented reality devices enter the market and similar systems offering complete virtual reality are in development. Assuming the civilization doesn’t collapse or self-destruct in the next few years, we will live to see it; virtual reality in the game-changing manifestation originally heralded way back when. Everyone is excited.

 But is this breakthrough a good thing? 

How Escape Came to Be

        In my late teens and early twenties, after losing the passion for gaming, I began reading and learning, and strangely found myself being more aware of how the world worked and how much that differed from what was ideal. I came to understand man’s paradoxical need for both security and heroism as it was: pretty much just as vital as food, air, or water. But knowing this didn’t really help my situation and kind of just made things worse. My own anxieties and depressions got pretty crazy, and that was around the time that I turned towards chemical escapism to get the solace of childhood that I could no longer derive from fictive imaginings. Essentially, I replaced rescuing digital damsels and saving the world from monstrous villains with cheap booze and a variety of narcotics, some legally prescribed, many not. I was amazed to find that drugs and alcohol were a highly effective 'solution' to my many, many problems....for a little bit. Half a decade passed by in a blur of desperation and bad decisions and in the end this lifestyle, as was portended by every voice of reason in my formative years, ruined my entire life. The person I once was was no more, and I spent the last three years rebuilding from the ground up. It was hell at first, but now I can look back and see it as an interesting transformation that has absolutely been for the better. Wisdom is indeed gained through folly. 
      It took a few months, but once I got sober and recovered from the after-effects of my indulgence, the idea came to me to write a book. It was to be this exaggerated, allegorical fantasy of the last five years of my life. That book was Escape. But I also had a desire to write a memoir, and since I was still immediately dealing with a lot of painful things, it seemed more appropriate and real to me to begin working on the latter.  This was in late summer of 2011 and I've been working on that project ever since. Up until only recently I was certain that that would be my first novel. But over the years my idea for Escape had grown too. I worked on it intermittently whenever I was inspired (or burnt out on detailing the chronological anatomy of my miseries), and the idea became a rough sketch. The ideas kept coming, and soon there was an outline and even chapters written, until a few months ago, when I realized that I had like half the damn book written and it would be a helluva lot easier to finish than the beastly tome which had previously been my primary focus. So I decided then to switch objectives and devote all my time and energy to finishing Escape. At present, the book is about 80% (4/5 of the chapters have been drafted) not including editing. I am very, very pleased with how it’s progressed and hopefully, a finished version should be available for people to read by early next year.

      The title "Escape" is a reference to a few different things. It is indeed a nod to the Escape sequence, programming vernacular used to execute commands (analogous to Roy's digital determinism), as well as an ode to a number of works with titular similarities, both fictional and non-fictional, that have served the foundation  for this book's conceptual and philosophical core, as well as my own. The most obvious allusion, however, is the central theme of escapism, or the practice of avoiding what is painful in reality. It is common defense mechanism that is done in a number of ways: by denying, rejecting, projecting, ignoring, obscuring the truth. It is something that has had a big influence on my life and something that I feel is the attributing cause for the social and political apathy possessed many young people today.
            Roy, the novel's subject and central character, is a game enthusiast like myself and many of you. But the key difference between he and us peasants, is that Roy actually has the means to finance his own whims, however absurd or unaffordable as they may seem to the average person. So when he has the "wouldn't it be cool if..." moment of existing in a video game universe full time, instead of sighing and going about his day, decides to pay a bunch of really experienced industry people a lot of his newly-inherited money to make it this private and permanent excursion possible.  His incentive isn’t really any different from the aforementioned reasons that anyone else plays video games or reads a fantasy novel, just a lot more radical and extreme. He too is dealing with existential ills stemming from issues of self-esteem. He too is subjected to the constant, rapid-fire bombardment of advertisements, persuaders, profiteers; their vanity, their veiled hatreds, the harassment, the deceit and the crippling burdens they impose. He too is victim to the innumerable oppressions at work and suffers the symptoms of this fascism – the hopeless, powerless, meaningless despair - broadcasted from innumerable external sources, big and small, material, corporeal, theoretical, from people, products, media, the multitude of forms of and faces of authority, all of it ambiguously layered like an infinitely coiled onion one tries in Sisyphean futility to peel, only to spend a lifetime in tears. 
       While certainly some of us are more sensitive and conscious to these conditions than others, and many are not affected at all, this is the current era, to which we and Roy belong. It’s an era that has seen a staggering rise in global unrest since the very moment the new millennium began. To a degree, there has always been unrest throughout human history, but because of the technological revolution the assimilation of psycho-social persuasion in the political arena, there are new anxieties, new restrictions, and new forms of alienation, which have never existed prior. Our era is distinct that the majority of the world participates in a kind of collective delusion, a capitalistic schizophrenia. Culture, once hallowed and fabulously diverse, has become a conglomerated Westernized monoculture, revolving around strips of paper. Even communities and families even seem to be disjointed and dividing, superseded by the larger telescopic national or global groups. Yet there is no camaraderie to be found there either, just an apparition of it. Many are too preoccupied to notice, but Roy, being isolated and without obligations, is susceptive and becomes compulsively aware. He feels not only alone, but also unable to subscribe to the conventional, orthodox routes for living that our world provides. Roy feels trapped. There is no role he can possibly play that will give him the value and meaning to his life promised to him in history, myth, and fiction, and this all-encompassing discontentedness is the catalyst for 'the game,' Roy's instrument for evacuation.
      Money can do many miracles, it cannot quell a deficiency of the soul, nor can it solve the human condition. Roy acknowledges the limitations of his financial power, but intuitively discovers a means to bypass his crisis by willfully changing his environment in a very drastic way. The end goal is simple: to permanently leave the mundane drudgery of the real world in exchange for a world which is ideal, light-hearted, and simple; a plane of existence where there is beauty in everything – even sadness – and where people are either virtuous or vicious, not the involuted, unpredictably mortal amalgamations of emotion that they are in actuality. It is in this kind of world that he believes he can find an adequate heroic role to play - one not limited to making money or building a family or traveling the globe under the guise of leisure - but rather a celestial ambition that will secure his purpose beyond infinity.
    But his reasoning is flawed and ostensible, missing critical factors. Most woes do stem from a destructive environment, yes.  This is true. Given the resources he has, the obvious conjecture would be in line with Roy's approach : simply replace the destructive setting for a productive one. True as well. But it is important to remember the things Roy did not consider: that the shape of any social environment is merely a consequential effect of politics and culture, causes which are interchangeably dominant depending on whether you believe first in the chicken or the egg. Going deeper, the primary source for the formation of all social environments is anthropologically indisputable: these occur on the individual level.  If enough individuals choose to avoidance and privatism over responsibility and cooperation, and there exist, simultaneously, vulturous types who are eager to exploit, to govern and to manipulate whole populations in whatever way deemed most efficient, we can see, speculatively, what will happen. In simpler terms: if you turn your back for long enough, you may very well come to find a knife in it. 
       We don’t need Orwell or Dick to imagine this type of scenario anymore, because it’s no longer speculative. It's been happening for decades, and if our eyes are open we can see with crystal clarity where it has taken us thus far. Escape deals with the era to come, the inevitable culmination of this neon, binary trajectory we are on, how the collision ahead will affect the future of humanity on an individual scale, and, how unimaginably terrifying this future might just be.  

Modus Operandi : On Clichés, Influences, and Theory

         In his published writings, composer and theorist, Theodore Adorno perceived and divided music into two categories:  serious and popular. This is a dualism that I feel can be apt beyond the connoted medium, and with respect to literature, I’ve done my best to bridge these two categories and make a work that is (hypothetically) profound and insightful, and simultaneously compelling and entertaining. Were this book to exist in its own pretentious, self-indulgent bubble, it would be accessible to only a few and that would be counter-intuitive to its purpose. On the contrary, the aim is to reach as many minds as possible, and this can only be done by achieving a certain balance.

        I’m sure some of you may have read a summary or synopsis and experienced some déjà vu. That’s perfectly understandable, and okay with me.  From a shallow perspective, there are indeed glaring commonalities with the narrative and settings from a lot of popular dystopian fiction. For example, the name Escape perpendicular to the location of New York City might evoke John Carpenter’s classic, Escape From New York. But despite any likenesses to this or a mountain of other books, movies, and games, all the contrivances are intended to be ironic and superficial - there is no pretense of “originality.” Instead, the narrative and setting will be the vehicle for the ideas presented, in a kind of pastiche-manner not dissimilar to how the dime novel served as the model for Wild at Heart.

       With a final name drop, I’d like to remind potential readers what Jim Jarmusch said about originality in film, as I feel it’s a another maxim that applies to most contemporary art forms. The quote I’m referring essentially says that just that nothing is original - everything’s been done and it’s what you do with it these ideas, how you blend them together to make something truly creative and unique. A lot of other great minds have echoed these sentiments, that here are only a certain number of possible things that can occur as drama. As Escape is meant to be hard science fiction, I wanted to choose from all the available possible scenarios the one which could be most empirically plausible, given the current sociopolitical situation. So instead of playing ironically with the cheese-ball eighties post-apocalyptic futurism, par for the course among genre kin, I wanted to construct a style is raw and grounded, with multidimensional characters who have real motives, real fears, and based on empirical psychology…. and that is where I hope the basis of this book’s “originality” lies.

Correlative Quotations

"Perhaps all we present-day people are something like slaves, ruled by an angry, whip-wielding, unrefined idea of the world."

-Robert Walser, Jacob von Guten

The world and society [] looked like this: life is completely confined and shackled. A kind of economic fatalism prevails; each individual, whether he resists or not, is assigned a specific role and with it his interests and his character. It makes no difference how this situation came about; it exists and no one can escape from it. [] Standardization is the end of the world. Somewhere perhaps, there is a little island in the pacific ocean that is still untouched, that has not been invaded by our anxiety.  How long could that last? Then that to would be a thing of the past.”

-Hugo Ball , Flight Out of Time

“Significant changes in psychological atmosphere accompanied the economic development of capitalism. A spirit of restlessness began to pervade life toward the end of the middle ages. The concept of time in the modern sense began to develop. Minutes became valuable; a symptom of this new sense of time is the fact that in Nuremberg the clocks have been striking the quarter hours since the sixteen century.”

“If the cause of the trouble were force, to ‘expropriate the expropriators’ would be enough. But if force did not establish domination of the master, then perhaps the slave is somehow in love with his own chains....a deeper psychological malady."

-Ernest Becker, Escape From Evil

“In bureaucratically organized and centralized industrialism, tastes are manipulated so that people consume maximally and in predictable and profitable directions. Their intelligence and character become standardized by the ever increasing role of tests which select the mediocre and unadventurous in preference to the original and daring.”

 “An increasing number of people are feeling confused about everything - work, politics, and morals - and, what is worse, they believe this very confusion to be a normal state of mind. They feel isolated, bewildered, and powerless; they do not experience life in terms of their own thoughts, emotions, and sense perceptions, but in terms of the experiences they are supposed to have. [So] there is an increasing number of people to whom everything they are doing seems futile. They are still under the spell of the slogans which preach faith in the secular paradise of success and glamour. But doubt, the fertile condition of all progress, has begun to beset them and has made them ready to ask what their real self-interest as human beings is.”

“The most effective method for weakening the child’s will is to arouse his sense of guilt. Once the will of the child has been broken, his sense of guilt is reinforced in still another way. He is dimly aware of his submission and defeat, and he must make sense of it. He cannot accept a puzzling and painful experience without trying to explain it. [] The child’s natural reaction to the pressure of parental authority is rebellion, which is the essence of Freud’s ‘Oedipus complex.’ [] The scars left from the child’s defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis. They form a syndrome the most important features of which are the weakening of the self in which the feeling of “I am” is dulled and replaced by the experience of self as the sum total of others’ expectations.”

-Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man

“Once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are severed, once the individual faces the world outside himself as a completely separate entity, two courses are open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable state of powerlessness and aloneness. By one course he can progress to ‘positive freedom’; he can relate himself spontaneously to the world in love and work, in the genuine expression of his emotional, sensuous, and intellectual capacities; he can thus become one again with man, nature, and himself, without giving up the independence and integrity of his individual self. The other course open to him is to fall back, to give up his freedom, and to try to overcome his aloneness by eliminating the gap that has arisen between his individual self and the world. This second course never reunites him with the world in the way he was related to it before…”

-Ernest Becker, Escape From Evil

“What guarantees the objectivity of the world in which we live is that this world is common to us with other thinking beings. Through the communications that we have with other men we receive from them ready-made harmonious reasonings. We know that these reasonings do not come from us and at the same time we recognize in them, because of their harmony, the work of reasonable beings like ourselves. And as these reasonings appear to fit the world of our sensations, we think we may infer that these reasonable beings have seen the same thing as we; thus it is that we know we haven’t been dreaming. It is this harmony, this quality, if you will, that is the sole basis for the only reality we can ever know.”

-Robert Pirzig, Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“Remove yourself as far as possible from the times in order to assess them. But do not lean so far out of the window that you fall out.”

-Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time