I have previously written rather warmly about games, but they are starting to look more sinister to me.

It seems to me that we don't play games to live, or to "play" - we play games in order not to live.  We play games instead of talking to each other.  We play games in order not to think about the war - and maybe our game-playing is why the war continues.

Every moment devoted to our hobbies moves us more deeply into a pastime paradise, which removes us from public life and walss un the more thoroughly into a purely private world of masturbatory selves who do not care for, or interact with, the larger world in which others are dying - and they die through our inaction, and their dying facilitates our lives of "comfort" and isolation.  Our greatest privilege - our luxurious vice - is to not need to care.

A culture of game-players, pop-culture fanatics, and hobbyists is a spectacle of alienation.  As we disengage from the real world, and retreat further into our fantasies, that world - the only world - dies from our neglect of it.  Soon enough, we will join it.