Some thoughts on "Discomfort in Video Games" by Angelo Careri

What is the difference between reality and video games? How do video games affect our real world and what are the repercussions on our inner world? While in the real world we often have to repress our feelings and actions, and we directly and powerfully feel the impact of our environment, in the video game universe, we have the impression that things happen to us without really affecting us. There is no judgment. According to Angelo Careri, video games allow us to express our thoughts, our impulses, and to "bring the violent satisfaction of our primary desires." So many remarks drawn from our reading of his article "Malaise in Video Games[^1]", which invite us to question a possible therapeutic function of video games. We present here some reflections that retrace these questions and respectively address the influence of video games on our perception of reality and ourselves, the nature of the human experience, the differences and similarities between real and virtual experiences, and finally, the trivialization of violence and its consequences on our relationship with society and others.

Perception of reality and video games: the shift in moral judgment

The real world is constrained by social, moral, and physical rules. In everyday life, every violent act has consequences such as physical harm, prison, social rejection. Video games, on the other hand, function as a filter: they transform these same acts into coded, aesthetic images, without real sanctions, which allow you to move on to the next level[^2]. This creates a psychological distance: killing in GTA does not have the same symbolic and moral weight as in reality, because the screen acts as a daydream that protects the player from anxiety.

GTA allows the player to embody an avatar possessing a freedom of action that exceeds their own skills and limits in the real world. Thanks to the distancing process specific to the screen, not only do the actions and events he chooses to accomplish have no impact on his real life, but this distancing, by suspending the feeling of guilt, also invites him to play with the limits of what is acceptable in the real world. This results in a shift in notions of morality, esteem, and value that they served to protect, which are now devoid of their substance and take on another meaning, more in line with the idea of transgression and subversion. It is thus that this lack of limitation transforms the leisure activities offered by the game into violent activities that are not recognized as such in the moral sense, but as simple mechanics. This disconnect with reality is accompanied by a diversion of the relationship to the law: for example, the visual reward system that appears in the form of stars in the top right corner of the screen, and whose number increases as crimes are committed. And one can be surprised to want to experiment with the guilty pleasure of filling all these empty boxes.

Facing the screen, we integrate an alternative world with its own rules, diverted from those of real life. By embodying a character through the avatar we have built, we experiment with the moral rules we have created with a freedom that is not that of real life. This subject has indeed been addressed in USS Callister, an episode of the series Black Mirror[^3], where the main character, a solitary CTO, creates a virtual world in which he exercises the fantasies and desires he represses in real life. He projects the frustration he experiences daily into this world he has created from scratch, king without a crown of a world shaped by his mind, where he has gathered the colleagues who harass and despise him in real life in order to take his revenge.

This dimension of letting go is found in open-world games, where players can express their frustration or act as they please, as if their freedom took place in front of a multitude of pixels.

Dream to play

Video games occupy a central place in our daily lives. They are not only a leisure activity but also a space where our emotions, impulses, and representations of the world are replayed. To understand their impact on the perception of reality, we must consider them both as a mirror and as a filter.

On the one hand, they reflect our real world by staging violence, competition, fear, or desire. On the other hand, they filter these experiences and transform them into images, narratives, coded actions that allow us to live them without direct danger. In this sense, the video game functions like a dream. In both cases, it is a psychic staging where unconscious contents find a form of expression.

Psychoanalysis helps us understand this process. For Freud, as Careri reminds us, primary aggressiveness is part of psychic life[^4]. It seeks to discharge itself to protect the Ego from chaos. In video games, played violence does not only result in the destruction of digital objects: it is also a way of mastering an internal excitation that is too intense. The virtual space then becomes an outlet that, like the dream, gives a containing form to the impulses.

However, this protective function is accompanied by a risk of trivializing violence. As Paul Denis points out[^5], violence is not only a behavior but also a psychic economy. Yet, by repeating it in a virtual framework without consequences, it can lose its problematic dimension and become a simple backdrop to everyday life. The adult player, as well as the adolescent, can end up perceiving the violent act as a neutral action, devoid of gravity, which modifies their relationship with the outside world.

But reducing video games to this danger would be a mistake. As Michaël Stora reminds us in his article "Mediation through video games: framework and therapeutic aspects"[^6], the videoludic act also has a symbolic value ("It is symbolic because it is contextualized by a narrative"). Destroying, confronting, failing, or starting over are not simple mechanical gestures: they are experiences that, when integrated, can help the player elaborate their internal conflicts. The video game then becomes a theater where the individual experiments with their relationship to the world, to themselves, to others, sometimes with more freedom than in real life.

Beyond the adolescent, the adult also uses the game as a space for exploration. It can be a refuge for him, a bubble that protects him from the harshness of reality, or a laboratory where he stages another version of himself. Thus, the video game does not merely influence our vision of reality: it shapes our inner world, and through it, our way of inhabiting reality.

Differences and similarities between real and virtual

In the real world, every decision has concrete consequences that must be assumed. Society imposes on us to control our emotions and, as the author explains, encourages us to channel our impulses through "work or artistic creation". We must transform anger or pain into creative work that allows us to produce meaning, hope, rather than reproduce the evil suffered.

On the contrary, in the virtual world, the rules are different. Our actions appear to us without real consequences because they stop when the screen turns off and "do not impact the other real world". This freedom gives the impression of being able to follow one's desires, dreams, or fantasies without worrying about morality or conscience. However, if the virtual world can serve as a space for expression and experimentation, the real world remains that of responsibilities and consequences. Creation and hope appear there as possible responses to violence and injustice.

On the other hand, there are also common points between the real world and the virtual world. Emotions felt such as anger, excitement, fear, or satisfaction can be just as intense and authentic in both universes. Even if the action takes place behind a screen, the body and mind react in reality, particularly through the acceleration of the heart rate, muscle tension, as well as the pleasure or frustration felt.

In both worlds, imagination and the symbolic play an essential role in expressing desires or releasing tensions. Similarly, violence, whether real or represented, can serve as a means of freeing oneself from internal tension. In the virtual space, it is often symbolic or scripted (in games or in films), while in the real world it must be contained or transformed so as not to harm others. These similarities show that, despite the differences in rules and consequences, our emotional and psychological reactions are shaped by common processes, which explains the attraction of the virtual.

Games and the transformation of perception

The relationship between inner experience and outer reality becomes complicated when virtual worlds come into play. To understand how games affect us, we need to examine two aspects: how they exploit our inner states and how they modify our perception of outer reality.

Dreams and games both seem to occupy this intermediate space, neither entirely internal nor entirely external. This parallel fuels the theory of catharsis, according to which games function like dreams to release aggressive tensions. But in reality, games work differently from dreams. Dreams are chaotic, uncontrolled, deeply personal. Games are systems designed with clear rules.

In GTA, every action generates an immediate response: stars appear, points accumulate, missions are completed. This structured response is different from the formless processing of dreams or the emotional outlet described by catharsis, but rather reflects the learning of algorithmic thinking.

Media theorist McKenzie Wark argues that games are "allegories of the form of being," in what she calls the "play space" or ludespace: a world that increasingly resembles "a game with changing rules and no clearly defined sides, which you are forced to play without being able to win"[^7].

Wark describes this as atopia, a space where experience fragments into distinct and measurable units that constantly collide with each other[^8]. Apparent freedom only exists within a strict digital framework. Every action generating points, every choice feeds calculation systems. This is what Wark means by "atopia seems to be nothing other than violence"[^9], everything becomes transactional, quantifiable.

Games present refined versions of these atopic models already present in everyday life. They reveal an algorithmic future towards which our reality is evolving, a world where everything functions according to clear and calculable rules[^10]. Games therefore probably influence us less through emotional liberation than through training in systematic thinking. When choices become calculations, when results become optimizations, perception changes. Internal emotions and external consequences begin to appear as variables to manage rather than complexities to navigate.

The trivialization of violence

In many video games, violence appears as an ordinary element of gameplay: shooting, hitting, or eliminating an opponent is often a necessary step to progress. These gestures, repeated mechanically, lose the gravity they have in the real world to become simple reflexes integrated into the logic of the game. Gradually, this illusion of reality can modify our relationship with real violence. As Michel Nachez and Patrick Schmoll explain in their article "Violence and sociability in online video games"[^11], this is not a direct transition to violent behaviors, but rather a reduction in sensitivity and a shift in the tolerance threshold.

Violence thus becomes a coded spectacle, devoid of human consequences, where death and destruction are only visual sequences. This process of function diversion inscribes violence in the register of entertainment, which can influence our collective perception: what should shock is transformed into a simple game mechanic.

Conclusion

Video games are not mere entertainment: they have become a language, a prism through which we learn to see, feel, and sometimes even accept certain logics of our world. Between a mirror of our impulses and a filter of our desires, they shape both our intimate relationship with ourselves and our way of inhabiting reality.

If their power can be therapeutic, offering a space for projection and exploration, it can also become insidious when it transforms violence into a videogame habit, stripped of all gravity. The trivialization that results does not necessarily lead to reproducing violence in reality, but it redefines our tolerance threshold and normalizes the unacceptable.

Ultimately, the issue is not to condemn or absolve video games, but to recognize the power of this medium in the construction of our collective imaginations. It is up to each player, creator, researcher, educator to become aware that behind the pixels and algorithms, something profoundly human is at stake: the way we learn to dream, to desire, but also to coexist in a world where the boundaries between real and virtual are increasingly porous.

Notes

[^1]: Careri, A., "Malaise in Video Games", Immersion n°1, 2019. [^2]: Careri, A.: "(...) these actions are no longer acceptable, whereas if they are acceptable in a diverted way, they provoke, on the contrary, sought-after sensations. In the first two episodes of the GTA series, for example, still modeled in 2D at the time, the goal of the game is to amass dollars by killing as many people as possible and chaining kill frenzies to move on to the next level", excerpt from "Malaise in Video Games", op. cit. [^3]: USS Callister, season 4 of the television series Black Mirror, broadcast on Netflix in 2017. [^4]: Freud, S., Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Paris, Payot, 1920. [^5]: Denis, P., "The Roots of Violence", Adolescence, 2019, p. 225-232, [online], https://shs.cairn.info/revue-adolescence-2019-2-page-225?tab=resume. [^6]: Stora, M., "Mediation through video games: framework and therapeutic aspects", Cliniques n°11, 2016, [online], https://shs.cairn.info/revue-enfances-et-psy-2017-4-page-105?lang=fr [^7]: McKenzie Wark, "Atopia (on Vice City)*," Gamer Theory, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2007, p. 70-84. [^8]: ibid, p. XX [^9]: ibid, p. XX [^10]: ibid, p. XX [^11]: Nachez, M.; Schmoll, P., "Violence and sociability in online video games", Sociétés n°82, 2003, p. 5-17, [online], https://shs.cairn.info/revue-societes-2003-4-page-5?lang=fr.

Bibliography

Books

• Freud, S., Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Paris, Payot, 1920.
• Tisseron, S., Psychoanalysis of the Image: From the Imago to Virtual Images, Paris, Dunod, 1995.
• Wark, McK., Gamer Theory, Paris, Les Prairies ordinaires, 2019.
• Wark, McK., "Atopia (on Vice City)*," Gamer Theory, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2007, p. 70-84.

Articles and journals

• Braconnier, A.; Marcelli, D., Adolescence and Psychopathology, Psychopathology, Elsevier Masson, 2013.
• Careri, A., "Malaise in Video Games", Immersion n°1, 2019.
• Denis, P., "The Roots of Violence", Adolescence, 2019.
• Houssier, F., "Metapsychology of Violence", Paris, Enfances & Psy, 2009.
• Houssier, F., "Dependence on Images and Elaboration of Violence", Cliniques, 2014.
• Nachez, M.; Schmoll, P., "Violence and sociability in online video games", Sociétés n°82, 2003, p. 5-17.
• Sauce, B. et al., "The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence while controlling for genetic differences in cognition and socioeconomic background", Scientific Reports, 2022.
• Stora, M., "Mediation through video games: framework and therapeutic aspects", Cliniques n°11, 2016.
• Tordo, F., "Digital transparency and digital transfer in online consultations", Cahiers critiques de thérapie familiale et de pratiques de réseaux n°65, 2020.

Translated by AI from the French version.