Lately I've been replaying the God of War series. It's one of those videogame series that I play as a way to process emotions and solve problems. Losing myself in the game and in the character of Kratos and his own issues with rage allows me to come to a meditative space. In that space, each push of the button is mirrored in the meditation and what is presented is a space where the problem can be worked through, while the game is being played.
I've found that different games can be used for this process. I use of God of War when dealing with feelings around anger, rage and hate, because the character's journey is as much about how he grapples with those those emotions as it is about the challenges he faces. Fallout games on the other hand are great for the theme of exploration and survival, as is the Uncharted games.
When I'm playing a given game, I often pick games that mirror the internal work that I'm doing at the time. I'm usually doing that internal work through meditation and reflection, but games provide another way to access that space and work through emotions and experiences. The work happens on the level of flow because playing a game inevitably brings about an altered state of experience.
Its fair to say most video games involve an adventure of some type with some conflict. Some of them don't though so this process can work regardless of what type of game you might play. I'll admit that the games I primarily enjoy have some mixture of conflict and problem solving, and that aids my process for working through a given issue, because the conflict allows me to work with the emotions, while the problem solving allows me to look at the problem from different perspectives.
Where does the magic component come into play with this?
The internal work, in my opinion, is part of the magical work. When I'm playing a game, it occupies the conscious mind, while the rest of me goes to work on the issue I'm working through at the time. Every action I take in the game feeds into that work, pushing it along.
That's actually how I apply video games to magic in general. I use the action of the game, the feelings and emotions that come up as fuel for magical work. The main difference in this case is that I'm applying all of this activity toward the internal work, to fuel breakthroughs that allow me to solve the problems I'm grappling with.
In my experience, you can take any activity and connect it to something else, creating a layered reality that allows the actions in one reality to effect the other reality. It just requires an out of the box approach that permits you to entertain the possibility that you can take an activity and make it into something that has a productive effect on another part of your life. I do this with every activity do and its played a huge role in the productivity I've experienced over the years.
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