Thoughts on what we consider real,
I’ve never implemented a game engine or anything similar, but I’ve heard a lot of discussion about what it entails. One thing that’s been super interesting to me about game design and the actual implementation of games in the programming sense is the fact that (it seems) you only consider the things that you want to render to be real, and everything else pretty much doesn’t exist from your point of view. However, that’s completely unlike the mental model we humans typically have. We consider everything to be real, even the things we’ve never seen. Like, even if you’ve never been to Egypt, if you see a video of the pyramids, or even a picture of them, you consider them to be a “real” thing. But it’s interesting to look at the alternative world model: what if you don’t consider things real unless you’ve interacted with them to some capacity? I would even go as far as saying as soon as you forget the feeling of experiencing something, you can pretty much consider it to be an “unreal” thing for now, unless you experience it again in the future. That’s a very radical approach in terms of mindset overall, but it’s been very helpful for me. I used to just overthink my relationship as an “entity” in the world with all the other “entities” that I’ve never even interacted with personally, and how that relationship affects my life! But with this new mental model, nothing is real anymore, unless I’m actively engaged with it.
I also understand it’s selfish in a lot of ways, but I’m not doing it because I want to be selfish. It’s mainly because my brain can not function otherwise.