You walk into your bedroom, press the eject button on your XBOX 360, and crack open the green case that holds the portal. You slide the disc out, hold it by the edges like it might disappear if you touch it wrong, and place it into the vertical tray.
You pick up the controller and feel the weight of it settle into your palms. It promises an escape into another world.
The light clicks on. The console hums. Your fingers know how to move. The screen fades in. Your room fades away.
For a moment it feels like anything could happen.
Los Santos materializes around you in a bloom of pixels. Blue skies splash across the screen, an avatar materializes in front of you, and the world stretches out in every direction like it was made just for you. You take a deep breath. You relax.
This is the part of which you never tire. The feeling that the rules are simple. You can run. You can drive. You can disappear for a while.
You can be whoever the fuck you want.
You immediately sprint forwards with your character, hunting for a car to steal. What next?
_____
For a while, you ignore the story completely. The world doesn’t care. It waits for you, patient and wide open.
Something small nudges you: a pop-up you’ve seen a few times. It’s a reminder on how to engage with missions.
Ignore.
You like this world because everything is unlocked from the beginning. You can step outside and go anywhere: downtown, the hills, the beach, the stretch of highway that seems to go forever until it finally loops back toward the city. It is an island that you’re on after all. No barricades that you’ve found yet. No invisible walls. Nothing tells you you’re moving too fast or too far. The openness feels honest in a way real life never has.
But the longer you move through it, the more you start to notice the currents underneath. The physics nudge you. The crowds react a certain way. Most of the doors to buildings don’t open. You total your car when you drive too fast. The police start killing you more often. Once, they even catch you and you lose your guns. The world seems to be aware of your impulses before you even act on them. You can do anything, but some actions glide forward while others drag like you’ve stepped into wet cement.
Possibility is everywhere, but it isn’t neutral.
You’re free to roam, free to drift, free to make your own path. Free to commit crimes and run from the police. Yet your in-game bank account sits quietly in the background, shaping your options without ever announcing itself. The things that make you feel powerful, or stylish, or stable still require accumulation.
Time. Money. Risk. Work.
You’ve ignored the main storyline for hours, but eventually you feel a gravitational pull toward the tasks you didn’t choose, the ones that were waiting for you the moment the world loaded in. You know you’ll be rewarded by the game if you do.
____
We call it freedom because nothing stops us. But we start to feel the difference between “not being stopped” and “being guided.” The difference between wandering and being pushed gently back toward the loop the world was built around.
We begin to sense the architecture behind the chaos, the way that even our most spontaneous decisions fit neatly into someone else’s expectations of how we should behave. We realize that our freedom exists inside a system that was designed long before we arrived.
___
It is easy to mistake design for desire. You start believing you chose this rhythm and forget that the world trained you to think this way. You forget the systems humming beneath the surface don’t need to forbid anything when they can simply make certain choices inconvenient. Freedom becomes less about what you can do, and more about what feels comfortable and easy. You realize that the world never had to limit us, it only had to teach us to limit ourselves.
You start recognizing the same patterns outside the screen. Your days stack up like missions you didn’t choose. Your accomplishments feel less like growth and more like progress bars you’re expected to keep filling. Degrees and job titles begin to feel like upgrades you chase because you’re supposed to, not because they mean anything on their own.
You move through life the way you move through those open worlds: scanning for the efficient route, calculating what pays out, building habits that look like autonomy but feel closer to compliance. You tell yourself this is discipline. You tell yourself you’re doing things the “smart” way. But beneath that, you’ve absorbed a quieter truth:
The world rewards the people who learn how to play along.
_____
A couple years ago, I had a conversation with my roommate Miles. It was his birthday, and we’d come back after a night of altered clubbing. We were going to be up for a while, and we started talking.
Really talking about the game of life.
He tells you he’s never thought of the world as something to beat, but to survive. That by growing up black in confederate flag territory, he wasn’t given the luxury of assuming the map was neutral. By the time he was old enough to understand the rules, he already knew they weren’t built with him in mind.
It sat with me longer than expected. I realized the metaphor I’d been living inside didn’t scale. Not to him, not to most people.
I’d treated life like a system designed to be mastered, as if mastery were the same thing as meaning. As if rising to top dog in a prison yard was the same thing as choosing your own fate.
Please.
I’d been interpreting my experience as universal. It isn’t. I started to see the gap between the story I told myself and the structure we actually live in. Once that gap appears, it doesn’t close.
After that conversation, something shifted in me that I didn’t know how to articulate. I kept moving through my loops. but the awareness that my idea of “freedom” came baked into my upbringing, my privilege, my safety, and my assumptions about how the world works. I could no longer pretend the map was neutral. I couldn’t pretend everyone is playing the same game.
___
You find yourself slowing down, not out of hesitation but out of recognition. The world feels a little less glossy, a little less intuitive. You start questioning the routes you’ve always taken, the goals you’ve always chased, the unspoken belief that optimization equals agency. That progress equals worth. That you earned a system that was quietly working in your favor.
And when you sit with it, there’s a kind of stillness you’ve never felt before. Not guilt nor shock, Something closer to humility. You confront an uncomfortable fact:
You were taught to “play” efficiently. Others are taught to survive. None of you chose the rulebook.
When you go back to the screen, nothing looks different, but everything feels different. The world loads the same way it always has, with neon, noise, and perfect fiction. Yet there’s a faint tension beneath the surface now you can’t unlearn. You used to think of this place as pure escape, a magic circle inside which the rules didn’t matter because they weren’t real. But now you notice the patterns you once drifted through without thinking. The way the world rewards certain kinds of ambition. The way it frames risk as heroic when the consequences aren’t yours. The way every system quietly reinforces the idea that freedom is something you prove through accumulation, strategy, dominance.
It dawns on you that the fantasy was never neutral. It just felt neutral because it matched the expectations you brought into it. The same expectations the real world taught you. You start to see how the architecture of the inside reflects the architecture outside: the hierarchies, the predictable arcs of power, the mechanic that your story only moves forward when you do what the designers intended.
You still do admire the seamlessness of it all: the way the world bends around your actions, the way everything responds as if you’re the gravitational center. But now that responsiveness feels curated, like a chore list masquerading as play.
As you sit with feeling, it becomes clear that the escape you once cherished was something of a rehearsal. A world that promised freedom while quietly teaching you its limits. A place where you could believe, for a few hours at least, that the logic of the universe was simple, coherent, and conquerable.
But simplicity is an ideology of its own. Coherence is a luxury. Conquerability is a myth reserved for people who benefit from the way things are.
The fantasy was really about permission. And in the real world, permission is never granted..
___
Once you notice the shape of the fantasy, you start noticing its authors. Not as isolated creators, but as people formed by the conditions they were born into. It is these same conditions that shape what feels possible, what feels natural, and what feels like a “good” world to make.
The design of games carries the imprint of those forces: the drive to accumulate, the expectation of scarcity, the belief that conflict moves a story forward. None of this arrives as ideology; it arrives as instinct, as craft, as inherited common sense. People build what they know, and what they know comes from structures older and larger than themselves. The fantasy ends up echoing the material world by inertia until the imagined landscape and our lived reality blur together, each reinforcing the logic of the other as if it were simply gravity.
How Aristotelian.
Once you understand how the imagined world mirrors the one you live in, you start to feel a subtle shift in the way you move through both.
You have a growing awareness that the boundaries you took for granted were taught to you, long before you learned to question them. You start noticing how your sense of possibility was shaped, how your desires were formed, how even your dreams arrived with a certain structure already built into them.
It becomes difficult to treat freedom as something intuitive. You begin to see how often “choice” is habit, “preference” is inheritance, and the world into which you escape reinforces the same logic from which you thought you were escaping.
You can’t rationally blame the designers. You don’t really blame yourself. But you start to recognize how deeply the design of systems settles into one’s imagination.
That recognition changes the questions you ask. They become less about mechanics and more about origins. Less about what’s happening and more about why it’s happening. You ask:
What shapes my sense of the possible?
Who benefits from the boundaries I’ve internalized?
Where do my assumptions about meaning, struggle, and progress come from?
And most importantly:
What becomes possible when imagination is no longer confined to the logic of what already exists?
___
You don’t have an answer. You’re not supposed to, yet. But the moment you ask it, both worlds, real and imagined, feel less predetermined. You begin to sense that the first step towards liberation might be in noticing the edges of the system itself.
That question stays with you. It reshapes the room. It follows you out of the game and back into your life.
And it waits for whatever you choose to do with the space it creates.