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Exercising Our Imagination Will Always Be A Good Idea
The benefits of practising our imagination are enormous whether we choose to create for others, enjoy what others create for us, or a little bit of both.
Infinite Games
I grew up when video games ran in cartridges and I was lucky to be part of a family where getting one was a birthday or Christmas affair. I used to imagine myself in a room filled with those old-school cartridges (a ball pit of sorts) where I’d have to swim to reach a little submerged sub-room where the games could be played.
Video games were rather limited back then — if miles ahead of those the older guys would show us, the ones they had played a decade before, and still a universe away from what was to come. In this context of high expectation, I used to daydream about video games in which you could live a life other than your own. This was just before the internet was mainstream, and long before I had heard of artificial intelligence or virtual reality. I was a child with a powerful imagination who thought it would be cool to have an infinite video game where you could simply travel to places you couldn’t afford to visit in the real world or ask classmates out on adolescent dates you were mortified to even imagine, or…