I have a confession. I am useless at Destiny 2.
For those who have never played it, Destiny 2 is a game where you run around the solar system fighting aliens, finding new weapons and armour, and falling off of the scenery.
The first two are core to the game, the third is my own special skill.
Destiny is played from a first person perspective so once you get used to the controls it feels natural to walk, run, jump and tumble off cliffs.
There is a certain reassurance in discovering that my clumsiness extends to the virtual world. I am as inept on Io as I am in M&S. The kinaesthetic senses are consistent across the real and the unreal. Which helps explain why VR will never be anything more than a marginal fad.
Yet my uselessness does not stop me from enjoying the game. Instead it provides a tether of realism in what is otherwise a fantasy of universe spanning Manichaeism where the eternal struggle between light and dark becomes an exercise in shooting tetchy robots and punching aliens who have got into goth in a really big way.
To oversimplify, games are mind whereas sport is body. Sport is Zen, the stone monkey quieted for a moment. That tether of realism in Destiny provides that quietness of the superego for me. Falling off a cliff in Destiny is my zazen.
So, you see, that by being terrible at Destiny I am in fact winning at Destiny. Just not in the sense of actually er winning…
Mark O'Neill 