Here and There in a Game

When you play an open world game like GTA or Skyrim, you experience walking through a whole city or landscape where different locations seem real and separate. The shop is here on this street, the mission location is way over there across town, your safe house is somewhere else. As you play, these places feel genuinely distant from each other, and it takes time to travel between them.

But here’s what’s actually happening. All those places that feel so distant while playing exist at the same moment in your computer as data in memory. There’s no actual distance between them in the code. They’re just different data structures in memory.

When your character walks from one place to another, nothing is really moving. The game engine is loading and unloading different pieces of data, and rendering them on screen frame by frame, to create the illusion of movement through space.

Even time doesn’t really flow in the game; it runs frame by frame. You can pause it completely, speed it up or slow it down with mods or cheat codes. Time is just something the rendering engine creates to make things feel coherent.

The world you experience as a player, all the space and distances and time passing and cause and effect, emerges from source code that gets processed through your GPU, which renders it into images your screen displays. But in the actual code, there is no here and there and there is no time.

If the game character was actually conscious and aware like we are, they would have no way to know any of this. From their perspective, the city would feel completely real and external. They would walk from place to place, time would pass, they would get hurt if someone shoots them. Everything would seem absolutely real with no way to access the underlying code generating their reality.

This is exactly what happens when you dream too.

When you dream, you’re in a house, then in a forest, then talking to someone in a marketplace. These locations feel separate and real, you feel yourself moving between them, conversations happen that seem to take time. But when you wake up, you realize the whole thing was generated by your sleeping mind. There was no actual forest separate from the house, both existed as mental activity.

Your dreaming mind created the entire framework of space and time from itself, without any actual space or time being there, the same way game code creates space and time experience without existing in space or time itself.

If the game character was conscious, everything would feel absolutely real with no way to access the code generating it. Physical reality feels the same to us. The sense of here and there, of time flowing, arises without existing at any location in the framework it creates.

People figured this out thousands of years ago without computers or games to help explain it. A teacher once asked students “you say you are here and I am there, but are not both here and there appearing within you?”