A post by Katia Franco

Trust is a fragile thing, especially when it comes to trust in ourselves. Knowing as much as we do about ourselves, having to evaluate the constantly incoming evidence about our own trustworthiness, self-trust is a difficult task to manage. More to the point, trust in ourselves is particularly fragile because it hinges on a delicate issue at the intersection of ethics and psychology: self-deception.

Unlike with interpersonal deception, when one person intentionally misleads another, there is no agreement as to whether self-deception is an intentional act. In fact, the currently dominant view is that self-deception is an understandable and unintentional psychological response to a difficult situation (Bach 1997, Barnes 1997, Johnston 1988, Mele 2001). Under intense psychological pressure, such as anxiety or a strong desire for something to be the case, it makes sense that we might (unintentionally) come to believe something that does not align with the evidence – a sort of self-preservation response. For example, one might be often irritated by someone, and under the psychological pressure to view themselves as a good person, they might misidentify the source of their irritation to be that other person’s bad behavior, rather than the fact that such behavior reminds them of their own bad behavior.

A post by Katia Samoilova Franco

As Nguyen puts it, games provide us with an “existential balm” (2020, 21) – a balm against a variety of human ailments, such as the lack of moral clarity, boredom, or the fleeting nature of our existence. There are other balms available for these ailments besides games, but for those of us who turn to games over other balms, the peculiarity of games makes them a particularly effective balm. That peculiarity of games and their effectiveness as an existential balm is what I’d like to explore here.