Cool breeze flows in through the screen door, the glass part­ed to allow the air inside the liv­ing room to stir. It's just the right tem­per­a­ture: 55 degrees Farhenheit. No more, no less. My ideal. The smell of slight­ly stale pizza com­min­gles with the lin­ger­ing scent of friend-who-has-been-in-my-house-recently. It is October of 2006, and I am alone. Alone in my par­ents' home, and alone in the Rogue Encampment, a few miles out­side of the fall­en town of Tristram. I am happy.

For me, gam­ing has most­ly always been a soli­tary activ­i­ty. Meant to be shared with friends when the time is right, cer­tain­ly a favorite social entan­gle­ment of my peer group.

Videogames are kind of like booze to an alco­holic: usu­al­ly con­sumed in tem­per­ance while with com­pa­ny, and taken in great, bliss­ful­ly melan­choly draughts when alone. Just like the bot­tle, though, games don't ever make the lone­li­ness go away. They make soli­tude tol­er­a­ble for mis­placed socialites, for sure. But at cer­tain times, with the right game, in the ideal envi­ron­ment, with an amenable per­son­al­i­ty (I con­fess that I do rather well by myself; I'm lucky in that way), they can make lone­li­ness sublime.

The most impact­ful moments are frozen, locked in mem­o­ry by par­tic­u­lar­ly brac­ing rush­es of dopamine through my trou­bled ado­les­cent brain, one already packed full of enough rag­ing pitu­itary hor­mones to stun a Kilwala.

I have my favorites of these immor­tal­ized (though not immor­tal) tran­scen­den­tal moments of soli­tude. I can remem­ber that sen­sa­tion, the tin­gling in the chest, my total cap­tiv­i­ty in the moment.

That haunt­ing riff that plays as you depart for the Den of Evil.

The video from the future, reveal­ing the apoc­a­lypse which was, and is to come.

Catching Mewtwo with an Ultra Ball (I actu­al­ly accom­plished this feat in my child­hood. My par­ents wept for my social life.).

I used the word "tran­scen­den­tal," not in a lit­er­al sense, or even in the strict­ly metaphor­i­cal. Even now, as a fair­ly entrenched sec­u­lar­ist, I've had my share of what might be called "reli­gious" (I'd rather say spir­i­tu­al) expe­ri­ences. Most of them out­rank, by a com­par­i­son of per­son­al grav­i­ty and emo­tion­al vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, those "peak expe­ri­ences" (as neu­ro­sci­en­tist Sam Harris is fond of call­ing them) obtained through game­play. But the same mech­a­nisms are at work: the heady dopamine shot to the appro­pri­ate cra­nial recep­tors, the sub­se­quent flash-camera inscrip­tion of the moment in per­ma­nent memory.

There's a dis­tinc­tion here, though, in the envi­ron­ment of the expe­ri­ences. See, most of the religious/spiritual/whatever moments I've had have taken place social­ly. As in, among a crowd of peo­ple. These were cor­po­rate jour­neys. Rather than find­ing myself indeli­bly immersed in the fic­tion­al world of a game, I was drawn in to the com­pa­ny, the cul­ture, the con­for­mi­ty. The sym­bols of these com­mu­ni­ties were most impor­tant; they pro­vid­ed that cru­cial feel­ing of being a part of some