Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?  If you think that it's life that imitates art, does it actually just appear to be that way because art influences the way we perceive life, the way we choose to interpret the experience of our life?

Certainly, watching movies and television affects how we understand the world around us, and what our own role might be in that world around us.  We often have that "Gee, this is just like in the movies" experience.  But is that really true, is it really just like in the movies, or do we subconsciously make comparisons of our lives to those movies and then let our imaginations fill in the blanks and correct the errors between our fantasy and our actual experience?

As you may have noticed, I've been spending a lot of time playing computer games lately.  If you can allow the suspension of disbelief and consider those games to be a highly stylized form of "art," then we can explore the possibility that the art of the game might affect my perception of the world.

Which is all a long and roundabout way of saying I had an experience this week that was just like in a computer game.

So-called "open-world" games like Fallout and Skyrim allow the player to wander at will anywhere in the cyber-universe of the game, so the game designers have to create incentives to get the player to explore specific places and advance the story line.  Typically, at some point, the player learns of some specific treasure or valuable item or weapon or something that's hidden in some labyrinthine factory or dungeon or cave system, and then the player navigates through a maze of dead ends, false leads, trap doors, and assorted other hazards until the quest item is discovered.  Most games require the player to go through scores of these quests to complete the game. This summer, I must have explored hundreds of virtual abandoned hotels, derelict mines, empty factories, haunted castles, and spooky cave systems, and that experience has seeped into my subconscious and even manifested itself in some of my dreams.

This week, in the real-life world, the so-called consensus reality, I had to perform an inspection/reconnaissance of a former newspaper building, complete with printing presses, paper rollers, warehouses, darkrooms and photo labs, and editorial, sales, and managerial offices.  Like many American newspapers, the print version had shut down and the "paper" is now on-line only, so the old news building is now empty.  I had to explore my way through a surprisingly large number of offices, conference rooms, editorial boardrooms and sales centers on several different floors, and just like in the games, everything seemed laid out like a maze, and I often realized that I just walked in through the east door of a large room I had earlier exited by way of the west door.  Power was on in some, but not all, portions of the building, and I had to use my iPhone flashlight to guide me through unlit areas.

In order to reach the printing presses in the basement, I had to figure out a way through the maze of offices, up and down staircases, passenger elevators, freight elevators, and dumbwaiters, and over and across steel scaffolding of questionable structural integrity.  Some elevators worked and some didn't, and one only worked in the down direction but refused for some reason to lift me back up, so after descending two stories only to find myself in a store room with no exit other than a stairwell, I had to walk back up again and find another way down to the basement.  Just like in a computer game.

When I finally got to the printing presses, I found myself in a dark cavernous hall full of mysterious equipment looming over me, overhead hoists, dangerous open pits in the floor, and a confusing maze of subterranean side rooms and warehouse areas off to the side.  It was all spooky and ominous, especially considering it was a "dark" area that required my iPhone flashlight for illumination.  And once I completed the inspection of the presses, I had to figure out how I got down there in the first place in order to find my way back out.  Just like in a computer game.

Now as I explained earlier, in the games there's usually some sort of treasure at the end of the quest to serve as the player's incentive to continue exploring the maze.  My real-life "goal" was simply to look for any evidence of environmental contamination, but just before I entered the building, the real-estate agent who had the key to let me in told me that the newspaper's former Editor In Chief didn't believe in banks, and was said to have kept all of his cash in a vault hidden somewhere in the building.  I didn't find the vault, if it's even real, or any caches of cash money, but a secret vault full of riches is exactly the kind of goal the game designers create to motivate a player through a quest.

In the end, although I didn't find any vaults full of cash, sadly, I did find my real-life goal (evidence of environmental contamination).  But my question here is how much of my experience that day was colored by my recent experience playing computer games?  If I hadn't been playing, would I have perceived the maze of offices and the dark basement differently, and if so, how? Would the exploring have seemed less like an adventure and more like a chore?  What if, instead of playing computer games, I had been reading gothic vampire novels or Stephen King short stories?  How then would I have perceived being in dark basements dependent on the dim light from my iPhone? What if I had instead immersed myself in an academic study of 20th Century industrial architecture?  Would the visit have seemed more cerebral and less like an adventure?

Finally, this brings me to the broader question - how much of the perception of my experience and my life has been influenced by media, television, movies, books, the internet, computer games and so on, in ways of which I'm not even aware?  Were things really like I remember, or do the comic books and sit-coms of my youth only make them seem that way?  How would I know, and what difference would it ultimately make?

What about you?