On Nov. 25, in a quiet corner of campus, I spoke with team lead Kimiko Ngo from UBC Game Development. She is used to talking about games: how they’re built, how people use them, how they shape the worlds we escape into. But this conversation isn’t about code or mechanics — it’s about something more subtle. It is about what it means to feel connected in a world where digital realities fold so easily into the real one.
In his 1974 book, Anarchy, State and Utopia, philosopher Robert Nozick famously imagined an “experience machine,” a perfectly simulated world where nothing goes wrong and everything you want — friendship, romance, success — is guaranteed. Plug in, and you would never know it wasn’t real. But most people, he argued, would refuse We value more than pleasure; we value authenticity, struggle and freedom.
So the question becomes: in modern digital life, especially gaming, where connections can feel vivid, and worlds can feel immersive, how close are we to Nozick’s imagined machine? And how do people like Ngo navigate that threshold?
The real in the virtual
When asked whether relationships in games feel real — friendships, rivalries, or even romance — Ngo thought carefully before answering. Her eyes flicked upward as if searching the ceiling for the right words.
“To a certain extent, they are real,” she said. “But not in the same sense.”
She split the question into two. In games with predetermined narratives, such as visual novels and story-driven role-playing games, the relationships are written in advance. They aren’t real people, but the emotions can be. Players get attached to characters, not because they believe those characters exist, but because the game explores personalities, fears, loyalties and vulnerabilities in ways that resonate.
“The emotions that they trigger do feel real,” she said. “Because it could be exploring certain personalities or certain events.”
Multiplayer games, though, are different. There, behind every avatar, is a human being.
“The experiences you share with people online are real because those are real humans on the other side,” she explained. People build guilds, teams and rivalries. Relationships are formed through hours of shared effort, failure, jokes typed into late-night chat windows and synchronized attacks against impossible bosses. For many, these communities feel as substantial as anything offline.
Yet, she added, the line between the two kinds of relationships, online and in-person, is not the same for everyone. Ngo herself is someone who feels more grounded in face-to-face connections. “Most of my relationships are in-person,” she said. “But I can see another perspective, where someone else would [feel] there’s no difference.”
She keeps things grounded, careful not to romanticize the digital, but not to dismiss it either.
Ngo explained that some people can be more susceptible to this blurring of boundaries.
It’s not addiction she critiqued, it’s dependency. If someone’s best or only sources of support live in fictional worlds, or if their closest sense of belonging comes from behind a screen, the line between game and life can thin. There’s comfort in consistency. There’s comfort in a world that never rejects you unless the script demands it.
That’s where Nozick becomes disturbingly relevant. The philosopher argued that what we want is not a perfect experience, but a real one, one shaped by uncertainty, failure and the possibility of change.1 A virtual world designed solely for pleasure removes all of that.
But modern digital spaces don’t need to be perfect to function like the experience machine. They only need to be preferable.
Ngo sees that. She doesn’t condemn it. She names it for what it is: human vulnerability expressed through technology.
Disconnection after the deep dive
When asked if long gaming sessions make her feel more or less connected to real life, Ngo laughed.
“I definitely feel more disconnected from life after a long gaming session, ” she answered. “Because I think I have to be fully immersed into the game when I’m playing it. Especially if it’s a long session, then that means, I’ve been engaging with this world more than real life.”
She described it casually, but the phenomenon is familiar to anyone who has played a game so absorbing that the real world feels flat when you return to it. The transition is jarring, the lighting is different, your body feels heavier, sounds seem wrong, and time seems off. Reality feels ill-fitting until the mind re-centers itself.
It’s a reminder that immersion isn’t passive — it’s a temporary relocation of consciousness.
And for some, coming back isn’t as simple.
Toward the end of the interview, Ngo was presented with the question that animates Nozick’s entire argument:
Would you trade your real social life for a perfect simulated one, if you couldn’t tell the difference?
“No,” she said. “Even if I couldn’t tell the difference.”
She leaned forward slightly, warming to the idea.
“Especially if it’s perfect, then I think it gets boring, like you run into a stalemate where there’s no challenge, there’s nothing that will change.”
That, she argued, is the fundamental flaw of simulated perfection. Real relationships are messy, inconvenient and surprising; they force you to expand. They hurt you, they test your boundaries and they reflect versions of yourself you might not want to see. Fictional ones, or artificially tailored ones, can’t do that. They can only mimic struggle, not generate it.
“Real friendships teach you more about the world,” she said. “They push you to grow.”
This cuts to the heart of Nozick’s point. It’s not just that people prefer reality, people prefer risk. Freedom is not satisfying if everything is predetermined, even in your favour. Growth requires friction. A life without obstacles becomes hollow.
And yet, Ngo’s certainty is not universal. There are people for whom the real world feels harsher, less forgiving, less rewarding than its virtual counterparts. She acknowledged that too. The world is not equally kind to everyone, and for some, the screen becomes a sanctuary rather than an escape.
As the interview wound down, she reflected on the people who might not feel the disconnection she experiences after gaming — those who step deeper into fictional or virtual communities because they feel more welcome there than in the physical world.
For them, she said, “that line between connection and simulation doesn’t disconnect.”
It’s not judgment, but recognition.
And that’s where the conversation settled: on the blurry threshold between two realities that increasingly overlap. Nozick imagined a machine that people would reject. But the world we have built — games, online communities, digital identities — suggests a different picture. Most people aren’t plugging into a machine; they’re drifting into something softer, more ambiguous, more porous.
A world not fully simulated. Not fully real. Something in between.
Ngo doesn’t fear that world. She simply navigates it with intention, with an understanding that screens can enrich life, but not replace it. Emotions felt in fictional spaces are real, but not always reliable and that growth requires the risk that a simulated world refuses to give.
As the blue light dimmed and the camera lowered, the room felt more grounded again. The interview ended. The real world resumed — imperfect, unpredictable, and, in its own way, worth choosing.
