Video games can be passive fantasy or a form of active imagination.

The characters, roles, and play styles one gravitates toward can be the psyche seeking expression.

Simple reflective and intentional practices can turn play into a genuine path of self-discovery.

A video game recently began to allow something to open in me. Since I started playing the "World of Warcraft Forever" beta, which I wrote about recently through a Jungian lens, my imagination has been exploding.1 Ideas arrive faster than I can write them down, and powerful internal images keep surfacing in quiet moments. Something dormant within the unconscious seems to have woken up.

Much of this, I think, has to do with playing a mage. Channeling fire and arcane magics through my character became a kind of conduit for what Jung understood as the autonomous nature of the creative impulse: a force that moves through us rather than from us. Each time I cast a spell, I found myself imagining that something deeper was finding expression through the magic, something that wanted form and had been waiting for a vessel.

Jung said as much in his seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra: the creative process "creates in us, through us".2 It struck me, too, that Jung saw the magician as one of the guises of spirit; spirit's oldest archetypal images are wind and fire. No wonder the mage felt like such a creative conduit.

That experience has me returning to a question some clients ask in different ways: Is gaming just escape, or can it be something more? The honest answer is that it can be either. What makes the difference isn't the game, but how we show up to play.

Fantasy We Watch vs. Fantasy We Enter

In passive fantasy, images drift past while we watch, and we are entertained but remain psychologically unchanged. Whereas........

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