The most popular video game for the PC right now is a game called The Sims, where people get to play people doing ordinary things in ordinary settings -- instead of fighting monsters or conquering countries, they're battling with leaky faucets and going out on dates. With a premise like that, one wonders what you need the video game for in the first place. Or maybe that is precisely the point: We can use the simulation to be vicariously ordinary, to feel more real than we might normally feel.

I find myself frightened by such an idea. Many friends of mine are fairly heavy video-game addicts; they spend a great deal of money and time in on-line games that are huge, elaborate multiplayer simulations featuring tens of thousands of people at once. For the truly hard-core, their real life is nothing more than a holding action until they can get back online again. I can hardly say my own hands are clean, so to speak -- one of my major side projects is an on-line gaming community I designed from scratch. I definitely understand the allure of a simulated world that threatens to replace or supplant the real one.

Walker Percy was one of the few truly philosophical American novelists: he didn’t just have his characters playact out ideas, but had them embody them.  Not all of his books hit the mark, but the ones that do are among the best fiction we have that has something valuable and real to say about our world.  He’s also a gifted storyteller and stylist; any one of his books are a pleasure to just read for the way he uses language so spellbindingly.