1843 Magazine - Escape to another world

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David Mullings was always a self-starter. Born in Jamaica, he moved to Florida to go to university, and founded his first company – a digital media firm that helped Caribbean content find a wider audience – before finishing business school at the University of Miami. In 2011 he opened a private-equity firm with his brother. In 2013 the two made their first big deal, acquiring an 80% stake in a Tampa-based producer of mobile apps. A year later it blew up in their faces, sinking their firm and their hopes.

Mullings struggled to recover from the blow. The odd consulting gig provided a distraction and some income. Yet depression set in as he found himself asking whether he had anything useful to contribute to the wider world.

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Mullings’s friends invited him to join them in playing Destiny, a “massively multiplayer online game” (meaning that lots of different people around the world simultaneously play within the Destiny universe) and a “first-person shooter” (meaning that most of the gameplay involves the player looking out through a character’s eyes and shooting stuff). The world surrounding the players is vast, filled with great, sweeping vistas rendered in extraordinary and realistic detail. It is a world of its own. Within that world, players, often in teams, take on quests and square off repeatedly in matches against opponents.

Before long Mullings was hooked, playing up to eight hours of Destiny each day. To all appearances, he had fallen into a familiar trap – increasingly common and difficult to escape in the eyes of some scholars studying the phenomenon – in which work gives way to, and is ultimately replaced by, the entrancing power of video games.


https://www.1843magazine.com/features/escape-to-another-world