Distort reality intensely enough, and there’s no such thing as reality at all. And in an era where artificial intelligence can easily conflate collective thought with objective truth, tech founders and those who buy their products are less tethered to the real world.

Erik Davis, author of the book “TechGnosis,” told me that he worries about the potential for both nihilism and elitism encoded in such a worldview. Once you assume that “the world is malleable like a gaming system,” he says, then it is all too easy to assume a clear-cut social hierarchy between “those in the know and those not in the know.” Once you start assuming that you alone can access a secret higher reality — to say nothing of the money, political connections and control over social media that mark many of Silicon Valley’s elite — it can become all too tempting to assume that the “sheeple” aren’t, well, fully real in the way that you are. There’s a reason one of the most cutting ways to insult someone online is to call them an “NPC” or nonplayable-character — a term, rooted in video game parlance, that is now used to suggest a person lacks agency or original thought.

Mr. Davis brought up the popularity of the “simulation theory” hypothesis proposed by many in Silicon Valley, most prominently Elon Musk: That reality isn’t real at all, but rather that human beings are living in a simulation run by higher-intelligence beings. Listening to some tech titans, Mr. Davis said, “you get the sense that they, at least some of the time, really are in that mind frame. Like, this is a game, and the whole point is to play it so big that, you know, something genuinely novel or unexpected happens.” If reality is only a simulation, even the most extreme Silicon Valley doomsday scenarios — an intelligent A.I. that kills us all, say — are not much more existentially troubling than dying in a video game.

Yet at its best, theatrical play brings us into a sense of creative possibility, rather than nihilistic remove. In my own time playing improvisational theater games — both at Vibecamp and with Dzieci, the New York theater company I train with — the ability to “yes and” with strangers through various theatrical games allowed me to meet people not by learning their job title, or their political affiliation, but by helping to create fantastical spaces and scenes, and, yes, be a little silly. During a recent 36-hour largely wordless “marathon” workshop, I developed friendships with people whose names I’d never learned, but whose propensity for rhythmic drumming, or snowball fights, I’d come to know intimately.

Ironically, in an era of artificial intelligence and sky-high screen time, theatrical play demands that we pay full attention to the world around us: a world much richer, and more complex, and full of unfamiliar consciousnesses, than the world of our Twitter feed.