Do you want life to be more like a video game?

There are many people who love the idea of living in a video game? No real world responsibilities, no desk Job, a vibrant world to explore, easy well defined goals, substantial rewards for completing tasks, defined rules and limitations and an easy track of progress.

These few examples already show a multiple of reasons that people love playing video games and why so many would and do swap their real world life for a virtual one. Here I shall go into each of these examples in more detail.

No responsibilities:

In the real world we have Jobs, family, friends, rent and food to buy. Though they may seem like simple tasks, feeling the weight of these things weighing down on you day to day can add up. Books, films, TV shows and games all provide a short term escape from the real world and let us pretend that we live in whatever world we are interacting with in the book or game. For a short time we take on the responsibilities of the characters we are playing or reading about. Though we feel their responsibilities, we don't feel the weight of them weighing on us. We can observe this vicariously. Breaking Bad is a good example of a character whose responsibilities weighed so heavily that they ended up breaking him. This can be entertaining to watch on TV but would be hell in real life.

No Desk Job:

Unless you are very lucky, your job is likely extremely repetitive and you feel it has little impact on the world at large. Video games offer us the ability to jump into a world that we can directly affect and interact with. The number of players in a given video game is much smaller than the number of people in the real world. As a result, any action we take will have a much larger effect just due to percentages. Wanted to be a stock broker but never had the money or the skills, trade on the grand exchange without all those huge broker firms and AI software outdooing you at every trade. Want to help people in need? You can save an entire village from destruction in an afternoon and you will likely get a fat reward for it too.

A vibrant world to explore:

The real world is beautiful but, if you dont have the luxury of extra money for travel then often you are stuck looking at the same scenery day in, day out. Jump into any number of video games and you will be transported to lands you couldn't imagine in your wildest dreams. Teleport around the world instantly to visit all the sites and build a home that is just to your tastes.

Easy well defined goals, progress and rewards:

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Its sometimes tough to see any progress in life as its hard to set goals and keep to them. Its also hard to track the progress of goals and theirs often no loot to collect for completing them. In video games, quest logs keep track of all of your goals. There is a simple leveling system that tracks XP and rewards you for each level you gain. You slowly gain access to better and better gear and weapons as you progress through the levels and NPC’s offer you more and more challenging quests as your skills increase.

There are several apps that you can download to try and “gamify” your life such as https://habitica.com/. These are great but you need to put in the effort to stay on top of them. No ingame messages are going to keep track of your success and failures for you.

Well defined rules and limitations:

To be sure, the real world has limitations and rules but how you go about utilising these to meet your goals is more challenging. Video game mechanics are far more simple than real world physics. You can only ever do what the developers have programed into the game. These limitations can often lead to great creativity and ingenuity. Sometimes, having limited choices is what brings the most freedom and creativity. Here is a great TED talk about how having too much choice is actually limiting.

I personally feel the strong draw to live life as if it were a video game. I just wish I had some super powerful AI that could give me goals and track my progress for me, rewarding me with gold and offering me awesome sets of armor and guns.