Just a game

 
Some thoughts on Life as it seems to be, for us, all things considered, just a game.

Indeed it has been likened to the most advanced video game, “invented” before any silicate component was even conceived, the Mother of all games, the Game that beats them all. Yet it is rather peculiar to see us, as a supposedly sapient species, spend most of our time doing side quests for the sole reason that we have forgotten what the main quest was. Or rather, we have forgotten that figuring out what the main quest was actually is the main objective.

Every day we speak to many NPCs. Some give us particular and important quests, some help us, some hinder us, some just dailies upon the completion of which we acquire gear and perks, while our stats progress or regress, ebb and flow. As a matter of fact, we ourselves are an NPC to someone else’s quest.

When we are born we are given a set of stats that shape our ability to move about, progress and quest. Some, more fortunate, people will inherit the perks, gear and gold of their elders, greatly enhancing their capacity to access and accrete even more resources, and level up more quickly. It is like, to them, playing the Ultimate Deluxe Edition they got for free because one of their ancestors got a lifetime pass long ago, while the rest of us are playing the base game.

There are, of course, tips and tricks handed down from generations, which one chooses to acknowledge and follow (or not) in our exploration of the open-world map. Yet as “open-world” as it may be, many of us won’t discover more than 10% of the map, and won’t even know this 10% well enough to not get lost at some point, even if we have a built-in compass for both inner and outer travels.

Deciding which way to go should be our sole prerogative, and the universe is so vast that we discover new maps every day, almost, and all of these being hundreds of light years away we cannot wait for the next upgrade to be able to teleport to them. Otherwise they shall remain out of our reach…which makes us feel cramped, even though our own map is already so very vast.

Some see a Dev’s hand, Devs’ hands or the Devil’s hand intervening in this Game. While it might be true for the larger astronomic systems, our own puny lives are ruled by RNG from the very second we spawn, and we abruptly land in medias res while the character-building aspect of our life, as crucial as it is, isn’t even in our hands, at least for a few years, until we can make our own bad decisions ourselves. Because we inherit, in secret, perks and flaws from people who played the Game, aeons ago, without knowing they were playing it.

For even though this game is on permadeath mode, we tend to play it as if we had multiple lives ahead of us. As de facto subscribers we have been offered a lot of updates, but never got any news from any Dev, or devs, nor any sales representatives.

If you push the argument just a tad further, in many respects we are playing a survivor game with tinges of horror, but it is an MMORPG really, with many genres intertwined.

Our lore goes back thousands of years, and the origin of the Game is a mystery surrounded by a recalcitrant fog of war that sometimes seems to fade, only to cover the area we thought we knew back up. We can delve and absorb in it but it is so vast and complex that we will never get the full picture. So we busy ourselves with the daily grind: work and grocery dailies, the fanciful questing in other parts of the world, occasional parties and festivals for which we buy and trade mats to craft the most sumptuous cosmetics, seeking companions to quest and ally with.

Sometimes we lose connection and the servers seem to lag and stutter, and we wonder if it’s the server or our own connection.

The Game has been going on for so long that it is no wonder we have lost the point of it, because even when we log off for the night, the Game still runs in the background, and when we log back in sometimes it feels like an entirely different Game, as if someone had hacked our account, or had plugged different variables in the matrix. Yet it is the same – and at the risk of vexing some of us, the final boss is not what they think it is.

Sometimes we feel that the Game is so crappy that we would really like to reboot and start all over again, but with different stats – or play a different Game altogether. Sometimes we get a virus and we can’t play for a bit – that’s when some of us consider leaving the Game to see if there’s another layer to it, somewhere beyond the harsh reality, or another Game altogether.

In our thirst for exploration some of us take various substances which can make us feel like we have access to the code, like we can peek behind the scenes. It is still a matter of debate.

Back in the day, when the offline connections mattered because there were no online ones, the zone chat felt pretty circular and was local, regional at best, things were going slowly and it was easy not to connect. Now the chat has extended to gargantuan proportions, and encompasses the entire world. It almost feels like the chat is the Game. We can apply filters to the zone chat to try to contain the tsunami of information, but even then we fail to distinguish between what is real, invented because the game is, well, bizarre sometimes.

It can happen that some of us are caught cheating, because even though the Game has rules, exploits and glitches abound…and sometimes the Game seems unfair to us, or it seems like too good an opportunity to pass, or some people only want to wreak havoc. The moderators and community organisers then take our gear, some of our gold, and ban us from playing for a while.

We organise ourselves in guilds in which like-minded people buzz to the same hum, echo-chambering one another, because there is nothing more reassuring than hearing your own thoughts in another, allowing one to wallow in the comfort of uniformity in claimed uniqueness. After all, we are all unique.

Final thought: for a game that has lasted this long, it is going rather well, despite the numerous negative reviews spanning all those tens of thousands of years of accumulated playtime.