What If You Were Born Into a Video Game

If you think about it, your life is a lot like a video game. You could say it’s like a role-playing game most of all. All you need to do is add the right icons to your screen, like your health and energy bars. There’s your inventory as well, with your phone, wallet and keys in it. And, of course, everyone’s got a skill bar.

But let’s start from the very beginning. Even when you’re a baby, the game difficulty is already set to hard. All your skills are at level zero, and your health bar is tiny.

Which is why you only sleep or eat most of the time to make sure it grows. When you reach level one [level 1], you unlock the ability to walk. But the world map is still closed to you because there are lots of dangers you’re just not ready for yet.

It turns out [level 8] [$ 5] this game has a really long demo mode called ’childhood’. Most game features are locked for now. Nearly all of your actions are set for you by your parents. They’re like quest-givers who help you gain the experience you need to make progress. Ignoring their instructions can make leveling up real tough. But if you’re polite enough, they’ll give you your first gold coins.

As long as you’re a child [level 11], you’ll constantly be leveling up, but of course it takes a really long time. Your health and skill bars get bigger as you go to school. It’s not the most exciting magic academy, but the students there still carry out quests and learn new abilities.

Congratulations! [level 18] You’ve reached level 18! [loading] Now we’re really getting into this role-playing game. You’re facing a classic video game choice — you have to select your character class [bartender, physician, programmer] [level 19] and the skill path you like the most to help you conquer the world.

While lots of games have different character classes, most of us end up being the same one in real life [level 20]: the adventurer who travels the world doing different tasks to earn gold and experience [level 21]. And you still have tons of quests to do!

That’s right — it’s also time to leave behind the safe part of the map where you grew up. This unfamiliar world is a little like a dark forest full of enemies. The trouble is, the bad guys out there are sometimes hard to overcome.

These monsters have names like [level 22] responsibility, work and money. They keep coming back even when you thought you’d finally learned how to deal with them. But if you didn’t slack off at school, one day you’ll overcome them all [level 23].

Imagine you’re in a restaurant, and your date asks if you like animals. You confidently reply: “I love cats”! Your date sighs and says, “I’m more of a dog person.” Quick! Go to the menu, reload the checkpoint, and change your answer! Uh, sorry, but you can’t do that.

Remember that this is one tough video game — and you’re still playing on hard mode. This means that you only have one life. You can’t just save and then go back if something goes wrong. Every decision and every action has consequences [level 24] for you and the other players around you. But that just makes it more interesting!

Interaction with other players is one of the most important parts of the game. But remember you need to be a little careful here. The admins are a lot stricter than for other games. Breaking the rules and upsetting people could lead to a completely different game mode. And there isn’t much to do [level 25] in this version except look at four walls and a grating on the window [level 26].

On the plus side, the character customization in this game is fantastic. You can change your hairstyle and hair color, get tattoos and piercings — really anything you want. Oh, and the clothes! There’s just no limit to the designers’ imagination!

With each new level you reach, you open up new abilities and new quests. [level 27] You encounter tougher challenges but get better rewards — like more gold [level 28] or a bigger house. But there’s one quest line that’s really unique in this game. When you feel experienced enough, you can start a family and even create a new character [level 34].

You’ll transfer some of your skills to them, and be their companion [level 44] in the game until they’re ready to go into the dark forest to fight the monsters on their own. You’ll never get to control this character, though. In this game, the plot isn’t always about you. The AI does what it wants.

There’s a bunch of other stuff about this game that’s really unusual as well. Let’s take the graphics. They’re just incredible! Like ultra HD [level 53]. And the resolution is absolutely stunning! But the gameplay’s pretty complicated compared to other games. You need to check your health bar all the time, build relationships with other characters, earn gold, and make sure you rest on time.

But the story is the most interesting part. It’s totally up to you what happens! [level 55] Sure, it can be boring if you just lie on the couch and watch other people play. But try hard enough and your character could become really important! So you need to put the work in if you want it to be an interesting experience [level 65].

But there are lots of cool things in other adventure games that are missing from this one. For example, fast travel. Imagine what it would be like if we had this option: you wake up tired, but you have to go to work. Just go over to the portal and select the right location. Boom! You’re already there! I think it’s definitely time someone invented this.

And we could sure use some cheat codes as well. Of course, no one likes a cheater on the server, but imagine how cool it would be! Don’t have enough money? [motherlode] Just type in the cheat and watch the numbers in your bank account double!

Feeling sick? Don’t waste your health potion — [aspirine] just use the cheat and your health bar is full again! But I’ve got to admit — playing at life like this would become boring.

Imagining life as a video game helps us understand it a lot. A lot of what we do is about setting small tasks and looking for ways to accomplish them. With rewards and experience, you move on to more challenging quests. Your skills, gold and health bars aren’t infinite though, and you need to manage your resources carefully to reach the next level.

Some people think that computer games can be really harmful. They say that gamers spend too much time in their virtual worlds and forget about reality. But there are actually a lot of benefits from playing games from time to time.

Many of them are designed in the same way as our real lives, and they have plenty of features that teach us useful things. Games always reward us for our hard work. Playing a game from start to finish and making all that progress along the way can help you understand that it takes time and energy to get what you want. Hard work always pays off!

Another useful thing that games provide is communication. Hundreds of millions of people play online games that bring them together in groups and teams. They have to achieve cohesion and use good teamwork to pass through a dungeon or win a match.

Competitive games can help people learn to communicate and make compromises. And although it’s all just for fun, this is exactly what we have to learn to do in real life as well. [the final boss] Only instead of a dungeon with a scary monster, we have to survive a day at the office with an angry boss.

And one more thing — it’s been proven that a person’s strategic thinking and decision-making can improve when they play video games. In one experiment, a group of 50 young adults who had never played games before were asked to play an action game for 50 hours.

Another group played a slow strategy game. The results showed that the action game helped to improve the young people’s perception of visual information. Their decision-making skills also improved. This was thanks to the fast pace of the action game. In these kinds of games, a large number of events happen one after another, forcing the player to act and make decisions. This can have an effect on people’s real lives.