Life as Illuminated by a Meaningless Game
5 min readTwelve runs, three or four good items found, and one and a half levels later, I logged off. To be honest, I didn’t really find “making runs,” as they called it, that exciting. Yet still I had played for well over two hours with complete strangers at a breakneck pace in an almost stressful environment. What drove me to treat a game like work?
Perhaps I should explain the game a little. It’s your basic adventure with swords and magic. You kill monsters who drop items and experience points so you can get stronger, kick down bigger doors behind which lie bigger monsters who give more experience points so you can get strong enough to open the chest that has nicer boots so you can kick down bigger doors so . . . well you get the idea. Of course, you can play the game the way the designers intended, going through the plot and quests, but few do this. Instead most “rush” the plot and then get to the so-called real business of making runs in the highest level area of the game and getting your character to the highest level possible with the least effort. Some runs are for experience, some to find good items, but all of them have the same goal of minimum time and effort with a maximum payoff. Pure efficiency.
Anyone who joins a game with a less-than-optimal character build is ridiculed, dropped, or “hostiled” (that is, attacked by the others). The plot of the game is epic in scope, a grand battle of good versus evil, with panoramic scenery, a stunning musical score, and creepy villains, yet no one seems to notice. They are too busy min-maxing their characters to get the most damage per second.
When I asked the people I was playing with “Foorsooth, what be this glimmering beacon of hope I spy on yonder horizon?” I got a number of confused and even hostile remarks in return. No one seems to play the game for the game, but they can tell you how many rare rings you can trade that shiny new armor for in a heartbeat.
Even worse, the game is rife with bugs that players exploit, and all manners of hacks that give players an unfair advantage. They use this advantage to kill other characters and steal their items, or sometimes just for the sake of killing. I was one of the few players I could find who played “legit” and didn’t use these cheats and bugs to amplify my damage.
I pondered the futility of playing the game online at all. I, a legit lower level character, playing a few hours a month, could never hope to compete with or win respect from the item duplicators (another bug), the hackers, and the folks who played twenty hours a day. My situation was basically hopeless. I would never reach level 99, never find that perfect unique sword, never be a clan leader, and probably never realize my full damage potential. So why even play the game at all?
That is the reasoning of the others who play this game. To them, why play if you can’t dominate? But I still play. I enjoy the game. I play at my own pace and enjoy the scenery. I talk to the non-player characters even though they won’t respond. I wear crappy armor because my character has a fondness for it. And I stop every now and then to look around at the stunning graphics. All around me, a swarm of high-powered and hyper-equipped tweakers blaze past, reducing our enemies to broken piles of corpses, and then with a shout of “lol n00b!” they are gone. Or perhaps they linger, like the stench of a sewer, to say “gib itamz plz?” “I neeeeeeeeed free plz!” I notice how much they hate. They hate and fight. They whine, oh they whine so much. They demand I rush them, or give them unique items, and I respond “Silence foul spawn of darkness! I shant be tempted to deviate from my quest!” and then run away to do my deeds as they respond with “WTF?”
I still enjoy the game, even though I can’t be anyone of significance as far as they are concerned. To me their rushing and running, their constant repetitious slaying of the same boss, the clearing of the same area, seems tedious and dull. The same boring characters I see over and over. They don’t even enjoy doing it.
And yet as pointless and as stupid all of you are probably thinking this sounds, this is exactly what we do in life everyday. As much as I take my time to enjoy my game, I then do what I hate to see in others in the game, only I do it in real life. I seek to get my maximum sleep by hitting that snooze alarm, then speed ten or fifteen miles over the speed limit to get in just mere seconds ahead of my boss and seem like a more productive worker than I really am. I drool over the nice unique items my friends own, like cars or houses or guitars. I make the same “run” to work every day, seeking to get my pay with minimum effort, never enjoying it, taking any shortcut I can. I play “legit” in real life, of course, although I envy those who don’t: the superstars, actors, drug dealers, etc who get so much for so little by cheating the system somehow.
But it’s all a pointless game isn’t it? That chase after success, material wealth, prestige, and such is just as pointless a game as the video game I described earlier. How incredibly ironic that the same people who tell me that video games are pointless are living in big empty houses with a three-SUV garage, snowmobiles and boats, while working seventy hours a week and never enjoying anything. They have hostile children and failed marriages. They hate their jobs even more than I do. If the life of a game addict like the others I described is pointless, then the life of a world-addict is simply depressing.
You can log off of a game if it is too boring or depressing, but in life it is different. I will say that, unless you experience life and take time to enjoy the little things, you’re destined to fall into societal min-maxing. Enjoy your drive to work, talk with your coworkers, do something other than worry about life for a change. This is all a game that will someday be little more than a dream. Look at all the “level 99” people in society today, the stars, the CEOs, the big shots, and ask, are they happy? Did it get them anywhere? Is their life more fulfilling? Are they any better off than the kid who got his barbarian warrior with dragonscale armor up to level 99?
At least the kid with the barbarian warrior didn’t kill, rob, or steal his way to the top for real. It was just a meaningless game.
