Mortality as an RPG
1978. I’m a 16-year-old college freshman, living in the dorms. Struggling (and often failing) to muster the self-discipline to attend class and do my homework assignments.
And then I hear about this cool role-playing game. Dungeons and Dragons, it’s called. D&D. Really popular, especially among college students, especially among geeks. And I start playing with a group on my dorm floor.
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The story doesn’t go entirely the way you might expect. I mean, yeah, I didn’t do terribly well in my classes that semester. But D&D is only partly to blame. Really, I was looking for excuses: something else to do with my time when I should have been studying or sleeping instead. If it hadn’t been D&D, it would have been something else. In fact, most of the time, it was something else: books, or long philosophical conversations with newly minted friends, or (on one or two particularly stupid occasions) sitting up all night watching other people play Risk without using cards. Let me repeat that: watching other people play Risk without using cards (which just about triples the length of a game that’s already fairly tedious if you’re not one of those playing). If that doesn’t show how far I went in my quest to avoid schoolwork, I don’t know what does.
Truthfully, I was never as much of a D&D addict as I was a reading addict. And nowadays, I hardly play video games at all. But I get to see a lot of playing of video games among family members, particularly RPGs or role-playing games: games like D&D where you control a character who advances through a set of challenges and build skills through going on adventures. My oldest son in particular waxes lyrical about the potential of RPGs as a storytelling medium, while acknowledging that for the most part it’s potential that hasn’t been heavily utilized thus far by video game designers.
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Which brings me to the notion of RPGs as a model for mortality.
Video games involve a lot of dying. You start the game, you goof up, you die. Simple. Then you start again. Typically (but not always), as a player you get periodic chances to “save” your game, so that when you die, you don’t lose everything you’ve already done. Sometimes, though, you discover that you made a basic mistake earlier than your last save, so you have to go to a previous save. Or start all over again.
Video games involve a lot of learning new skills. Okay, typically as a player you don’t actually learn how to backstab or climb walls or whatever it is that your game character does. But you do have to learn how to manage the controls, the particular set of moves that allow you to solve a particular puzzle, the proper way to deal with specific characters and situations you encounter on the way. No one expects video game players to know this in advance.
Video games are arbitrary. I know of one (okay, it’s actually a text-based computer game rather than a video game, but whatever) that requires you to ask multiple times what you see, before the game gives in and tells you what was actually in front of you the whole time. What’s up with that?
Video games involve a lot of apparent dead ends. This is one of the things I find most frustrating on those rare occasions when I try to play one. You reach a certain point, and all ways forward appear to be literal dead ends. Usually that means there is something you neglected along the way, or someplace you have to go back to — but good luck figuring out what that is. Hence the popularity of FAQs — files posted by other gamers explaining what you have to do in order to beat a particular challenge. Or gamers may talk to friends and family members for a hint. There are probably some purists out there who insist on doing everything on their own, with no help from an outside source, but from my experience, such people are rare. Game designers don’t expect players to figure out everything on their own.
Video games can involve hours of tedious practice and multiple attempts in order to gain some important (though often intrinsically trivial) advantage. One very popular RPG requires the player to take time off from killing monsters and saving the world from a corrupt power company (!!) in order to breed and race large ostrich-like birds (!!!). Another involves playing an invented card game, over and over. Still another involves potentially hours of virtual fishing. Hello?
It’s really quite amazing that anyone ever engages in such a frustrating and often apparently pointless enterprise as playing a video game. Except, of course, that all these frustrations are actually part of the appeal. It would be a pretty sad game that didn’t require multiple tries, dead ends, pointless frustration, and other miscellaneous vexations. Which says something interesting about us as humans.
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This came to mind earlier today, thinking about the real-life travails of several people I care about who are struggling with job difficulties, attempts to find work (and a direction in life), health problems, spiritual struggles, and other personal issues.
I do not want people who are important to me to experience a life that resembles video games. Because really, that would kind of suck. I mean, who actually wants that in real life?
And so I plead with God for these people. I say, please give them what they need, even if I don’t know what that is. Please help them have a happy life. Help me figure out how I can help them.
And I don’t get any clear answers, and my attempts to help don’t often help all that much. And I’m left with the reality that people do live lives composed in large part of frustration, toil, and painful growth, ending in death.
Why do I balk at this? If it’s good enough for video game designers, why do I want something different in real life? Except, you know, for the fact that it’s real life pain, not just (imagined) mental anguish. And the part where I hope for a better set of ethics from God and the cosmos.
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Which brings me back to my first point, or maybe my second point. Which is that video games, like much of life, are about growth. Challenge. Becoming more than what we are.
Comfort is apparently not a goal that contents humanity. We seem to have an innate desire to test ourselves against something — ourselves, our surroundings — find out where we fall short, and keep trying until we can do better, no matter how much unpleasantness that involves. It’s less a case of life being like a video game, and more of video games reflecting this key facet of life. (And how can you reflect a facet? Don’t facets do the reflecting? Bad Jonathan!) Growth, apparently, is the bottom line, even — or perhaps inevitably — at the cost of pain, frustration and the like.
Which leaves us, I guess, with those classic video game values. Namely: Find out the game shortcuts. Ask for advice. Learn new skills. Rethink assumptions. Practice. And keep on trying.
