Life as an Adventure Game

Today, I was working on my day job as a project manager, and as I often do, I played some background music to finish my tasks. I like to play Zelda, Nintendo music, or Lord of the Rings.

I was thinking about the gamification of stuff. I began to apply it to my tasks. I tried to finish fast and imagined that finishing the tasks I had at hand would unluck the “get to write” level, which I am doing right now.

Writing is one of the skills I really want my character to have. I love adventure video games. I love The Legend of Zelda. In that game, you are Link, a hero, and you need to save the kingdom from Ganondorf, which is kind of personified evil but to do so, you need to do a lot of stuff first. Like finding a bow and the “Master Sword”. The game is super fun, games, in general, are fun. They are engaging, you don’t want to stop playing them. Unlike work.

If work is seen as just that, like work, you want to kill yourself. The fun part about games is that the objective is clear, you need to save the kingdom or the princess, or whatever. You have a sense of meaning. I began to wonder, isn’t life just the same?

For life to be engaging, you have to be engaged. Being engaged in games is easy, you are given clear objectives and obstacles and the ways to overcome them. Not so much in real life. Obstacles here in the flesh world…