I’m on vacation this week, and similar to vacations of everyone else living in a semi-lockdown pandemic state, it turns to be a stay-cation, in which instead of travelling to a far unknown and adventurous land, or sun-bathing on a nice beach next to a big coconut decorated with a funny hat and a colorful straw, I stay home and do random things. To be fair, there are tons of projects I should be working on (like finishing some draft posts I started in this blog), but since it has been quite rough few weeks, I decided to take it easy and do something fun. Netflix works at first, but after a while I realized it got quite boring: there are so many choices, yet the decision-making process (choosing what to watch next) became a pain; also, most of the animes I would like to watch are only available in Netflix North America, so since I don’t live there (and am too lazy to set up a VPN just for that purpose), I don’t really want to keep watching Netflix after one day or two. That’s when it hits me: there’s a whole entertainment system lying in my living room, under my TV for a while, which I should be using as much as possible before it becomes too old and outdated: my (actually, my wife’s) PS4. (My wife bought it last year, after watching the ads about a game that she really wanted to play. The device was nice and we both had our funs with it, but after one or two weeks, as we both get busy, our interests in it droped, and it has mostly been lying there and catching dust.)

When I was a kid, my parents didn’t really allow video games (we were poor anyway, so buying such a thing or spending money on playing it had never been our plan), hence though I know about video games, I don’t really have the experience of spending day after day, night after night trying to do a quest, killing a monster, or simply running around in the game watching (artificially created) sceneries. As an adult, so far I have been quite skeptical with getting myself into that kind of experience: for several reasons, I rarely have some much time to waste in my life, so I always try to avoid these addictive hobbies, which, in my mother’s words, “does nothing good, and simply wastes your time and money”. However, as I grow older, that skepticalism gets faded out gradually; I am almost 30 after all, I think I can handle myself, i.e. I’m confident that even if I get addicted, I will be able to do something about it. So I started playing games seriously.

What I didn’t expect, though, was that playing games actually taught me serious lessons about real life, abeit I was only playing for some quick fun and stress-relieving moments.

1. Some tasks are impossible to conquer, until you really conquer

I sucked at gaming, or at least I thought so.

In the first day or so of playing The Witcher, I failed pretty frequently. Almost every task was too difficult: my character was too weak and fragile, and I also pressed wrong buttons (or was too slow in responding to the situation). Needless to say, it was brutal for me: my character died over and over, and I almost stayed in the same place after several hours. To my surprise, that didn’t last forever: I gradually got the hang of it, and suddenly noticed that I didn’t die that easily anymore; I started to be able to dodge the opponents’ attacks and fight back, and not long after that I figured out that I conquered many more than what I did the previous day in the one or two hours. My character got stronger, too, and somehow a bit more … rude, as he facing an opponent, he would say “Show me what you got, b*tch!”, and then split that thing he was talking to in halves.

I don’t even know exactly how and when I get so good at the game I used to suck at, but I guess the changes just happen a little at a time, just so small that there was no apparent improvement in the results until the accumulated difference gets big enough. As I mentioned briefly in an earlier post, nonlinearity is the nature of many progresses, we human are, sadly, just not cut out to feel it.

So first lesson of gaming: we get better as we fail. Any failure doesn’t mean to be permanent, just try again later: either immediately, or leave it to another day, when you have a fresher mind. There’s a saying “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, I guess here we can also say “What kills you also makes you stronger”, of course provided that you can get revived.

The same lesson can be applied to real life: whatever challenge you do is valuable, even if you fail at it. Of course, we don’t have a Save Game button in real life, so there might be other consequences of the failures, but also in modern world, there’s not so many things that can literally kill you, is it?

2. Quests are sometimes boring, but you still have to finish them, with high concentration

The second thing I noticed is that besides those challenging tasks that made us fail several times before knowing how to pass, there are certain ones that are so boring, yet the game still insists that we do it, even repeatedly. (One example is the maintenance of weapons, which doesn’t happen immediately, but requires travelling back to a blacksmith, who may disappear from time to time.) Sometimes, the game let you face a bunch of laids who are very weak and do not give you and difficulties, but the moment you start to believe that you have easily won, there will be one or two laids, who you forget to notice, suddenly appear out of no where and brutally beat you to death. That kind of stuff surely may trigger angers in impatient players: not only you have to do such extremely boring jobs, you also have to pay good attentions to them. Come to think of it, though, that is actually what happens in real life: the reasons of your failure is sometimes not the hard things that you have anticipated, but the easy minor details you have failed to plan for.

3. Cheating brings victory, but takes the fun out of it

Have you ever played a game with a big cheatsheet in front of you? How did you feel after winning with a cheat code? And how would the feeling different if you had won with your own skills, fair and square, instead? As human, we normally complain about what we don’t have, but forget that difficulties are what make the success really meaningful. If all the sucesses can be achieved so easily, then what’s the point of achieving those successes? When there’s no longer anything that can challenge you, then what’s the point of improving yourself? But, if you don’t have to work on your own improvement, then what would you do with the rest your life?

Luckily for us, almost everything we own is limited: intelligence, money, health, time, etc. and our level of success depends big time on how well do we distribute these resources to necessary tasks. Working on managing those scarse resources gives our lives a lot more meanings

Imagine if tomorrow you wake up and all those problems that you normally complain about are all gone and you have become the most powerful and successful person in the whole world, what would you do?

In the end, what do we do to “win” the game of life?

Some points that we have learned so far:

• Pay attention to your resources: look for ways to increase them, while use them and distribute them wisely.
• Don’t give up on a task just yet, your level is about to increase
• Do your quests
• Remember that difficulties is what make the game exciting.

While in this whole post, I have been trying to persuade you that the life we live is very much like a video game, the two things have one fundamental difference: in life, we are not told beforehands how to know if we have “won” it. With that said, while everyone might have a different idea of what constitutes a successful life, no matter what your definition is, as long as you are happy with what you are doing, I think you’re on the right track.

So long!