You might think drawing inspiration for life from videogames is absurd. To that, I say, “Have you heard of Camus?”
Albert Camus was a French philosopher who provided an answer for how to live life in a world that will never be how we want it to be. As humans, we can’t control our wanting even as we know that the universe is largely indifferent to our desires. To Camus, this makes life profoundly absurd. In order to vividly explain what to do in such a hopeless and bleak situation, he revisits a story that involves cheating the grim reaper, rivers of the afterlife, the Greek pantheon of immortal gods, and the hero, Sisyphus, pushing a rock up a hill for all eternity.
Far from being mere kids’ stories, myths are unforgettable because they take our everyday struggles and heighten them into epic drama. In his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus imagines that the cursed hero is actually happy. Despite being doomed to an eternity of menial labor in a fruitless task, Sisyphus manages to find pleasure in his punishment by embracing it and pushing on. He might thrill to the fact that the climb gets easier over time, master the rolling of the rock, and turn the movement of a stone from one side of a parabola to the other into art. Sisyphus, in other words, manages to make life fun.
Like Sisyphus, the pointlessness of the tasks and moments that make up our lives can make it all seem crushingly boring. But Camus’s point is that if we embrace the freedom granted by accepting that the world doesn’t have a point and commit to living with passion regardless, then we can make the most of what we’ve been given. To me, there’s no better place to start making life fun than by looking at what we find most fun about games.
Do it for the love of progression
The acts of fetching special items, solving puzzles, and overcoming difficult adversaries make games fun. Meanwhile, fetching groceries, completing work tasks, and confronting difficult people are considered boring. On some level, we want to do these things, we just don’t want to do them in real life. Last week, we examined how games incentivized us into doing them because they conferred on these tasks a sense of importance (the fate of the world depends on it!) while we know that the consequences for failure are actually minor (start over from the last checkpoint).
But the sense of importance is really just a trick. Original Doom programmer, John Carmack, once compared the presence of story in videogames to story in porn. It’s important that a game have one, but it’s not why gamers are here. Sure, the story that you get to be a badass space marine here to kill demons gets you to install the game. But it’s your willingness to perform the same mundane clicks and button presses over and over again that keeps you going. And this is because you keep getting better until you are good enough to advance to the next stage. Every game progresses in difficulty and reveals more of itself as you play. Without this key element, it would be considered an experience at best.
The property of ‘unfolding through grinding’ is found in nearly all of life’s activities. So much so that it’s at the core of Zen. From archery to garden sweeping, from paperwork filing to waiting in line, from rolling a rock uphill to rolling it back uphill again, anything can be made into deliberate practice. Repetition with intent unfolds hidden depths and may even lead to ultimate meaning: enlightenment.
Gamers and adepts alike might come for the story, but by and large, they stay for the skill progression. So while I could tell you to do your chores by pretending the fate of your family depends on it, or visualize yourself as some kind of killer Mr. Clean, chances are they won’t work for long. The story that’s going to stick has to be the real one: that everything we do is an opportunity to get better.
Keep mixing things up inside the box.
Doom Eternal game director, Hugo Martin, was adamant about the play experience he wanted people to have. He wanted players to be moving fast, switching weapons often, and taking the fight to the monsters. For those who wanted to duck and find cover like more conventional military simulators, or stick to one favorite gun, or run past enemies without engaging them he had four words: play a different game.
Boredom and frustration primarily come from two failings. Either we fail to see the possibilities within the boundaries of an activity (boredom), or we resent having to play within its limitations (frustration). Instead, we might take the way of Sisyphus and embrace the task. But how? To have more fun with any task, keep trying new ways to perform it that satisfy the criteria of a job well done. In doing so, each time becomes a fresh experience and a new challenge. Take washing dishes, which is just a chore until Alan Watts found a way to turn it into a dance.
Replenish your stats and resources
Something every player is well aware of within gaming is the mechanic of the health bar. Few modern games do not visually show the player in some way how much more wear and tear they can sustain before losing the game. Heck, The Sims is an entire game franchise based around managing character stats and resources. In order to succeed, players not only needed to ensure that their character was physically healthy, but that they also socialized and slept well. A valuable lesson that is all too often neglected in our hyper-competitive, always-on world.
Sleep deprivation leads to insanity. Lack of exercise leads to depression and obesity. And the overwhelming amount of burnout that exists in our schools and industries is the result of us attempting to run our bodies as if we were videogame characters with infinite health meters. As important a role as hard work plays in success, we often underplay the importance of maxing out other attributes like resting, socializing, and relaxing. To that end, sometimes the best way to keep the fun going is to put the rock down and sit on it for a while.
Conclusion: Free to Play with Passion
Tired of the old cliche that inevitably greets game designer Ian Bogost's answer to the favorite party question, “What do you do?” Ian makes a point of saying that life is not like a game. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use games to inform how we might live better lives.
Recognizing that there are no game designers deciding what we must do or laying down green arrows for us to follow to life’s next checkpoint is itself liberating. Understanding why we are bored by many of the same life tasks that we eagerly seek out in games can help us find new ways to see chores as opportunities to level up. And remembering to replenish our depleted meters ensures we continue to transform life’s mundanities into fresh and worthwhile challenges. For, as David Foster Wallace said, if you can make yourself immune to boredom in our modern world, then “there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish”.
Where else can you get a link between video games and Camus except in this blog?
We do live, "in a world that will never be how we want it to be," and that, "…the universe is largely indifferent to our desires." As well as, "there are no game designers deciding what we must do."
That's the crux of the matter, isn't it? You give us several ways to approach this, from Camus to Zen to myth. All useful—hope people look up from the grind.