Exercise 1.3: Your Life as a Game

While to many people life can seem boring and repetitive, in the eyes of a game designer, life is a game. Anything that you do in day to day life can become a game, and when that is your outlook on life, it makes life much more fun.

As you are planning your schedule in school and at home, you may feel a little bit like a game designer. For example, planning your high school schedule for the next year is just like designing a brand new game. The game is high school, and while that sounds boring and tedious, it can be fun. Scheduling challenging classes is like making the challenging levels. These are designed to not be too easy for the player (or student) so that achieving the goal (good grades) is a challenge, but it also must be easy enough so that the student has a good chance to get good grades if they put in work. Scheduling fun elective classes is like minigames. These classes are still challenging, but they are significantly easier and more fun than core acedemic classes.

Even within a class a game can be played. A good game gets progressivley more difficult, and skills mastered at the beginning of the game will come back into play later in the game. The same is true in a good class. For example, in math a new skill is learned almost every class. Every few classes these skills are assessed. This represents a checkpoint, or a new level. When the next skills are being learned, the previous skills still need to be understood by the student in order to succeed.

Another area of life that can be seen as a game is driving or riding in a car. Like any good game, there are rules that surround driving that cannot be broken. The game consists of getting to the desired location in the shortest amount of time while still following laws and avoiding accidents. The challenge is to choose the best route while accounting for traffic.

Some of the best parts of the day involve food. Cooking and eating can be seen as a game. The challenge is to put together a desirable dish, and the reward is getting to eat it. The player (or cook) will need to understand the food that they are making, and have all of the neccesary ingredients in order to successfully make it. The game gets harder when there is no recipe or one of the ingredients is missing.

The final attribute of life that can be seen as a game is playing a sport such as field hockey. Sports usually are seen as games from any point of view, but a game designer sees it the most clearly. The levels are represented by moving through levels of play (ex. moving from JV to varsity). There is a distinct competitive component to almost all sports, and players want to win like they do in all good games.

In conclusion, a seemingly boring life can be greatly improved by realizing that all parts of life can be seen as a game.