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Life as a Role-Playing Game

Understanding Life As an MMORPG by Reflecting Upon Your Life

Uh, I think I just had a major breakthrough. It relates to how best to introduce people to the concept of Life as an MMORPG and it’s something I touched upon before but didn’t really realize the power of it.

Basically if you tell people that Life is an MMORPG, their initial reaction will be, “Awesome, let’s roll up my character.” And when I told someone about this in the past, back when I was on Google+ a decade ago, that was their reaction.

Do you see what’s going on here? The person is assuming that they are starting a new game. Yet what they aren’t aware of is that they’ve already been playing the game.

So that’s the introduction—the bridge—to my framework.

It’s basically going through the basic patterns of life that a person has experienced and helping the person to see how these patterns are actually the narrative mechanics for Life as an MMORPG.

And after reflecting on where they’ve been and discussing where they are now, that’s when you can hit them with the obviousness of what they were expecting all along: a new game.

Starting a new game is what levelling up feels like in life.

It’s because each level is its own game, with its own set of rules, within the larger game. To put that in psychological terms, each level of consciousness is seen as its own worldview within the larger worldview of human possibilities for growth and development.

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Life as a Role-Playing Game

If Your MMORPG Player Character Acted Like Your Ego in Life

I realize that understanding my “Life as a MMORPG” metaphor is probably hard for people to grasp, even those who play MMORPGs. Fundamental to this metaphor is realizing that who you think you are, your identity, is really equivalent to your ego being the “character” you’re playing and who you truly are is a soul of potentiality as the “player.” You’ve just forgotten you’re a soul because you’ve been unconsciously immersed within the game for so long as your character.

But I thought what if we reversed this metaphor to make it more evident? So imagine if you sat down and started playing a new computer MMORPG, like World of Warcraft, but one in which your character you’re supposed to be controlling, had AI capabilities to think on its own, and actually started acting like your ego in real life?

And for you to be able to direct your character where you want it to go and do the things you want it to do, you had to convince it of doing these things first? What would this look like?

Posing this question to Claude.ai, this is what it revealed and roleplayed for me.

The Walled City: Levels 1-3

Level 1: The Slums (Survival)

Player: clicks to move character towards a food vendor

Character: Wait! What if we don’t have enough gold for food? We might starve! There’s not enough resources for everyone in these slums. Maybe we should hoard what little we have instead of risking it.

Player: It’s okay, we have plenty of gold. Let’s buy some food.

Character: But what if bandits attack us on the way back to our shelter? We’re so vulnerable out here!

Level 2: The Marketplace (Relationship)

Player: attempts to join a guild

Character: Do we really want to join a guild? What if they reject our application? Or worse, what if they accept us but then kick us out later? I don’t think I could handle that kind of abandonment.

Player: Joining a guild will help us tackle tougher quests and earn better rewards.

Character: But what if the other guild members don’t like us? I’m not sure I’m appreciated enough to be part of a team.

Level 3: The Noble Quarter (Self-Esteem)

Player: approaches a quest giver for a challenging mission

Character: Hold on! This quest looks really difficult. What if we fail? Everyone will see how incompetent we are. Maybe we should stick to easier quests where we can’t embarrass ourselves.

Player: But completing tougher quests is how we level up and get better gear.

Character: I know, but… I’m just not sure I’m good enough for this. What if we let the quest giver down? The whole Noble Quarter will be talking about our failure!

Conversations with Claude.ai

Do you see how hilariously this interaction reflects how we go about our real lives and how we spend so much time fighting with ourselves to the point of exhaustion? And how so much of our growth and potential is actually limited by our “self” (character) which is often standing in the way of our “Self” (player), whereby the capitalization represents our larger potential.

This is why Alfonso Montuori said that so much of creativity is really just learning to get out of the way of ourselves.

This is because our limiting beliefs often have fears associated with them which block us. This psychologically embodies the monsters within the Hero’s Journey which are really just our fears created from our outdated beliefs.

So how do we overcome this and make it so your character (ego) wants to go in the same direction as you the player (soul)?

That’s what levelling up in the game is all about, whereby one brings one’s character (ego) in alignment with one’s self as a player (soul), so that both of “you” are travelling side by side and adventuring in the same direction.

To do this requires trust. And to build that trust requires getting to know one another at a deeper level and going through challenging experiences that bring each other closer together within an intrapersonal relationship.

This is effectively the Hero’s Journey. It’s actually an inner journey fictionally relayed as an external one which relays truths about life. And the more one discovers who they truly are, deep down inside within the dungeons of themselves, the more one actually expands one’s worldview and one’s sense of Self, thus allowing oneself to play much larger roles in life than one previously imagined and believed.

When one achieves this state, one is no longer unconsciously immersed with the game of life but consciously instead.

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Life as a Role-Playing Game

Embracing The Adventure Towards Your Unique Self

Stepping beyond the ego of your “character” and embracing your soul as a “player” in life’s greatest adventure.

To find out who you are, you will want to embrace adventure; you will want to discover and hone your skills and talents: you will want to become all you can become.

During the early years of our lives, while we are passing through the surviving, conforming and differentiating stages of our psychological development, we have to do two important tasks: develop a sense of self—an image of who we believe we are, and build our storyestablish a set of beliefs that we can use to explain how the world around us operates. The image we create becomes our identity and the story we tell becomes our cosmology.

Our identity and our cosmology are conditioned by two factors: our parents, and the culture of the community/society in which we live. By the time we become young adults, who we think we are is a complex mixture of our own unique character overlaid by layers of beliefs we have learned about ourselves from our parents, other close family members, and the community/society in which we are embedded.

If parental programming and cultural conditioning was all there was to our character and story, then all children born into the same family in the same community and the same society would turn out the same. But this is not the case.

You don’t have to reflect for long before you realise that as far as our characters are concerned, we are all born different. We come into this physical life with inbuilt preferences, qualities, gifts and talents. You just have to observe how different siblings can be to know this is true. These differences are apparent even at a very young age. There is no scientific explanation for this: All we know is that every one of us is unique, special and different.

The parental programming and cultural conditioning we experience can either suppress our uniqueness, in which case we develop a false sense of our self, or can support us in discovering our uniqueness.

This is what evolutionary coaching is about—helping your clients examine and, as necessary, remove or reduce the layers of parental programming and cultural conditioning that have led to the creation of their false sense of self (the ego), so they can uncover and examine and explore their unique sense of self (the soul).

In other words, evolutionary coaching is about helping people find out who they really are and become all they can become—helping them to individuate and self-actualise—so they can be truly independent unique human beings and live the life their souls intended.

Richard Barrett, Evolutionary Coaching
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Life as a Role-Playing Game

Playing: Constructing Our Own Meaningful Narrative of Reality

In a game, through play, you make your own story, personal to you, with a meaning personal to you.

MMOs, being games, are driven by player actions. Narrative removes meaning from action. Offering three, four, or five different endings still removes meaning. Your gameplay experience is running on rails that are all going in the same direction, and switching tracks doesn’t change that.

MMOs should be richly-featured enough that they don’t need imposed narrative; events can unfold as a result of player action and interaction, taking individual players’ personal experiences into uncharted waters. Players shouldn’t merely get the chance to redirect the narrative, they should get the chance to define it.

The answer is that people are individuals. Some things are incredibly important to them, but not to anyone else (or at least not to many other people). In playing a game, a player can cause events to occur that might not even impinge on the consciousness of the majority, but which are a major experience to that one person. They don’t even have to be a major experience, they can be a minor experience that the player is using as a building block to construct a more meaningful story in their mind. That story may well be garbage to anyone else, but it’s not to the player concerned. They did what they did in the game because it generated (or is working towards precipitating) an event that is a continuation of the unique causal chain the player is assembling, extrapolating, appropriating, honing, and personalizing.

Games, as systems, allow players to experiment with events, picking from them the ones that make the best story for them, which will lead to the further stories that are best for them. An overall, plot-driven series of events can also do this, but by necessity it’s offering a general rather than a specific story. Games allow people to weave these plots into their own story—the one that is arising from the gameplay they are manipulating.

Games are machines for creating stories. Play them, and your imagination will construct ones that work for you.

Everyone likes stories, but they like their own stories most of all.

Games don’t generate meaning. Players and designers generate meaning. Games are the objects or tools from and through which meaning is generated, but it’s the people who generate the meaning.

The Real is Imaginary

In the real world there is nothing except subatomic particles. It’s only because you view those as collecting to form energy and matter, and interpret particular configurations of energy and matter to be “objects,” that you can say a particular thing—a house, for example—“exists” in the real world.

In virtual worlds, objects are emergent consequences of the interaction of computer code and data. People ascribe meaning to these configurations, just as they do to matter/energy in the real world. They recognize that there is a difference between this kind of object and the kind they deal with normally, so they call them “virtual objects.”

Ultimately, though, the “objectness” of anything (whether real or virtual) is nothing more than a construct of the mind.

Richard Bartle, MMOs From The Inside Out
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Life as a Role-Playing Game

Playing: A Quest For Identity

The theoretical reason is to do with immersion. MMOs are virtual worlds: people play them to get away from Reality. In an MMO, you can be someone else; by being someone else, you can become a better you. Why do people play the same game for hour after hour, night after night, week after week, month after month? It’s not because they like the game; it’s because they like being who they are.

When players play characters different to themselves, this can influence both their real self and their character. Much of playing an MMO involves making tiny adjustments to your perception of yourself and to your perception of your character until eventually the two align. It’s as if there’s a dialogue between them, the resolving of which affirms (or reaffirms) the player’s sense of identity.

It’s a quest for identity.

By being someone virtual, people find out who they are for real.

It’s an identity thing. The more you feel that your character is you, the more immersed you are. When the two finally become one, the result is a persona—you, in the MMO.

That’s immersion.

Imagine a line showing a spectrum of identity. Yes, I realize this is a tall order, but bear with me. Put a box on the left of this marked P, which shows the player’s sense of self when they start. Put another box on the right marked C, which shows the character the player has created. A third box in between, marked H, indicates the hero—the renewed sense of self the player gets from having played the MMO and completed their hero’s journey.

Playing an MMO—or a virtual world in general—is a hill-climbing exercise through identity space. The hero’s journey is a good algorithm for finding a local maximum. Through playing, you get to affirm who you are.

Or, put another way, you are a multi-faceted diamond. Playing an MMO means you get to see more facets of yourself than you would in ordinary life.

Richard Bartle, MMOs From The Inside Out