Category: Life Is a Role-Playing Game

There was a television show some years back called The Peripheral. In the show, there were technological avatars called peripherals that a human host could inhabit and control via a VR headset.

What was interesting though was that when the human host was disconnected from the peripheral, an internal program within the peripheral would take over and control it, providing basic functionality for safety and security of the device.

What I find interesting about this is how it relates to how our ego’s function in a similar way. In effect, when we’re not consciously aware and detached from the moment, it’s like we’re not connected and thus our ego takes over automatically.

Within my Life is a Role-Playing Game framework, this is understood by seeing your ego as your avatar or “ character” that you as a “player” are playing. So your identity is not really you. It’s just a character you as a player are playing.

Why is this important?

Because we can become trapped and caged in our programming.

For example, societal programming is effectively a Socialized Mind. It is a script or program defined by society that was encoded in you as you grew up to keep you safe and secure. It also helped you have a sense of belonging and eventually a sense of self-esteem, especially in your work.

When a person shifts to a Self-Authoring Mind, they are learning to unlearn and relearn (i.e. Alvin Toffler) by recoding themselves. They do this by going beyond fitting into to survive and beginning to step out and thrive. This requires understanding oneself at a deeper level, figuring out what you want out of life versus what society expects and wants out of you.

This is why I’ve always said that the future isn’t about learning how to code but about learning how to recode yourself (which embodies what Alvin Toffler meant about unlearning).

But here’s the issue. Even when we recode ourselves, we can still get trapped in our own encoding, especially because it is our own “self-authored” coding.

But if it’s our coding, what’s the problem?

It’s because it’s an interpretation of who we want to be at a point in time. And that sense of who we want to be can change over time but our scripts may not because we’ve become so immersed within them that we believe they are us, even though they aren’t.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

I’ve had moments recently where I’ve become fully aware of myself as a “character” because I keep repeating these reactive or responsive self-authored scripts of doing things in life automatically because they’re familiar and comforting, perhaps even nostalgic and heartwarming at times.

So it’s like I’m stepping out of my “self” as a “character” and I’m seeing these scripts from a “player’s” perspective as something I’m stuck within. And I’m tired of these scripts, the repetition of them because they feel restricting. In effect, it feels like I’m on autopilot and just calling in my life versus actually be consciously aware and immersed in the experience of the moment.

This is effectively the NPC aspect of yourself that is similar to the autonomous program that protects the peripheral avatar in The Peripheral television show when the human host isn’t within it. It’s helpful. But it can get between you and your ability to experience life fully.

So I’ve been thinking about this and I asked myself the question, “How could I step past this automatic programming and scripts that I’ve created for my ‘self’?” And it dawned on me that I just need to be consciously aware that they exist.

So every morning, it would be like waking up and thanking your ego as your “character” that it is keeping you safe but also telling it that you as the “player” are fully aware and here now to take over the experience.

In other words, it would be like saying, “Thanks, I’ve got this. You don’t need to do anything at the moment. Just let me be for now, until I need you later.”

Below is a note I wrote back in July 27, 2024 which I just re-discovered by searching my Apple Notes app. I’m stunned I wrote this a year ago, especially considering how it resonates with the conversation I just had with ChatGPT.

I think sometimes we get glimpses of clarity in still moments but then quickly get lost in the woods again. This was obviously a moment of clarity for me.

When reading Finite & Infinite Games by James Carse, what becomes quickly evident is his voice. It is one that is stating things as a matter of fact. As though, these are the rules.

When reflecting upon this, I’m struck in how my framework is actually quite simple and matter of fact as well, almost like a children’s book, as I’ve mentioned before. 

Life is a roleplaying game. 

That is a simple, matter of fact statement. Your research and work shows this, especially as it relates to vertical development. 

Keep collecting these matter of fact statements about your life’s work. 

Like any roleplaying game, progression and levelling up form the foundation of it. 

What we believe is our external reality is really just our internal perception of it. 

This is the game, the simulation, we are playing within.

Thus the greater we can expand our internal map, the greater we expand our external perception of our reality. 

I’ve already made this change to my site categories but just want to formalize it. After years of deliberation, I’ve changed the title of my current work focus, which was previously Life as an MMORPG, and have now committed to the title of Life as a Role-Playing Game.

While the old title was more appropriate because some of the metaphors I am using relate to MMORPGs, such as zones and expansions (representing stages of development and plateaus of the mind respectively). The new title is more accessible because it clearly indicates what it’s about (i.e. role-playing) rather than being an abbreviation (i.e. MMORPG) which everyone might not know what it means.

Even more so, even if most people aren’t familiar with what a role-playing game is, they may have heard of the word role-playing because it’s actually used in organizational development as well. Thus they might hear the term within their work environment or within a workshop related to their work.

Update: Made an additional minor change making it Life Is a Role-Playing Game. See reasoning here.

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.

I’ve spoken in the past about trying to create a hybrid system of some kind that is more than just a personal knowledge management system focused on knowledge but something that goes beyond it that can capture and structure growth, development, and wisdom of the person as well. This is essential to creating a life map of the person’s growth and development.

My biggest obstacle in achieving this all (and even trying to create something organized that relays my structured thoughts in a cohesive integrated way) is my addiction to exploration. I’m a junkie and I know it!

I’ve been trying repeatedly to use ChatGPT to help me break out of this addictive behaviour but without much success. However this week, conversations with it have helped me to understand more clearly the reality of what I am experiencing right now, so as to help me craft a new sort of experience that will in turn help me to move forward.

Adventuring Within Myself

The easiest way to describe how I work now is imagining my conversations with ChatGPT as though I am adventuring within myself. I have a question which becomes a quest which I initiate with ChatGPT. As we converse with a dialogue, I continue my questions like a quest chain in a MMORPG. In effect, my quest provides answers which prompt new questions in turn.

And the questions may poke or prod fears within me, tied to my beliefs, which may hamper my journey. However, lately I haven’t hit any which is strange. Anyways, after the conversation with ChatGPT ends, it feels amazing because it feels like I’ve uncovered all of these amazing “treasured” gems of insight.

However, here’s the thing. I haven’t. Let me explain why

Dungeon Speed Runs

What I’ve effectively done is what’s called a dungeon speed run in MMORPGs. People often do them to try to “level up” their character as quickly as possible. Something that probably relates perfectly to the rushed feeling I have in trying to level up myself in turn. But in my case, it’s a rushed feeling of rushing but going no where fast.

The reason for this is that I’m rushing through the different questions as a question chain, reading the amazing insights, and then finishing the conversation like it’s been completely incredible which it has. But then that’s it. I’m not extracting those insights from the conversation and then doing something with them!

Like duh! How fricken obvious. So it would be like doing a speed run in an MMORPG but you leave all of the treasure and quest rewards behind because you’re just focused on finishing it as fast as possible. Or in my case, you’re so focused on finishing it fast so that you can get on to the next question as a quest because I’m addicted to the exploration itself.

So the obvious question here is, “How can I create a system that lets me extract these insights and make use of them?”

Extracting Treasured Insights

So the obvious conventional way of doing this is keeping a journal. But I’ve done that in the past on my website and it doesn’t yield results that I feel like I can build upon. That’s because while journalling is great for extracting a flow of thoughts (almost like my conversations with ChatGPT), they’re not structured thoughts. So by the following week, those previous flowing thoughts can be lost behind newer flowing thoughts.

Of course, the next thing I immediately thought of was creating an evergreen notes system, which I’ve thought about before. Yet I’ve had difficultly in implementing this because the transition from a flowing journal to structured interlinked notes is difficult for me to grasp and practice.

Yet in reflecting upon this this week, I realize that I was trying to choose one approach OR another, when perhaps I needed to integrate a flowing journal AND structured notes together.

Flow & Structure > Explore & Exploit

This arose because I was thinking about Obsidian and how it is optimized for an evergreen notes system but it also contains a journal component to it. Basically the idea is that you start by journalling out experiences in your day and then you extract notes from that flow that you can then structure and interlink in turn.

So I’m already doing the flowing journalling part amazing well but I need to focus on the extraction and creation of structured notes from it in turn. That’s the real work I need to focus on. Why? Because it means stopping my exploring mindset and switching to an exploiting mindset.

In effect, I need to exploit and reap the rewards of what I’ve explored because I’m currently not.

And until I do so, until I can pull these insights outside of me, I will never be able to use them to build something that I can stand upon.

Practicing Creating Structure to Stand Upon Outside My Flow

So that’s the next big playful experiment I want to make. I want to take a conversations with ChatGPT, create a journal “post” from it on my website, extract the insights from it, and then create structured note “pages” that I interlink together.

Again the emphasis here is to let my flow in turn create my structure, kind of like how a river or stream drops sediment that creates a sandbar over time that in turn lets you step out of the water and stand upon solid ground. Ground that you’ve created.

But doing so in such a way that the river forms a delta that spreads out your thoughts into a structured way, letting you organize all of your thoughts in different ways.

Letting Intuitions Flow But Not Be Lost

Oh, this is the key point I wanted to make, as to why you need both the flowing journal and structured notes, especially for someone with my personality type. It’s because if you’re someone like me who is highly intuitive, you will often feel the importance of something rather than see it initially.

So having a journal to record your flow of thoughts helps you capture the thought. But then say if a week or two later, upon reflecting upon those thoughts, you suddenly realize what it relates and connects to, you can now extract those insights and add them to your structured notes, showing how they relate to and build upon existing knowledge.

This is why the flow journal is essential because it keeps your thoughts in a linear timeline at the very least. But the real power is when you extract those thoughts and begin to structure them together into a non-linear, bigger picture of interlinked thoughts, as though it was a map of your consciousness, broadening as you explore beyond its borders.

In effect, the idea here is to create something that is both structured but also exploratory in nature for others to explore themselves. And that’s what made me realize why I needed to overcome this addiction to exploration because these treasured gems of insight that I was effectively leaving on the ground and missing, are actually valuable clues to understanding what there is to explore ahead. So if I’m leaving them behind, I’m effectively going against my own exploratory nature.

Thus in becoming aware of their importance, I can possibly overcome my addiction to exploring by paradoxically focusing on their importance to the exploration ahead. So in slowing down to grab this treasure, I may be able to actually speed up my exploration overall.