Wednesday, April 10, 2013

The Gamer's Dilemma

Imagine this: Your house destroyed, one of your family members killed and you are hunted because you have an ability that others deem as "dangerous". With the rest of your family members, your brother, your mum and yourself, you travel across the sea to where your mum used to live, got hired by a gang of mercenaries due to your "dangerous" ability and for the better part of a year was able to create a place to lay low and settle down as you pay your debts.

In order to hide your true self, you try to enroll yourself in an expedition in the hopes that the treasure you find will make you go up in the world, thus allowing you to hide your true nature. In order to get the capital needed for the expedition you went through all sorts of funny, hilarious and dangerous odd jobs including being hired as a bodyguard, search missing items and unfold a conspiracy among the authorities. During your journey for capital, you stumble across a few individuals who wanted to also change there fortune as well, and thus joined in your company for all the glory, adventures and gold that was worth.

To make it a story, the jobs you undertook made you involved with some really famous (and dangerous) people as your reputation as someone who gets the job done is revealed.

With the determination of getting the capital you wanted in order to support your family and protect your own identity, you finally muster enough capital to go forth with the expedition. During the expedition you found unfathomable treasures and artifacts that you believed people would pay a huge fortune to get there hands on it. Eventually, the expedition was a success and so you literally "moved up" in the world by buying yourself a mansion and living among the elites. Life is good.

Even so, you still wouldn't put down any jobs that are worth gold and is more than happy to make more gold if the opportunity arises.

As you live in the life of luxury and adventure, the authorities calls you "by name" because they have a problem which they believe only YOU can solve. It seems that, due to the success of your past jobs, you have been seen as trustworthy to handle jobs that are deem as "important", jobs that may tip the balance of power in your residence.

Eventually, while trying to solve these problems, which in some way you yourself may have created due to your greed for gold, a power struggle arose and in order to save your new home and the wealth you have accumulated, you venture into this power struggle and took down the person responsible for creating this chaos. The country now considers you their "Hero".

As time passes, and the country is being rebuild after the turmoil, different factions in the political arena starts to fight in order to move on after that devastating tragedy. Each faction has rights and wrongs, each one makes good arguments, thus you, as the hero and (as everyone would put it) most influential person in the country, they ask you for guidance and to support their own faction. You choose to be neutral in this conflict, thinking what could such political battle really do the life you have now.

Suddenly one day, chaos broke between the two factions, an ex-member of one of the factions has murdered a public figure of the country because he believed it was the only way to end this conflict. And thus it turned into an all-out war. Having to choose one faction over the other due to some other interest than gold, you took down the other faction.

Even with your old companions help, your efforts seem in vain as each faction destroys one another. It was then revealed, that whatever artifact you had excavated during your earlier expedition was the source of this madness! It turned one of the leaders of one of the factions into a crazy psychopath that is fanatical with the ideas of her own faction. You destroyed her, and to ensure your safety and the people you cared about, you ran away from that country.

Even so, the war between the two factions still continues. It seems that in your pursuit of happiness and security, you have literally "Changed the World".

*                           *                           *

This is a story I took out from a game I played (Surprise Surprise!), one that made me think and wonder.
How in the world some "out-of-nowhere-dude" did all this?

and so I tried playing it again (to the disappointment of my parents), with different character choices, and what do you know? If I stick with a particular type of choice, the effects will be more detrimental, but if I continue to change my type of choices (like choices between gold or glory) then the impact will be lessen.

The reason why this character was able to to accomplish what he wanted and eventually caused what happened was due to the choices he made.

The idea was actually quite simple, stick with a type of choice that would eventually define you. Put enough pressure on the choice and eventually people will start noticing. Due to that character of yours, base on the choice you made, people believed you were "the best suited" for the job. Sticking long enough with such choices, eventually it will be your character that makes that sudden push and then "change the world".

In simple terms it's called: Passion.

This passion with enough determination can shift mountains.

but passion can only be realized with belief. A belief that in turn defines our choices and actions. Stick with them long enough and you create passion.

Almost everyone knows this, but we are too afraid to follow it. The society right now chooses their actions not base on what they believe in, but what the norms are.

We always wished that our lives was like in the games, and yet we are too afraid of making those choices that would develop our character. This is the Gamer's Dilemma.

We have to move out from this dilemma and make those choices that we really believe in. because the only way, you want to get out of this cycle of norms and NPCs is through not just by playing games, but making your life like a game, literally.

Stop wishing your life was like a game, if you could have made those choices in the game, then what is there to be afraid of in making those choices in real life? You need to bring that virtual reality into the real reality.
Only then will you be able to achieve something in this world