Gaming is one of the most popular hobbies and leisure activities in the world — and in the last few years, the number of people who regularly spend time playing video games and getting immersed in virtual worlds seems to have been rising exponentially.
It’s not hard to see why gaming is so popular. For one thing, it’s an interactive and engaging form of leisure activity that puts you far more in the “driver’s seat” than more passive activities such as watching TV, or even reading a novel.
For another thing, gaming can be an avenue to exploring great narratives, stories, and motifs that take you above and beyond the preoccupations and experiences of your everyday life, and help you to experience a deep sense of adventure.
Obviously, games are also really fun and have the potential to be challenging, competitive, cooperative, or all of the above — depending on what you’re in the mood for.
But although there are a lot of things that make gaming a really engaging and fun pastime, it’s arguable that gaming is the kind of thing that is best used as a way of adding to and enriching your overall quality of life, as opposed to becoming a form of escapism from whatever you find frustrating, irritating, or difficult about everyday life.
Instead of losing yourself in the gaming world, dipping in, having a great time, and then applying some of the same principles that make gaming so engaging, to your real world life, can be deeply empowering.
Here are just a few tips to help you to turn your life into a video game, so that the adventure doesn’t have to end when you step away from the screen.
Set yourself your own bold quests and missions, in the form of exciting goals
One of the most powerful and compelling things about video games, by and large, is the fact that — at their best — they offer you rich and engaging quests and missions to invest yourself in pursuing and accomplishing.
The Witcher 3 is one example of a hugely popular game of recent years, which gained so much of its dedicated cult following due to the fact that it was loaded with dynamic side quests which seemed genuinely rich and impactful, and which contained characters that seemed truly fleshed out.
For this reason, in large part, players of the game found themselves genuinely excited and motivated to step into the role of Geralt of Rivia — and his adventures seemed meaningful and impactful, above and beyond those of the protagonists of various other games, films and so on.
When games do drop the ball on quest and mission development, and just go for the most bland and by-the-numbers fetch quests and the like, they very often attract some fairly heavy criticism for that fact.
But even if the quests and missions you’ve pursuing in a game are fairly mundane, there’s still something engaging and rewarding about accomplishing those missions and quests.
To replicate this in your own life — in a way that will have the most significant overall impact — create your own “Quest Log,” either using a notebook or a good to-do list app, and set yourself some exciting and meaningful goals that you will feel genuinely motivated to pursue and achieve.
Of course, not all of your goals need to be big life plans that are supposed to unfold over the course of the next couple of years. You can also include “side quests” that help to give you a small sense of fulfilment in their own right. Things like tidying up the house or getting your car washed.
Think of some attributes that you want to level up in your life, and then get started
Are you very happy with your personal style and presentation in life, or would you ideally want to add something like a Panerai collection watch to your wardrobe?
Do you want to learn an instrument, or to become more skilled at an instrument you already play?
A big part of the sense of progression that video games offer — and that we all tend to find so appealing — is connected to the development of different characteristics and skills. This is especially the case in various RPGs, but more and more games outside of the traditional RPG mould now include skill and attribute development mechanisms.
In your own real, day-to-day life, think of the attributes that you have but want to develop — and the ones that you don’t yet have but want to gain — and then get started on developing them.
You could use a written log to track how much you think you’ve progressed in each area, and you can also opt for certain activities and pastimes that track development and progression with their own internal systems — such as the belts that you get for grading up in a martial art.
Making your life into a video game, so to speak, obviously involves you treating yourself as the character you are trying to develop and progress through the great story and adventure that’s busy unfolding.
Go travelling and explore
Many video games have great exploration features built in, and this naturally helps to resonate with the innate desire to see new places, and indulge in a bit of wanderlust, that most of us have.
But for all of the great and beautiful locales to be found in video games, there are even more to be found in real life — it’s just that they’re of a different type.
By getting out, travelling, and exploring more in your own life, you’ll open yourself to more of the mystery and magic of the world at large, and will likely gain plenty of experiences and insights that you wouldn’t have come across if you’d just stayed in your home town perpetually.
Create a bucket list of experiences to pursue and tick off
Video games frequently do a great job of introducing elements of novelty — both through their plots and stories, and also through the gameplay mechanisms that they employ.
When playing a great game, you’re likely to have the sensation that you’re accumulating new experiences, achieving new things, and are deepening your sense of experience along the way — even if those things are only, or at least primarily, happening in the world of the game.
Day-to-day life can often feel pretty mundane, as we fall into the same routines and do more or less the same things, over and over again — like engaging in the same morning routine from one day to the next, followed by the same commute, and so on.
But life doesn’t have to be completely repetitive. You can create your own “bucket list” of life experiences that you want to have at some point, and you can then look for opportunities, on a regular basis, to pursue and “tick off” those experiences.
This simple change alone can add a lot of adventure and excitement to your life, and can help you to dive into an existence that seems “larger than life.” One that involves regularly stepping outside of your comfort zone and challenging yourself, seeing new places and meeting new people, finding yourself doing things that you previously never thought you’d be capable of, and more.
Your own bucket list — or life list — can include just about anything, ranging from singing karaoke, to skydiving, to seeing the pyramids in Egypt, to writing and publishing a novel.
The key thing is that these experiences should be the sorts of things that you find genuinely exciting and interesting, and that you want to have at some point in your life.
