What Does it Mean if We Look at Life as a Game?

It seems to have become something of a commonplace over the years to draw an analogy between life and a poorly designed video game. The lists of problematic features of said game typically mention such things as: the lack of a satisfactory tutorial, the fact that you don't get to design your character or choose your difficulty setting (with the randomness often massively and painfully disadvantageous), the abundance of minigames that are both mandatory and extremely dull (e.g. school, work, chores), the lack of a pause or save feature, and the player's getting only one life without reset being an option--with all this just for a start. (After all that come the incessant and frequently unwelcome updates, the profoundly unfair leveling system, the "pay-to-win" terms . . . and the lack of cheat codes for surmounting these innumerable annoyances.)

All this, of course, has mostly been a matter of humorous or ironic remark, but it seems worth remembering when we see yet another of those pieces about how young people are playing video games rather than working that the (exaggerated but still real) preference for video games is not just a matter of games getting more satisfying--but arguably the sense that the "game of life," bad enough as games go to begin with, has been getting worse, with the tutorial still less satisfactory, the difficulty setting ever harder, the leveling system less fair.

Indeed, if it does not make for quite so catchy a sound bite, the real story is far, far bigger--and in fact I found myself recently taking up a bit of it here.