The Ultimate Role-Playing Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Game

I was going to use an idea like this for a conclusion to an essay I was writing for Pathway, but since I completely changed what I was going to write about, I'll share this thought here instead: Life is the ultimate role-playing adventure game. This thought came to me as I considered that I was raised with traits that made me a natural Paladin. My mom raised me to be helpful and chivalrous, Scouting fostered my spirit of adventure, and the Church helped me become a soldier of God.

As I was writing about how I had been born to be a Paladin, I had to acknowledge that not all people are born into as fortunate circumstances as I was. For them, I included that, no matter what their background, they could choose their own path. I had been thinking that life was a role-playing game, because of the many roles people play in life, but it's also a game in which you can choose your own adventure. You choose what paths you take, what skills you develop, and what you ultimately become. You can even, to a certain extent, choose what the object of the game is by choosing what goals to pursue.

Life is an open-world sandbox game. We can explore, pick up objects, move things, and change the world. We can interact with everyone and everything. There are no limits, no invisible walls holding us back. This world and our own lives are what we make of them. It's incredible how much freedom and potential we have.

Thinking about the world this way makes me feel excited to be alive. I think I've blogged before about Gamification, a concept by which you make something more fun and interesting by thinking of it like a game. Mary Poppins gamified the cleaning of Jane and Micheal Banks' room. I just gamified life itself, and it puts a very interesting perspective on how I live my life. If life is an adventure game, with role-playing, character-building, and an ultimate quest to complete, I don't want to spend all my time in this world playing mini-games that don't help me make progress toward my ultimate goal. I want to spend my time in activities that help me fulfill the purpose of life, that make me a better and a more prosperous person. Mini-games are fun, but there's a much bigger game to play right now, and I'm really excited to be a part of it.