Video Game Feature: 5 Video Game Mechanics In Real Life

Published May 23, 2016

As gamers, we trained ourselves to distinguish between videogames and real life. Real life is by most accounts pretty boring and there’s all kinds of “laws” and “ethics” involved in everything we do and unlike videogames, what we do is permanent. But what if there was some sort of cataclysmic event that for some reason merged the two worlds together? What would our world look like if it seemed like we were living in a videogame? I’m not talking about something like Spy Kids 3-D where everything looks like some knock-off FPS or something like Pixels where everything has the stink of Adam Sandler to it, but rather a life with videogame mechanics.

Let’s look at 5 mechanics that made the quantum leap to the real world.

Respawning

Death, like taxes and Donald Trump talking about his penis, is inevitable. We will all shed this mortal coil at one point or another. Some of us will die in spectacular fashion such as in a fiery car crash, bungie jumping into a crashing airplane or having a heart attack while getting a lapdance from Kate Upton. Conversely, most of us will probably just die of something stupid and boring such as cancer, heart disease or old age. But wouldn’t life be a little more fun if we had the ability to respawn after we die? Of course, there’s a lot of logistics to consider first.

The first question is, where will we respawn? Will you respawn as you’re coming out of your mother’s womb (great place by the way, 5 stars) and experience a trauma like no other? No, that would be a little too cruel. Rather we can take a page from Minecraft and say that your respawn point is your bed, or wherever you fell asleep. You will die and then pull an Edge of Tomorrow and just wake up again that morning. Pretty convenient huh? Unless you die in your sleep, then you’re stuck in an eternal nap. What, I didn’t say this new game world is fair. Also, if you die of old age, it’s permadeath, sorry.

Obviously there needs to be some sort of punishment to respawning otherwise we will just do it all the time with reckless abandon. Since you’re waking up and retaining all your memories, you can possibly shape your life like you want to. But like The Witcher 3 on the hardest difficulty, life is cruel. So each time you respawn, 25% of your total income is retracted, no matter what form it is in. Got R100 in your wallet? You got R75 now. Got 200 Bitcoin and you’re literally almost set for life? You got 150 now. So while dying isn’t that scary anymore and you can go out there and do some risky stuff, your ass will get progressively more broke the more you die.

Death is a tax now.

Leveling

Leveling up us one of the biggest pulls of any RPG. We seem to enjoy watching small increments of numbers go up and fill a bar until an even smaller number goes up until we have the best numbers we can get. Within this MMO of life, how would leveling work? Well, everything you do will have a leveling bar that you can see in the corner of your eye. Almost like Google Glass that doesn’t make you look like a prick. Mundane tasks will have a sort of Sims-like approach so when you make that grilled cheese sandwich, you will get points in your cooking skill and when you hit the next level, you will magically know how to make pasta.

You will get levels for anything from typing, driving, cleaning, playing games, playing instruments and so on. It’s massively convenient because now you can know conclusively if you suck at something and everyone was just too afraid to tell you before. Productivity will go up tenfold because we will be chasing those sweet sweet levels every day until we can become the very best. Stuck in traffic? No problem, because you’ll be grinding out your driving skill. Have to write an essay you don’t care about? Your writing skill is going up with every word you type and maybe that can finally teach people how to use goddamn apostrophes correctly.

An interesting side-effect of this is that we also get a stats page filled with a count of all the stuff you did throughout your life. Now you can see just how many times you spent those lonely nights with yourself and a bottle of lotion and/or a long cylindrical device. You might be ashamed or you might be proud, depending on your perspective.

Dark Souls Death Spots

Some critics would say that life is the Dark Souls of existence. But how would our new videogame world look if it took some pages from Dark Souls? A convenient little mechanic in Dark Souls is how you can see where another player has died by a blood stain on the floor. You press a button on it and it shows a phantom of the player meeting their end. In the real world, we will see red spots of people that have died and we can interact with and see how they’ve met their maker. Of course, this doesn’t include everyone that has died in the history of the world because then the world would look like that one essay I wrote in high school while being hungover. It has a 5 year limit on it, so everyone that died in the past 5 years will have a little red spot.

People might then slow the hell down on highways when they see the amount of red spots littering the road. Unfortunately, hospitals will have to cover the spots up with some sheets or something because nobody wants to see a bunch of people horribly die when you’re in there for the burn wounds you got from trying to increase your cooking skill too much. It can also save a lot of lives, especially if there’s a high concentration of red spots in a dark cavern that has “free candy” and an arrow sprayed in its direction.

Dialogue Options

If this quantum catastrophe happened right now, my social level might be in the negatives. Good old social anxiety and a deflated sense of self worth has made me incapable of talking to other human beings correctly. I often dreamed of having a dialogue wheel like in Mass Effect where my responses are curated and fit the situation rather than me standing there like an idiot and trying to think of something else to talk about than the weather. So this is exactly what happens in our hypothetical game world. Whenever you talk to someone and they end their sentence, time will slow down and a radial menu will appear with all of your options in one place.

I say “time slows down” for a reason because many a time in a game with dialogue options, my character will just stand there blankly staring at another person without moving like they just took a massive accidental dump and don’t want to admit it. Of course, people in the real world won’t have the patience for that and will either think you’re crazy or really into staring contests. With that in mind, your dialogue options will have responses that take the context in mind and make you not sound like you’ve been living under a tree for the past decade. Rejoice, fellow social outcasts.

Dialogue options will also have morality associated with them so you can see when you’re being an asshole or not. Oh, each time you take the evil option, you start sprouting horns and smelling like last year’s sewage.

So don’t be an asshole.

Tutorials

Let’s be honest, life is hard. We are meandering aimlessly on this big blue marble trying to figure out just what the hell we are supposed to do. If you think other people know what they’re doing, you’re very wrong. Some of us are just better at not messing up at every opportunity. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a little assistance like we get at the start of games. Press this button to jump, interact with this to get stuff and so on. A tutorial for our life would be more than welcome through those times when we are completely clueless of what we are supposed to do.

In our case, we will get little heads up displays that indicate to us the correct course of action when doing something new. It will certainly help the nervous virgins out there for sure. Learning to drive would become pretty simple as well as figuring out what the hell you’re supposed to do in school and work. Think of it as a little helping hand as you wade through this chaotic human existence.

Press F to not mess up.

Conclusion

This is but a few game mechanics that would be pretty dope in real life. Imagine we could fast travel, or have quest markers and waypoints to tell us what we were supposed to do. The possibilities are endless. Leave your own ideas in the comments.

The following two tabs change content below. - Bio

Latest Posts

MG Thabo

Guest Contributor

Marko has played way too many games, listened to way too many metal albums and is probably taller than you. He is a qualified language and communication practitioner and likes to write about the good things in gaming.