Are We Living In A Video Game?

These days video games are so good. Not just visually but also how intelligent they have become. I like the open world games where the characters we control seems to be capable of doing anything we can think of. Also, this is not the limit. With time the gaming technology will only get better enabling the player to have more realistic experience.

At this point I must say that I don’t fully understand how a video game works. But based on what I’ve observed I know how it is different from the movies; animated or live action. This is what I’ll need to introduce my thoughts on the question I asked in the title.

I have created a fictional universe (Rexal World) to make sense of our reality. The logic, I give, behind this universe is that it’s like a three dimensional pre-recorded movie. So if a conscious being wishes to live a particular life, they take that character and live that life from their perspective, like an actor does in a movie.

Granted, by that logic all the life events are fixed. Means we don’t have the freedom of choices. But that is not a problem. The life plan is drawn so instinctively that it would feel that we are making the choices with our free will even though we aren’t. This one approach.

Another way to look at our life is like it’s a video game. In that case none of the events are set in stone. A basic template is ready where the world and characters are created. Now it’s for us to decide where we take our lives. This ensures us to have complete control on what we do. (I am not talking about our bodily functions, they’ll stay on auto mode). This is good but it has a drawback.

When a storyteller creates a story, they plan a complete character arc one has to go through. So if I am born as a character then they will see me grow old and do meaningful things until my story is complete. But with the video game approach everything is unpredictable. Since I make my own future, one wrong step and I will die prematurely without completing my story arc. That’s a scary thought.

Now, having proposed both the ideas, I think I can definitively say that we don’t know if any of the two approaches are true. So it’s for you to decide. What do you think our universe is like… a movie or a game?

I would prefer somewhere in the middle. Like our life is pre-planned but still we have the free will to make minor decisions and reach the next fixed point of the story using any of the many paths of our choosing. If I take a wrong turn at any point I will die but return to the last saved point and continue with my life not knowing that I died. This is same like the video games we play these days.