Is It All Just A Game? - A Fight Against Boredom

One of the first things we ever learn to do is play. Like all animals, human beings seem born with a thirst for challenge, an urge to compete. As our world becomes increasingly divorced from nature, the need is perhaps even greater than ever for activities which hone the senses, gird the loins, and stir the adrenaline.

Probably the first games were in training for the hunt and for war, often deadly serious contests for position in the tribe. Developing skills in the absence of actual danger is part of what makes our species so successful in maintaining low mortality rates. This is reflected in modern recreational habits; from gridiron to X-Box, the tribal imperative to victory lives on at every level of the culture.

It doesn’t seem to matter who the opponent is, though for some reason the overwhelming preference is to face a difficult one. Perhaps the play is more interesting; perhaps the satisfaction greater. A foe easily defeated confers no glory. And even when the victory is over a computer, the game itself, the honor is empty if too easily won.

The urge to triumph is the essence of human motivation. Hardly any activity is free of it. The same biology that rewards for finding food makes us rosy bright at winning that trophy or electronic badge.

It’s the accomplishment that matters. In today’s world, it can be nearly impossible to feel like life has any meaning. Most people do something they don’t care about for someone they don’t like, all day long, for three or four decades before being consigned to the porch permanently for lemonade-sipping.

The rest of the time, it seems many of us would rather do nothing quite so much as win…at a game of our choosing, to which we can devote as much of our time as we choose. The kind of game we choose says volumes about our personality. Some choose vigorous one-on-one sports like racquetball, while another type takes to team sports all the way to arthritis.

In the virtual world, gamers have been the beneficiaries of some of the most creative technological innovation of the rapid-fire recent explosion of pixels. Since the first arcade games appeared in the late seventies, the drive for more realistic virtual contests has been backed by some of the deepest corporate pockets on Earth. The designers, of course, are game-addicted geniuses who find that building the perfect mousetrap is a greater challenge than playing someone else’s diversion.

The end result of this is an increasingly larger class of folks who more or less literally live in a game. Advanced RPG’s like the Sims and Second Life offer a virtual world complete with drama, characters, and, the latest hot realistic detail, the mundane chores of daily life. We’ve come full circle. As industry becomes more robotized and human labor more obsolete, we may eventually find ourselves a nation of unemployed workers who while away the day playing in a virtual factory for points.

IC endorses Kel who is on a crusade to fight boredom. To kill some time when she's bored she heads to The Boredom Killer