Life as a video game: simulation theory gains ground online

688,000 people play at life being a video game

New year, new patch. On r/outside, a subreddit with 688,000 subscribers, the holidays are a server update and New Year's resolutions are side quests. There, the idea that reality is a video game is taken to its extreme: work is grinding, illness is debuffs, and death is game over. What's interesting is not the metaphor, which anyone with a controller has thought about at some point, but the next step: if we are capable of creating such immersive simulations, who's to say we aren't ourselves the content of one?

From metaphor to suspicion

The argument, repeated in tech circles, gains strength when combined with quantum physics and consciousness. It points out that humans have created reality in their own image in video games; applying the reverse logic, someone must have programmed ours. And if someone programmed it, someone is playing it. The answers about the programmer's identity range from a single, fragmented consciousness to a dimension where infinite souls wait their turn to inhabit earthly bodies.

The comparison with video games doesn't stay on the surface. Some point out that the rules of life already had a game-like structure before video games existed: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, you don't advance to the next level without meeting certain requirements, and great empires fall when the alliance that made them invincible breaks, as with a final boss. The difference is that we now have precise vocabulary to name it.

Simulation or energy farm

Not everyone sees it as an innocent game. One school of thought holds that the simulation is not entertainment but a trap: an energy farm where the players are the livestock. This reading, with gnostic echoes, draws on the existence of suffering and on the fact that the character has no real choice. Against the new age idea that "we come here to learn," there stands the suspicion that we are merely batteries. The promise of evolution would be the biggest scam to keep us complacent.

The discussion then borders on psychology. Game Transfer Phenomena is mentioned, a concept described by Angelica Ortiz de Gortari, which documents how video game elements seep into real perception after intense sessions. Applying that lens to life produces depersonalization, some admit, although for others it is a way of taking the edge off what happens.

A script with precedents

The idea has pedigree. Back in 1995, Secret of Evermore antiestéticatured a group of scientists trapped in their own creation. And some turned to The Twelve Tasks of Asterix as a resistance manual: the hero who understands the rules of the game and learns to cheat, going from being manipulated into reacting to being an actor.

The community, moreover, keeps growing. Every New Year is awaited like a patch, with the same mix of curiosity and skepticism. If everything is a game, someone will have to explain how you win. Or, worse still, who is behind the controller.