Real life as a Role Playing Game

Following on the heels of Ikea as a fully immersive, 3D environmental adventure that allows you to role-play the character of someone who gives a shit about home furnishings comes the notion of Weightwatchers as a Dungeons and Dragons-style Role Playing Game:

As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers’ points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you’ve used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up — by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren’t apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I’ll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat!

Even the Weight Watchers web tool is amazingly gamelike. It has the poke-around-and-see-what-happens elegance you see in really good RPG game screens. Accidentally snack on a candy bar and ruin your meal plan for the day? No worries: Just go into the database and see what spells — whoops, I mean foods — you can still use with your remaining points.

And those 35 extra points you get every week? They’re like a special buff or potion — a last-ditch save when you’re on the ropes.

From Wired. Hat-tip to Boing Boing.

In Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” society has evolved so that brains are wirelessly connected to the web and humans have virtual head-up displays through which they can interact while also being immersed in the real world — a multitasker’s wet dream but problematic for those of us who relish mindfulness. In that world people accumulate “Whuffie,” which is the author’s term for kudos points awarded by other people. Life has become a kind of RPG in which people’s actions are voted upon in much the same way that Digg posts and comments get voted up or down. Except that it’s your entire reputation that has become quantified.

All of this reminds me of the Budhist ideas of karma and merit, where actions invisibly accumulate to influence our future. I guess that makes the Wheel of Life into the original RPG.

Comments are closed.