Simulated Real Life

“A master programmer passed a novice programmer one day. The master noted the novice’s preoccupation with a hand-held computer game. “Excuse me”, he said, “may I examine it?”

The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the master. “I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium and Hard”, said the master. “Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human.”

“Pray, great master”, implored the novice, “how does one find this mysterious setting?”

The master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it under foot. And suddenly the novice was enlightened.” –The Tao of Programming, Geoffrey James

This is how the master programmer talks about video games. Probably if he could find me spending so much time in a video game, he would crush my computer under his feet, too! Of course, the master programmer does not completely reject video games (“…[The Tao] is even in a video game,” he says somewhere else), but anyhow I know I should do something about it since I have been spending much of my spare time playing The Sims 2 in the last few days. I have so much other things to do, and I plan to do half a dozen of them from noon to night, then at midnight I find that I have done almost nothing but guiding my sims through their lives for a few days! The interesting point is that it’s somehow like the game the master programmer explained, “where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human”. Yes. The Sims is not an ordinary game. It’s “real life” simulated. I remember what some Dark Throne players say, “RL is more important that DT!” (that is, real life is more important than playing Dark Throne). Now I think I should say to myself, “RRL is more important than SRL!” (Real real life is more important than simulated real life.)