We’re finally at the end of this unusual 2020. It’s been a year where most of us had plenty of time to take a long look at ourselves, and realize how dull our lives are, or even were before the pandemic came. That’s what happened to me, at least. And I want to change that. If you want too, then let me tell you a little story before we move on to 2021.
Have you ever played life simulation videogames? You know, like the entire The Sims franchise (except The Sims 4, because EA Games ruins everything)? I did, and still do, for the same reason why I enjoyed playing D&D: I love to play out scenarios I would never be able to experience in real life. But I digress.
Half a year ago, during the first lockdown, I got interested in a life-sim app called BitLife (both available on Android and Apple devices, if you wanna check it out). In this game, the player lives their virtual life one year at a time, carrying out one action per turn, reacting to random events and trying to live the most impressive existence possible. To get a feel of the game I watched a few playthroughs on YouTube, where people tried to pull off various peculiar life paths: becoming pop stars, kings, crime lords, gold diggers… I watched so many of them that, when I actually started playing it myself, I tried something I’d never seen on any other let’s play: carrying out the dullest life possible.
My alter ego—we’ll call him Jack Smith—attended business school and began working for an insurance company. He never changed jobs after that. He married, tried to have children but, as it turns out, he never made it. In their forties, Jack and his wife adopted a girl and finally achieved their dream of becoming a complete family.
Time passed. Jack retired at the age of sixty-five. Nothing noteworthy happened until ten years later, when his daughter died in a terrorist attack. Five years from then, his wife passed away, too, causing Jack to fall in the deep, dark pit of depression.
That’s when I decided to carry out the first and only independent choice in the session: I made Jack leave the States and migrate to Indonesia at the age of eighty-one. Depression haunted him for years, but he survived, doing exercise and generally carrying out a healthy lifestyle. He found another partner at the age of ninety-two. The two of them even agreed to a three-way with another woman (the game’s randomly generated events are pretty wild… but life isn’t less than that).
When Jack died at the amazing age of one hundred and ten years, I sat back, staring at the wall in front of me for a few seconds. I had tried to live a dull life, but in the end I felt like I’d come up with an authentic one.
I think the random events played a huge role in that. Jack’s inability to have a baby, his daughter’s sudden death, the unusual sexual experience… all these were dabs of color in his otherwise gray existence. “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” John Lennon said, and this game was just the demonstration of that. As much as we steer our lives towards the destination we want (success, money, popularity), the world around us always changes; and what really makes us extraordinary is our ability to face challenges head on and grow because of them.
Whether or not we’ll make the right choice next year, this 2020 we’ve all been extraordinary. Some of us have endured grief, one way or another, while others have struggled with isolation and boredom. Most—maybe all of us—have learned a lot. I know I have, for one thing.
Let’s hope things will get better next year, and even if they won’t, they will be the year after that. Either way, in 2021 I will still be here, sitting on this virtual beach, waiting for you net-surfers to stop by.
See you in January, scrap-folks!
John Forcolin