The Ultimate Role-Playing Game. Wanna Play?

(Note: I posted this on an old blog many years ago and I want to warn you that I got a lot of negative feedback on it. However, I still like the concept because just consider this for a moment. What if your life really could be an adventure?)

I was reading an article on the Myers-Briggs Personality Test results and I thought of my counseling model and how everybody fulfills certain important roles.

Huh! I thought to myself, life is nothing but a big role-playing game!

PARADIGM SHIFT

I suddenly had a vision of you, gentle reader, sitting around a gaming table filled with the brick-a-brac of role-playing games: dice, pencils, paper, rule-books, little figurines, maps. I was there too along with all your friends. The Game Master (GM) sat in shadows.

We had played every RPG in existence. We had plumbed deep space, deep dungeons, and our minds. We were nothing but jaded players who had wore out all the novelty and we longed for the time when we first thought of the concept with the rush of excitement, the camaraderie, the unfettered rush of our creativity.

Now we sit in the gloom of the gaming room, but suddenly the GM makes us an offer of another game, a different game, one suitable only for an experienced player like you and me.

A tiny, nondescript box, smaller than your hand, is slid to you across the table. It is unmarked except for a small yellow button in its middle. To push it, the GM explains, is to enter the most creative role-playing game in the universe, but once the button is pushed, you must play the game to its completion. The rules are both simple and complex, but the game is in a free-form style. There is still a GM, but now it will be more up to you to decide in far more detail how you will live in the game. A character will be designed for you, but once the game starts, you have the freedom to do whatever you wish within the parameters of the simple and sane game rules. "And," the GM says, "the game is going to give you challenges that will make the past ones I've given you look like children's playground stuff."

Do you dare push the little button? If so, read on.

Congratulations, bold player.

You push the button and you find yourself within the game, sitting at the very computer in front of your computer, sitting in this body you now occupy, reading these very words on the screen before you with all the memories, experience, talents, and abilities you now have. You may not have liked the way you were rolled out (who has ever rolled out a perfect character?), but you have some ability to change those statistics.

Welcome to the game which is already in progress. You know the rules.

Time to play.

What's your first move?