Is This Real Life or Is This Just Fantasy?

Japanese RPGs may arguably be my favorite genre of video games. Final Fantasy 7 was probably my first real introduction into the genre. After that, I played through Legend of Dragoon and then Final Fantasy 8 and so on and so on.

Games like these had a sense of scale, adventure and memorable characters. They had engrossing stories and were really well thought out.

But I always wondered, maybe RPG stories, characters and strategies have parallels in real life. I had an epiphany a few weeks ago that has been on my mind. Take leveling up, for example. We have the same thing in the corporate life. Every year there is a performance review and depending on how much experience you get, you can essentially "level up" by getting promoted. In the tech field, it's even literally defined by numbers too. Engineer I becomes Engineer II, for example. When you "level up," you obtain more income and essentially gain access to new paths in the company as well. P

When I end up getting sent to other states to get trained, it is kind of like learning a new spell. After the training is over, I always want to go try it out to see if it is useful for me or not. It's the same feeling I get when learning new spells in a game. I always want to try it out to see how much more damage it does and how cool it looks.

Working as an engineer requires you to not only learn and develop new skills but also form relationships with other people to get projects done. Imagine a core group meeting as your party. You have certain people with different skills that, as a whole, will complete the project. If you think as project as dungeons, you can probably see that different projects would require a different make up of specialties. In my line of work, projects require different jobs to complete.


But each project is like an adventure. You start with a small party and as the scope of the project grows, your team grows with new "characters" with different personalities. And just like any video game, there are characters your like and characters you don't like. But when you plan right, and utilize the right strategy, you can do some major damage! But when planning goes badly, well, timelines get set back and the damage isn't so great anymore.

Side-quests may also appear in small menial tasks (that can also grow to be full fledged quests). And those can be just as annoying or intriguing as video game versions. It's funny when I hear gamers complain about side quests being too much of a collect-a-thon or too grind-y when I see the same parallels in real life. I know people who have jobs where they do the same thing every morning; grinding away at life.

I'm only trying to draw parallels. And I guess I have a bit of an imagination. I mean, real life isn't a game to play around with and the consequences of actions don't just disappear after you head home. The effects of actions persist from day to day. There's not turn off button or pause. It keeps going. But sometimes I feel like people become jaded with how their life is turning out. Sometimes I see people become complacent without wanting to improve or "level up" so to speak. But what's the point in that? Why not keep climbing higher?

Just my imagination, I guess....