Leveling up or wearing down?

I spent three hours playing Destiny today. It wasn't exciting, or all that interesting; I spent the entire time flying around the same small map, shooting low level Fallen, farming Helium Filaments. Destiny being like every other MMO out there, requires you to spend a lot of time looking for randomly dropped junk to make your weapons and armor better. Which is fine; I didn't buy the game expecting anything less. The fact is, I would be extremely disappointed if I didn't have to waste precious hours upgrading my stuff. Item farming is all a part of the MMO experience, and a mighty step in the goal of leveling up.

I need them. All of them!

We all want to level up. I certainly do.

In a way, I totally understand how some people can withdraw from the world at large, hide in their parents basements well into their 40's, and play video games all day. The thing about video games is, unlike the real world, they have rules. There's a logical progression in a game that's both comforting and oddly therapeutic. That's not to say that video games aren't challenging, or even unfair-- I'm looking at you Ghouls N Ghosts.

"I fight in my underwear because apparently my armor is made of tinfoil."

But video games follow  a certain line of reasoning. In the game world, all of the tedious minutiae and hours of efforts eventually bear fruit. In many games, that sweet, succulent fruit takes the form of level increases.

The formula goes something like this: you spend way too many hours of your rapidly dwindling free time running around killing monsters, picking herbs, and skinning randomly spawning creatures. After you do this enough time, a bright aura not unlike the beauty of a starry night illuminates you, and you find yourself better than you were before. We in the geek culture like to call this leveling up.

If leveling up was a food.

In my experience, my desire to level up is the only thing that the real world and video games share in common. Unfortunately, the paths to that elusive goal diverge sharply. The game has clear, simple rules: Do stuff, gain levels. Easy.

Gaining levels in actual life doesn't work that way, alas. Oh, we are told it does from an early age. Go to school, study hard, get a job, work even harder, and you'll gain epic levels-- the muggles call it "The American Dream" or some such rubbish.

However, as should be evident by anyone who isn't a trust fund baby or a Kardashian, hard work doesn't always equal leveling up and getting ahead. Depressingly more often than not, hard work translates into barely staying afloat. Doggy paddle through the muck, earn enough to pay your rent and bills, and hopefully have some left over for a wee bit of fun.

 I followed all of the rules (the lies) I was told as a youth. I did fairly well in high school, then went off to college, because that's what was supposed to lead to a good job. And yet, after years of school and even more working for a living, what have I to show for it? Certainly not that sweet +3 Longsword or the Cloak of Displacement I've been eyeing since forever. No, I remain a low level worker drone, with nothing in sight but more of the same for the next thirty or forty years, after which I'll retire worn down and used up.

Unlike in a video game, my efforts don't level me up so much as wear me down. I'm thirty two years old, close to thirty three, and while I'm certainly not old yet, I'm beginning to feel like it; I wake up groggy and exhausted, my joints creaking in protest as I stiffly clamber out of bed. There are all sorts of little pops and snaps as I stretch. My stamina bar never seems to hit its peak; it starts out half full, and steadily lowers as the day drags on, until finally I make it home with a thin sliver remaining.

My inner gamer geek screams in futile rage at the pattern; much of my efforts allow me to barely keep my head above water. Whenever I try and surge ahead, even just a little, I seem to get knocked back several steps. It's like advancing deep into an game level, only to die and respawn at the beginning. It's frustrating and exhausting.

"Gee, working is fun!"

Life doesn't play by the rules. There are no rules, as much as we like to pretend there are. Some people are born higher level than others, or have the means to jump ahead. Others are stuck as low level NPC's, doomed to repeat the same line of text over and over and over. As time goes by, I can't help but feel like one of those doomed NPC's.

The only solace I have is that I'm not one of the random mobs spawning in the forests like little juicy bags of xp, waiting for adventurers to kill me off in their own quest to rise in level. Unless you count the 1% as Adventurers, in which case all I have to say is:

"Oh Shit."