#6/7 Playing the Game: An Avatar’s story
Welcome back my wonderful friends!
We’re overviewing the video game model for exploring spiritual growth. Last week we set up (again) the idea of the body/avatar being you, in relation to your soul (you as the player). This week we’re going to talk about the avatar’s story. Aka. the story of your life!
Here’s a rough outline of the big picture:
A video game is an interactive storytelling experience:
It is designed by a “developer”
It is built using tools
It is run on a machine
And it is played by a player ← doing this now
Each of these things correlate almost 1:1 to the building blocks of Jewish mysticism
There is a creator
The creator uses the “spiritual realms” to build a “world”
The “world” runs with rules and systems, in order to cultivate an experience
The soul lives in that experience – hence the quote: we are spiritual beings having a human experience ← doing this now
Playing the Game: An Avatar’s story
When your gear doesn’t match but it has the best stats
Last week’s post explained how “you” are your avatar (you’re also not, but that’s for later). We did a game/life meditation. Get back in that mindset, take a moment to read this to yourself in corny narrator voice: ****You live in a game, your life is the story. This is the best game ever made, the world exists to tell your story****
Now that you’re. in the right headspace, your first task/quest will fall under one of these categories:
You already know what you’re supposed to be doing – Go downstairs? Get your allowance? Go to the fair? Crash into a princess? Time travel shenanigans?
You need to figure out what to do next – you’ve played a game before, you’ve got this!
See how long you can hold this thought modality through your day. Can you see how events and tasks chain together into the “beats” and or “encounters” of a story? Into your character’s (*your*) life?
Immersion
My story, or rather, my avatar’s story, has recently been turned upside down and loopy. This is called an inciting incident.
The inciting incident of a story is the event that sets the main character or characters on the journey that will occupy them throughout the narrative. Typically, this incident will upset the balance within the main character's world.
I’m an only child, and I never imagined the concept of having 5 children. FIVE CHILDREN?!?! UNDER FOUR?! We were in the news! I’m writing this sentence doing baby night shift the day before they boys’ bris. ( ««Do you see that apostrophe? DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS?! 😛)
No person’s life goes as planned. So too any good story, it won’t go entirely as planned. If it did, the story would suck. Would you watch a movie that was flat? Bad writing 👎 🤢 What makes the story good? And why do I care?
We intuitively and subconsciously understand the vivifying “escape” of being transported into a story. A movie, a good book, an inspiring speaker. But how do I express the value out loud? Why do we love stories? Is it facilitation of greater self-awareness? Understanding? Deep and powerful empathy for characters we come to know intimately? All sorts of amazing stuff.
Your life is a damn good story. It’s a thrill ride that puts the best Hollywood films to shame. SHAME. Complex characters, colorful plots, the absolute best graphics possible. Packaged in a 4d experience so complete you can’t help but get invested in it. You might start to…take it seriously😬 My life feels so real – I’m so immersed in it – that I’ll sometimes dissociate when it gets hard! (...so weird and backwards… but that's how it is i guess) What is the thing I’m invested in? Same as any story: the growth of the character(s) and the evolution of the world.
I hope it’s clear that life can be compared to playing a video game. Our character has a story that we are invested in, and we “play” the avatar.
Next time we’re going be coming full circle, connecting all this back to how video games: provide a clear way to get unstuck, when we’re trying to progress, but the gap feels too big, ominous, or overwhelming.
Woo hoo! See you next week!
Jay