Gaming is serious business. It’s now worth at least five times more than the movie and music industries combined.
I’ve loved playing computer games for as long as I can remember. It probably started in a dingy, cigarette-smoke-filled arcade on the upper floor of Federal Bowl in the early eighties. Bored out of my mind while my father and his colleagues enjoyed their bowling downstairs, I would plot my escape from those mundane evenings—one twenty-sen coin at a time—into the pixelated worlds of Pac-Man, Galaga and Space Invaders.
Later, while my fellow engineering course mates were using their PCs for serious work like computer-aided design, I used mine for far more important endeavours. Like saving the free world with Command & Conquer, overthrowing tyrannical galactic empires via X-Wing, and building megacities for millions of virtual citizens in Sim City.
It’s no wonder gaming has become one of the fastest-growing industries in history. Like our modern, digitally connected, always-on lives, modern games have evolved in complexity, demanding every last drop of processing power our brains can muster.
The irony isn’t lost on me that my favourite escape from stress now requires spreadsheets to play effectively. The social aspects of gaming mean that some nights, a few of us are still up at 2 am, min-maxing character stats and sleepily mumbling about optimal damage output. And our fear of falling behind in competitiveness has us grinding the same dungeon over and over, hoping that the next chest will finally drop that elusive uber-legendary-whatever item we’ve been dying to get.
Yet, despite the exhausting complexity, we keep coming back (and enriching game publishers in the process) because now you can fully immerse in flying a commercial jet across the world, commanding large scale armies, slaying godlike monster bosses or casually wiping out entire civilizations for fun.
The industry may be worth hundreds of billions now, but deep down, we’re still just kids in an arcade—mindlessly shoving in coins, hoping for one more round while escaping from the “responsible adults” who are rolling their balls down the gutter.
But the rate that technology is evolving, life itself will soon be fully gamified. Every action just a click away while every aspect of our existence tracked, scored and displayed in real time on our screens. AI will become real-life NPCs that we interact with on a daily basis.
When reality starts feeling like a leaderboard, escaping our increasingly gamified world might require an entirely different kind of game. Who knows? Maybe one day, I’ll be grinding experience points in real-world carpentry or baking– just to escape.