Have you ever played a game in god mode?
Typically god mode turns all the cheats on in a game. You can do anything, go anywhere, be invincible. Suddenly without any effort at all, you can have all the coolest armor, all the best weapons. The boss battles that you would have struggled with, playing over and over again, are over in seconds. Things you’d have to spend hours doing during normal game play, are immediate, or you can even just bypass them.
You won’t have to trudge through the dessert to find the 7 lost ancient baubles, so you can make the omega key and open the chest of lost knowledge. It’s all handed to you at the click of a mouse.
I have turned on good mode in a few games and the results are often disappointing at best. Oh sure it’s interesting for the first few minutes. You can explore the places too dangerous for you to visit before. Wander the forest where everything would have killed you, knowing nothing can stop you now. But all too quickly, as you start to analyze what you’re doing, you realize, everything that had value previously, does not anymore.
The entire economy of the game has collapsed. Everything that meant something before, is meaningless. You don’t have to worry about getting the armor of great brilliance, because you can’t die. You don’t need a sword of insane awesomeness, because your hands are lethal weapons. You don’t need to defeat the boss of Swampy Evil, because you can just walk past her.
Now consider your own journey here as a human being. I think this is the reason the universe has seen fit to blank our memory upon arrival. When we arrive on this planet, for our human experience, we are given a clean slate. If we remembered everything about why we came here and where we came from and what was to happen, the game would appear rigged. There would be no incentive to proceed. There would be no interest. The adventure would be over before it began.
Without the illusion generated by complete amnesia there would be no perception of risk.
The stakes are high in this life.
We are here with the idea that this is all there is and that everything is riding on this life.
But if we had absolute certainty that this was only an elaborate illusion put together for our amusement and education we wouldn’t be invested.
The total amnesia that accompanies the arrival here into our humanity is crucial to keep life interesting.
If the challenge is gone. The risk is gone.
Life just becomes a tedious exercise of moving pixels around on a computer screen. The mental investment is lost and you are left with complex animation with no purpose.
On the other hand. If the game is complex enough, having higher knowledge can simply change the game. Alter your perceived values.
There are several ways to look at god mode functionality. Depending on the complexity of the game instead of breaking the game, it initiates a subtle shift in the game. Everything that mattered in the game doesn’t any more. Your perspective has shifted and you no longer value what used to have value. Instead you find a new economy in the game. You battle for higher stakes.
Maybe previously you were fighting for your own survival.
Now you are trying to save the native people from the onslaught of giant tree grubs.
If a game is complex enough and interesting enough you can actually find a higher level game, a meta game if you will, within the game. Suddenly your powers are required to pursue a higher purpose. You have gone from the victim to the maker. You have changed from a boat on the unforgiving river, to a mountain around which the river must alter its coarse.
When we do capture glimpses of the higher reality that brought us here it informs our values regarding the real economy.
It fractures that illusion that we must have the iphone of awesomeness and shifts our values to the higher economy.
What if we already entered the cheat code, and we’re playing in god mode, but we forgot?
Namaste,
Kevin
