To Repurpose th' Bard in Iambic, and then for One to Ponder its Meaning

All the world's a game,
And all the men and women player-char'cters:
They have their spawn-points and their weaknesses;
And one man in his time is many-class'd.

...

As much as I would love to continue the quote repurposed, I'm tired and my mood ill-suited to creativity. I actually do feel that the world is game-like; rather, my favorite construct for dealing with the world is to consider it in video-game terms.

Take social situations, for example: A person has a Charisma ("CHA") score, which can be modified up and down by various factors, like self-grooming, fashion, even the room's lighting. One person (the player) has an objective; say, to sway a person to his point of view and to take action based on that view. There's some manner of chance involved: no matter how good or bad the situation is, the end result can still surprise you, and this is represented by a Random Number Generator ("RNG"). The other person has some level of social inertia against this idea, representing a modifier to whatever number the RNG comes up with. Finally, the player's goal has a certain innate difficulty to it, represented by the number to best.

Now, so far, that's not video-gaming, that's D&D. Fair enough. But video games feature one thing that D&D does not: strict, pre-programmed dialog options. Every dialog can be represented by a 'tree' of things the player can say, the other person's reaction to it, and what the player can say in return, as far as any programmer or script-writer cares to take it. When confronted with a social situation, attempting to look down the dialog tree beyond your current branch or node is useful. So, too, is the idea that there are only a few real choices in a given social situation in a given moment: while you could, in reality, say anything, generally you only have a few reasonable options, and immediately cutting those potentially infinite options down to a small subset of reasonable ones can help to process them quickly, since, like in many games, there is a time limit to this.

The construct of life-as-video-games is useful elsewhere, but I'll leave this example on its own for tonight. I bring it up now, however, because I feel that it helped me make a bad situation survivable for myself and a few others tonight, and in the long run.