What's the Point? Treating Life Like a Video Game

When a Video Game Teaches You How to Live

Imagine you're deep into a video game — sword in hand, controller humming — and instead of simply enjoying it, your brain starts optimising. Which route is fastest? How do I level up most efficiently? What's the quickest path to the end? If you've ever caught yourself doing this, you've stumbled onto something far more revealing than a gaming habit. You've found a mirror held up to the way most of us approach everything — work, health, relationships, ambitions — and what stares back isn't always pretty.

The question "what's the point?" sounds defeatist at first. Nihilistic, even. But asked with genuine curiosity rather than despair, it becomes one of the most liberating questions you can put to yourself. It strips away the noise and forces you to confront whether the urgency, the stress, and the relentless push for efficiency are actually serving you — or quietly stealing the very experience you're working so hard to create.

This article explores what happens when you flip that script: when you stop treating life like a race to be won and start treating it like a game meant to be enjoyed.

The Efficiency Trap: Why We Play Games Badly

There is a particular kind of suffering unique to the modern high-achiever. It isn't poverty or illness. It's the inability to do anything — including rest — without trying to optimise it. We track our sleep, schedule our leisure, and time-block our weekends. Even on holiday, we're often mentally auditing how "well" we're recharging.

Psychologists call one dimension of this instrumental thinking — the tendency to evaluate every activity purely by its output. The walk isn't enjoyable; it's a step-count. The book isn't enriching; it's a title crossed off a list. And the video game? It's a story to be completed as swiftly as possible.

The problem is that instrumental thinking is genuinely useful in some contexts — it helps surgeons, engineers, and air traffic controllers do their jobs without catastrophic error. But applied indiscriminately to every corner of life, it becomes a cognitive trap. It turns means into ends and ends into moving goalposts, and it quietly drains the pleasure from almost everything you do.

Research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology supports this: people who focus on the enjoyment of a task during execution consistently outperform those who focus primarily on results — not just in wellbeing, but in actual measurable output. Presence, it turns out, is productive.

What "Cosmic Insignificance" Actually Means for Your Motivation

Here's an idea that initially sounds crushing but is actually remarkably freeing: almost nothing you do will matter in a thousand years. Your productivity app, your promotion, your renovated kitchen — in the grand sweep of geological time, they are imperceptible blips. The Stoics called this the view from above, a deliberate imaginative exercise in zooming out until your problems shrink to their actual proportions.

But here's the twist: cosmic insignificance doesn't mean personal meaninglessness. It means the opposite. If nothing you do carries ultimate cosmic weight, then the only weight that genuinely matters is the subjective experience you have while doing it. The joy, the curiosity, the frustration, the growth — these are real. They happen to a real person in real time. They are, arguably, the entire point.

This is not nihilism. It's closer to what the philosopher Albert Camus described when he said we must imagine Sisyphus happy. The boulder is arbitrary. The hill is arbitrary. But the man pushing it — and how he chooses to meet that task — is not.

When you internalise this, the stakes of any given project quietly rearrange themselves. You stop asking "will this matter forever?" and start asking "is this worth doing well, right now, for its own sake?" That's a much more honest — and motivating — question.

The Play Mindset: Not an Excuse to Slack Off

At this point a reasonable objection surfaces: isn't this just a sophisticated justification for not taking things seriously? If everything is a game, why try hard at anything?

The answer lies in what we actually mean by "play." Play, in the psychological literature, is not synonymous with laziness or apathy. Research by Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, defines play as any activity pursued for its own intrinsic reward — and consistently links it to higher creativity, greater cognitive flexibility, and stronger resilience. Surgeons who engage in playful activities before operations make fewer errors. Children who learn through play retain information longer. Adults who bring a playful attitude to complex problems solve them more innovatively.

Play is not the absence of effort. It's the presence of genuine engagement. Think of the difference between a musician who performs anxiously, terrified of making mistakes, versus one who plays with expressive freedom. Both are technically "trying hard." Only one is likely to give a memorable performance.

Applying this to work means asking not how do I get this done fastest but how do I engage with this most fully. It means taking the scenic route occasionally — the side quest, the exploratory conversation, the experimental design — not because it's efficient, but because that's often where the best ideas live.

Practical Ways to Shift Into Play Mode at Work

Knowing that a play mindset is beneficial and actually inhabiting one are two different things. Here are concrete ways to make the shift:

Change the question you start with

Instead of opening a work session with "what do I need to get done today?" try "what would make this genuinely interesting today?" It sounds small, but framing shapes experience. The first question primes your brain for a duty; the second primes it for engagement.

Design your environment for enjoyment

Play is situational. It flourishes in environments that feel comfortable and psychologically safe. This means your physical setup — lighting, music, clutter levels — matters more than most productivity advice admits. A Spotify playlist that puts you in flow isn't a distraction; it's a legitimate tool.

Reframe difficulty as the game mechanic

In video games, difficulty is the feature, not the bug. Without resistance, there's no game. When a work problem feels hard, try the explicit reframe: this is the level boss. The challenge is the point. This isn't toxic positivity — it's a cognitive restructuring technique with real evidence behind it, often used in both sports psychology and cognitive behavioural therapy.

Schedule the side quests

Some of the most valuable work you'll ever do won't look productive on a task list. Allow time — protected, guilt-free time — for exploration, experimentation, and tangents. Many breakthrough ideas in business and science emerged from someone following curiosity without a predetermined destination.

Catch the franticness and name it

The shift from stress mode to play mode rarely happens automatically. It requires a moment of metacognitive awareness — noticing that you've slipped into urgency for its own sake, pausing, and deliberately resetting your orientation. Even a thirty-second pause to ask "why am I rushing right now?" can dissolve unnecessary pressure.

The Journey Is the Destination — Cliché, and True

Every culture has some version of this idea. The Zen concept of ichigo ichie — this moment will never come again, so be fully here. The Stoic practice of amor fati — love your fate, including its difficulty. The Eastern philosophy of wu wei — effortless action, doing without forcing. Even in Western corporate culture, the research on "flow states" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi points to the same truth: peak performance and peak experience coincide when we are fully absorbed in the process, not fixated on the outcome.

None of this is new wisdom. But there's a meaningful difference between knowing a cliché and actually living it — between nodding at "enjoy the journey" and genuinely restructuring how you approach your day.

The video game metaphor is useful precisely because it's concrete. You already know, intellectually, that playing a game for its own enjoyment is the right approach. Extending that obvious truth to your work, your health goals, your relationships — that's the real practice. And it is a practice. It doesn't become automatic overnight. But every time you catch yourself defaulting to frenetic efficiency and choose curiosity and ease instead, you're building a different relationship with everything you do.

That might not change the cosmos. But it will almost certainly change your day. And your days, strung together, are your life.

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn't treating life like a game just a way of avoiding responsibility?

No — and it's worth being precise about this. Treating life like a game doesn't mean treating it carelessly. The best gamers are deeply engaged, highly skilled, and take their craft seriously. The game metaphor is specifically about removing unnecessary anxiety and urgency from the experience of working toward goals — not about lowering the standard of your work or avoiding commitments. Responsibility and lightness are not mutually exclusive.

What if my work genuinely does have high stakes — lives depend on it, for example?

The play mindset is about psychological orientation, not the literal framing of every task. A surgeon in an operating theatre is not being asked to treat the procedure as trivial. But research shows that surgeons who approach their work with calm, focused engagement — rather than anxiety-driven hyper-vigilance — make fewer errors. The opposite of frenetic seriousness isn't reckless casualness; it's composed, present-moment engagement. High stakes and a play mindset are compatible.

How do I stop reverting to efficiency mode under deadline pressure?

Deadlines naturally trigger threat responses in the brain, which narrow thinking and push us toward anxious, tunnel-vision productivity. The most effective counter is to make the habit of metacognitive pausing routine long before pressure arrives. When you regularly practice noticing your mental state and deliberately resetting it during low-stakes moments, you build the reflex. Under pressure, you can then access it faster. Think of it as a skill that needs training, not a switch that flips on demand.

Can this mindset work for goals I don't enjoy at all — like admin tasks or difficult conversations?

For genuinely unpleasant tasks, the game metaphor still applies, though it requires more creative framing. You can gamify the task (set a timer, compete with yesterday's version of yourself), pair it with something enjoyable (music, a preferred environment), or reframe it as the necessary "fetch quest" before a more rewarding mission. And sometimes, the honest answer is that the task is worth outsourcing, delegating, or eliminating entirely. The play mindset isn't just about enduring everything more cheerfully — it's also about questioning whether every item on your list deserves to be there at all.