So I’ve been in this town for almost a good six years and I have made many friends and acquaintances along the way. There have been some fun times, as well as moments that were sad or just plain disappointing. People have the capability to either be wonderful or downright disgusting at a moment’s notice. It really is seriously interesting to see someone show their true colors when an unexpected event happens.

I’ll try to avoid anything personal. What I am trying to say, using a vague example, is let’s say that you have been friends with someone for years, and you have supported them whenever they have desired to succeed at something. You do whatever you can to help them achieve their goal, even if it changes to something completely different every year. Maybe it’s because they gave up on their previous goal or lost interest. Anyways, you support them and they trust you as one of your close friends and they let you know that you are very important to them as a friend.

Then one day, you are put in a position where you have to make some tough decisions. The choices you make may not be the most popular ones but you feel they are the best decisions that you can make under the circumstances. Even if your friend doesn’t agree with your decision, you wouldn’t expect them to throw years of friendship out the window over something that didn’t actually hurt anybody, right? Wrong. The person cuts you off from their life and goes about living it as if you never existed. You never had a problem with this person ever — or so they have claimed — but then the second it happens, the last few years of your life with this person no longer mattered to them. All the fun times, heartfelt moments, the tragedies, the hardships, and everything else that goes along with friendship – it’s gone to this person. Can you imagine that?

But the plot thickens! You find out that you are not exclusive to the way you have been treated by your former friend. Rather, you find others who have experienced the same thing. You even found out that this person is now friends with people that they once disliked because they can do things for them that you can’t. You learn something: many of this person’s friendships are based around being able to climb a ladder. A person can achieve success in many ways; some have talent or the ability to be dependable or work hard. Others succeed because they have the right connections. They call this “networking.” So what does this have to do with the ladder? It’s a ladder for success and the person climbing it right now is actually cutting ties with people who can’t help them self climb it and making ties with people who claim that they can help. You may know these people to actually be rather shady and untrustworthy and are likely to use this person as much as that person plans to use them. Will success be achieved this way? The story is not finished, so I can’t say.

Now then, what the hell does this story have to do with anything? I had a talk with a friend about this at a park not too long ago. About climbing social ladders and essentially turning your back on people who won’t help you and only surrounding yourself with people who can. What causes a person to want to do that? Can it be prevented or for further instigated? It’s seems to be easier for some people to change than others.

So let’s say you have friends who may or may not be this way. You try to be as good of a friend as you can by spending time with them, possibly sharing ideas and interests. You might get them a present or vice-versa. Not everything is this simple though. Every human has their own unique defects and it’s when this happens, choices have to be made. How will the choices you make affect your friendship? Will you make a decision that doesn’t make you happy to please them? Do you do what makes you happy and make them dislike you? Will you put aside happiness and other emotions and do what you think is “logical” or “right” regardless of what the potential outcome will be?

So what if you’ve made a choice that loses a friend? How do you make it up to them? What if “I’m Sorry” or a present or some sincere act of kindness is not enough? What do you do? is it even worth it to do anything? I mean, you could have other friends that respect you for who you are and the choices you make, no matter how disagreeable they are. Maybe they are your real friends and you’ve been, hate to say it, wasting your time with them. But if you’ve learned something from your experiences with them, then it probably wasn’t a waste. But if you think in terms of having friends based on who likes you for who you are, then aren’t you climbing the social ladder too? Where does that thing lead, anyways?

Now you are that person. People are making decisions that effect how you feel about them and they may compromise your wants and needs in a way that you like or dislike. Will you stay friends with them, will you abandon them? Will they have “chances” like a game character would that would result in their “game over” when they reach zero? Will you base friendships on wants and needs when you could obtain them yourself if you had some combination of talent, hard work, dependability? What if you are lacking in ability that someone else has? Will you be friends with them? How will you treat each other to satisfying your respective desires? And how can all of this be represented in simple and abstract terms?

I have been thinking about is making a game that does some of these things, but it donned on me ten minutes ago that there is a game that does these things and more. It’s called life, and there is no strategy guide. “Wow! How powerful of a statement, Kent!” is what you are thinking. Okay, maybe not since we didn’t talk about strategy guides before and I’m just trying to be clever. Anyways, I have spent over the last year or so reading books and articles on how games can teach us important things we can use in our life. There is a lot of good stuff out there. So what if a fraction of someone’s life could be used as a smaller game that had players experience their experiences and think about them from their own perspective, maybe even learn something? People have shared their life experiences with the world commonly through literature and films, but how often have games done this? Could it be done more? Up until now, games have been based on other peoples experiences but not so much those of the creators. There have to be some great experiences out there to be shared with the world! A little creativity blended in with our life experiences can probably make for some interesting works.