For as long as I’ve been playing video games (about 16 years), I’ve always wondered something: what would it be like if we had the features from a game in our actual lives? The idea sounds appealing from the get-go. In the games I’ve played, most of the features are there for convenience's sake, so it would most likely be pretty beneficial to experience them real life. While this could never actually happen, a guy can dream. There are some specific features from video games that stand above the rest for me when determining which I like better than others.
1. Fast travel.
Fast travel is probably the number one option for a lot of people. Think of it as a form of teleportation. In a game that offers this feature, you can travel to any place that you’ve already been with the click of a button or two. The great thing about this function, as you can probably guess, is that it’s a serious time saver.
If I had this in real life, there’s one thing I’d do almost immediately: I’d leave the dorm where I live and take all of my stuff home. If I could just fast-travel to school, why would I need to live on campus? The nice thing about fast travel is that the distance doesn’t matter. So if you wanted to go across the world, as long as you’ve been there before, you could do it.
2. The save button.
For anyone who’s every touched a "Pokémon" game, the save button is something to be celebrated and feared. The idea behind a save button is to save all of the gameplay that you’ve done up to a certain point. Yet, it should also be feared because if you don’t use that button after playing for an hour or two (or 17, in my case), you’ll lose everything. Everything you worked so hard to do -- gone, because you’re an idiot and forgot to save. One thing that is really nice about save files is that in some games, you can have multiple save files. So if you wanted to, you could go back to whatever moment you wanted without having only one option.
If this feature were in real life, I’d imagine that repercussions like this wouldn’t exist. The drawback of it would cease to be. If the save button were a reality, I’d want to use it to relive great days or moments that I’ve had. Let’s say I habitually save every morning when I wake up. If that were the case, and I happened to have one of the best experiences of my life, I could go back to where I saved and relive it again. It would be a bit excessive to relive that moment more than a few times, but even just one more could be worth it.
3. Change in difficulty.
In RPGs (or role-playing games), there’s an option that can change the difficulty of gameplay; it can make things way easier or way more difficult depending on how you use it. As a rule of thumb, I always start a game that I’ve never played on “normal” mode, which is as basic as it gets. There’s nothing spectacularly difficult about it, and it isn’t insanely easy either. It’s a nice middle ground. But, sometimes, if I get good at a game, a boost in challenge is preferred. So if I wanted to, while playing a game, I could go up to “hard” and see what it had to offer. But if that was too much for me, I could go right on back to “normal.”
As of right now, I only have one idea for what I could use this function for in the real world. If I would be doing anything related to school or work, I could change the difficulty to “easy” so I wouldn’t have to worry or be stressed over it. It’d be really nice, don’t you think?
So what am I missing? What features would you transfer to real life if you could?
