You know how when you play some games, such a sentence always appears after you lose? After failing to defeat an enemy, which leaves little argument to the outcome; After running out of time hopping from one train car to another to defuse a bomb; After failing to save a character key to the progression of your story.
That's what games are. You die, you lose, no worries. There's a save game there for you to re-load and retry it all over again. Do things differently. Use poison instead of spamming fireballs at the boss character. Memorise the timings of the enemy guards' patrols. Remembering to use a Healing spell at the right moment for that damsel in distress. If you failed to save...Well, that's really your own problem, then.
And if you think I'm going to say how games aren't like real-life, complete with the finger-wagging and stern look that lecturers always give to students who get their answers wrong, you're right. At least with the first part.
But recently I've discovered that Life isn't simple like that. It doesn't simply mean that since games don't resemble real-life in all it's glory (or infamy), there's no room for a depiction of principles found there in reality.
You see, the curve balls Life throw...They have a pattern. They are, after all, thrown according to the one constant - Your life.
Your life, your experiences, your emotions. The joys and sorrows, the trials and blessings, all of them are in accordance with your life and how you live it.
And every now and then, some of the curve balls are so remarkably similar that you can say, "Hey, I've seen/experienced this before!"
That is, if you've been paying attention to yourself and seek to learn from every success and failure experienced in your life.
Recently it's been a little like that, and almost immediately I thought of the Save Game analogy. It certainly isn't the same situation, with the same elements, but they are similar. For example, I might deal a critical hit to the boss which helps me finish him off easier this time round, and such actions are subject to the computations and calculations (some of them random) of the programmers.
And just like that, it's not the same, but definitely similar. Symmetrical, even.
Similar circumstances. Similar people. Similar emotions. Similar (or perhaps even the same) motivations.
The key thing, of course, is to learn from previous experience, then make a decision not to do things that caused one to lose what he/she could have been blessed with.
It isn't easy. But armed with the knowledge of what went wrong and what you can do right this time round, it gets a little less hard....Like decreasing the difficulty of the game if your entire party was massacred in a heartbeat.
So what's your Last Save Game?
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