And If So, What Can We Do to Patch It?

If we were to render modern existence as a video game environment, it wouldn’t be a high-fidelity masterpiece like what the big game studios seem to produce monthly these days. Instead, it would look like a grainy, grey, overpopulated digital world, rendered in the glitchcore aesthetic of a corrupted save file. Avatars bump into one another due to server lag, where the HUD is consistently broken, and where the background radiation is a quiet, vaporwave-meets-dystopia apathy.

We’re living in a what I’d like to term a “Sh*t MMORPG” (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game). But this isn’t just a cute metaphor for having a busy schedule. I mean this term as a critique of a system defined by uninspired design where agency feels fake. Many of us find ourselves trapped in a grind-heavy loop with poor narrative payoff, completing pointless fetch quests for rewards that barely cover the cost of repairs of our equipment.

The central tension of our lives has gone beyond the struggle itself. It’s become pure Ludonarrative Dissonance. In game design, this term describes the conflict between the story the game tells you (you’re the Hero who can do anything) and the mechanics the game forces you to play (grind these enemies for 40 hours to level up to be able to progress the story).

Society tells us we’re the protagonists of a grand adventure, yet our daily gameplay consists of bureaucracy, career ladders, and performative social media quests. We’re stuck in a loop like Sisyphus, but with a daily login bonus. WIth increasing futility, we’re pushing the boulder up the hill not for cosmic meaning, but for constant dopamine hits and a slightly higher credit score.

The tragedy isn’t just the bad design; but in how we react to it. Instead of quitting the server, we have decided to “min-max” our misery. We see people frantically trying to optimize their playthroughs with emotional spreadsheets, biohacks, and productivity journals. They’re attempting to impose strategic elements onto a broken code base. We’ve convinced ourselves that if we just play the game harder, the glitches will resolve. But optimization has replaced meaning. So, what is the point of trying to write a strategy guide for a game that hates its players?

The Illusion of the Open World

The most insidious trick this MMORPG pulls is the illusion of the Open World. We’re sold the narrative of infinite choice—that we can explore any map, build any character class, and craft our own destiny. But the moment you try to deviate from the Main Quest—the convoluted plotline of school, career, debt, and retirement—you hit an invisible wall.

We realize quickly that the agency feels fake. The game world isn’t designed for exploration but instead for retention. So, we’re funneling ourselves through a grind-heavy loop, chasing modest XP, skill points, and loot rewards that barely keep up with the inflation of the in-game economy.

This is where the “min-maxing” culture becomes truly dystopian. In a desperate bid to feel like we’re winning, or at least making steady progress, we treat our own lives as assets to be optimized. We see content creators and productivity gurus strip-mining their own humanity to chase an algorithm, optimizing their playthroughs with various hacks. They’ve stopped playing the game and started working for it, becoming sort of pseudo-developers for free.

This raises the terrifying question: If you’re not choosing the game, and you can’t exit the server, are you really playing?. Or are you just an NPC with a slightly more complex dialogue tree? When we optimize for survival rather than fulfillment, we aren’t the heroes of the story at all. By surrendering our agency to the system, we risk becoming just background processes running on a server that doesn’t care if we crash.

The Modder’s Rebellion

If the game is so poorly designed, do we still owe it our best effort? If the code is broken, is there any honor in following the rules? Well, it would seem the answer lies in a shift of perspective: We must stop trying to be high-scoring players and start thinking like Modders.

In gaming, modders are the ones who refuse to accept the developer’s initial limitations. They look at a rigid, grey world and inject their own textures. They ignore the Main Quest to build something strange and beautiful in the corner of the map. But while IRL modders understand that they cannot rewrite the “source code” of the real-life server (the laws of physics, the economy, and the passage of time), they can absolutely overhaul the interface through which they experience it.

To “mod” your reality is to reject the Ludonarrative Dissonance. Refuse to grind for rewards that barely cover your living expenses. Step off the treadmill of “min-maxing” your misery and asking: What if I just played for the side quests?

This is the Absurdism that Albert Camus famously wrote about. If we must push the boulder uphill like Sisyphus, let’s at least paint it a ridiculous color. We should ignore the status bars and the credit scores. Let’s find the glitches in the system—moments of unexpected connection, creative accidents, and pockets of unregulated joy—and live inside them.

The server may be terrible and the lag may be unbearable at times. But the open world is only truly miserable to be a part of until you decide to break the pathing. Stop trying to win a broken game. Just play it as you wish.