WWMD: Life Lessons from the Mushroom Kingdom

Recently, I’ve been struck by the sudden understanding that this is the only chance at life I get.

I don’t mean that I was somehow unaware of the reality of my existence, or that I went from believing in life after death to skepticism. I always knew that I wouldn’t get a do-over on my childhood and that time is slowly ticking away from a finite store.

But I knew it the same way I know that the atoms of the laptop on which I’m typing this are more empty space than solid matter: in my reserve of propositions whose little ovals are filled “true” on the SCANTRON sheet in the back of my brain but that otherwise share the emotions I reserve for willingly collaborative falsehoods like “You can get to Narnia through Professor Kirke’s wardrobe” and statements of which I have no intuitive understanding like “There is a 1 in 2 chance this coin will land on heads.” Now the idea of my own mortality is firmly lodged in my heart as well as my head.

And like so many attention-seekers in the media, I blame video games.

After all, if I accidentally jump Super Meat Boy into a saw, no biggie. I’m not going to run out of lives any time soon, and even in games where I do, well, whatever, I’ll lose that halfway point I worked so hard to reach with Donkey and Diddy, but I can just choose “Continue.” If Lavos or Ganondorf schools me the first time, no worries — à la Arnie, Ah’ll be bahk. And, heck, if I really don’t like the way my Pokémon team has turned out, I can start the game over and do it right from the beginning.

It’s only lately that I’ve realized the counter more applicable to my own reality isn’t the number of 1ups I have but the rapidly diminishing timer in the upper right corner. In some ways, defending my dissertation has made me hear that uh-oh time-running-out noise that means the music is about to go double-speed. What do I do now?

Well, apparently I can just apply all the other important life lessons I learned from playing video games.

1. Solve problems by trying things out.

As normative narratives, I think this is one place video games shine in our cultural psyche. Traditional forms of narrative like books, movies, and plays tend to privilege linear paths to success; for instance, when Harry Potter spends a bunch of book 4 working on figuring out what the egg is saying, we don’t feel like that’s an important part of the story. From our perspective, Harry’s life would be better if he could just take a pair of scissors and snip that bit out. No more puzzling over the egg — just Cedric giving him a hint and then skip ahead to the awkward Moaning Myrtle scene.

But in our own lives, sometimes that dead-end puzzling can be the best strategy, and video games make it an integral part of the narrative. Not always in the game, although sometimes (“The princess is in another castle”). The story of a video game becomes the story of the player as well as the character: “I got to the door, but it was locked, and I didn’t know where to find the key. So I tried the room with the guards, and then I died. Then I tried the room with the lava, and I died again. Then I found… etc.”

In fact, if you give up when the going gets tough in games, you probably don’t play very many of them. The gamers I know who take the most pleasure in gaming are the ones who like to defeat challenges — who thrive on trying strategy after strategy, knowing that the experience will eventually bring them to a place where they can overcome whatever problem has been presented. And when they do get there, they don’t consider any of those failed strategies to be useless — they understand that each attempt brought them closer to the eventual solution.

2. Seize opportunity when you can.

If you’ve ever played a point-and-click adventure game like the Monkey Island or King’s Quest series, you know one important rule of adventure gaming: pick stuff up. Whatever’s not glued down goes in your pocket because you’ll need it later on.

The same principle applies to other kinds of games. If the guy in the village asks if you’ll help him find his lost brother, do it. If you notice a wife in the east side of town looking for her husband and a husband in the west side of town looking for his wife, find some way to bring them together.

If you wait for the game to drop goodies and answers into your lap, you’ll be waiting until you decide to put down your controller and do something more exciting. But if you grab the chances to tie up loose ends whenever you find them and collect those Secret Seashells, something good is bound to happen.

3. Failing is how you learn.

I admit it: I’m one of those cautious players who hesitates to lose a life or risk game over. There’s a shiny giant coin up there, you say, at the end of a set of ten tricky jumps over a pit of lava and fireballs? No thanks, I’ll just continue my merry way, saving every ten seconds so I never, god forbid, lose my progress.

This is what makes me a bad gamer: I think of progress as something I must keep at all costs rather than acquire at all costs. So I often fail to experiment and try new things — on the first playthrough, anyway. Particularly in newer Mario platformers, where once you beat the game you can save any time instead of just at castles, I’ll go back and start tinkering once I’m satisfied my basic game is “safe.”

But that just shows that I’m ignoring the most important way of learning in games: dying. How do you find out if that thing on your screen is an enemy or a powerup? Touch it and see. How do you find out whether your character can kill that enemy by jumping on it? Or if there’s a hidden platform under that cloud leading to a secret area?

Games have taught me that failure is a learning experience. If I don’t take the lesson from losing a life or running out of time or backtracking — or worse, if I make my goal not to fail rather than to succeed — I’ll wind up never beating the level at all.

4. Listen to what everyone has to say.

True, sometimes people say stupid things: “You spoony bard!”/”Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?”/”I AM ERROR.”

In fact, according to video games, it wouldn’t be far off to claim that most people say stupid things most of the time. But for every “Hey, listen!”, there’s an NPC who’s telling you where you should go for your next quest, giving you hints about how to find secrets, or just generally making sure you don’t get completely lost. And if you don’t talk to everyone, you’ll never find the gold amidst the dross.

And, keeping that in mind, the last life lesson I learned from video games:

5. Do a barrel roll!

Why not?