At first glance you can draw some easy comparisons between “real life” and video games: both often involve some form of physics, economy (especially money), conflict, and other essential characteristics. This might be because games try to simulate different aspects of reality, so of course there would be a resemblance.
Perhaps there are certain areas of “real life” that are kind of like video games. Working out at the gym1 bears a surprising resemblance to one: you start out weak and barely able to do the most basic of exercises, but by grinding out reps and ironing out other aspects of your playstyle like diet and sleep, your strength levels up. You can even unlock new techniques and abilities once your strength and/or skill passes a certain threshold. It’s funny that gym bros and gamers used to be contrasted with one another, when there is so much overlap.
This kind of approach is quite generalizable; many aspects of life can be likened to games where you can do quests, daily grinds, get rewards, level up skills, etc. You could argue that non-gaming activities are more fulfilling than games because they’re real but lots of IRL tasks that you can improve at don’t really feel that great, while lots of people love playing video games despite gameplay that is often even more of a grind than the kind of things they refuse to do IRL. From my limited knowledge of anime this seems to be a theme there too (e.g. Solo Leveling), especially with isekai, but usually there is a more supernatural setting to go along with this gamified approach to life.
Given this generality, it seems to me that the answer to this post’s titular question is in the affirmative. If so, what kind of game is it like? Survival? RPG? First-person shooter?
In most games there are structured objectives, including ways to objectively “win.” However, at least to me, life seems more like an open-ended sandbox like Minecraft or Paradox games in that you make your own goals/fun. There are achievements you can go for but it can be more fun to ignore those and build your kingdom however you want. Obviously, life most closely resembles a game like The Sims, but that’s clearly art imitating life. The same is true with GTA V.
More abstractly, life is a sandbox with the rules of physics as the engine. Of course, unlike the default game mode in most games, real life is on hardcore mode2 where (to the best of our knowledge) you can’t respawn after you die. This naturally makes people more cautious since you lose all progress and have to completely restart the game. Real life is the ultimate hardcore mode, since even in hardcore mode video games you know you can always just start another playthrough with the lessons you learned from all of your previous runs.
This undercuts the affirmative answer we reached earlier in the piece. Unless we find some way to respawn with our memories intact3, we only ever have one continuous “play-through” of our lives. Moreover, we learn everything about ourselves as well as the world we live in while playing the game. We, as players, are contained within the universe’s physics engine rather than existing outside of it. Imagine a physics engine simulation with no players interacting with it from the outside. Within the game, there arise entities like ourselves who can think, self-reflect, and interact with the world. At what point do cellular automata or “NPCs” become players in their own right?
The same dynamic shows up in game-playing AIs like Deep Blue or AlphaGo. Even LLMs can be thought of as playing a next-word-prediction game. To improve at their assigned tasks, models start understanding the wider world they are a part of, and better models are generally better at world-modeling. Humans evolved under surprisingly similar circumstances, just with Darwinian evolution as the game and genetic fitness as the optimization function. I plan to write more on this topic in the future but for this piece suffice to say that as gaming gets more advanced, its features approach those of reality.
Of course, other than through Occam’s razor, we can’t rule out explanations that invoke things outside our universe and its physics. This gets at another deep difference between reality and video games, which is that there is no way to know what lies outside the universe where our lives take place. Hints about what might exist beyond tantalize us from numerous corners — including mathematics, science, religion, spiritual experiences, and more — but things for which we have reproducible evidence are only ever part of the physics engine in which we all live. Moreover, a gamer can always stop playing and “return” to the familiar wider world; we cannot make such a move with equivalent certainty. So while life shares a lot of mechanics with contemporary video games, it’s the only shot we get, and is played from inside the game itself with only the faintest whisper, if even that, of what happens outside.