I am a big gamer. I love entering worlds someone else has created, learning their rules, discovering how they work, and figuring out what I’m supposed to do within them.
Reading What Is the Meaning of Life? made me notice something strange. I can’t remember one of my characters sitting around wondering what the meaning of their life is.
They already have an answer.
Complete the quest. Save the kingdom. Stay alive. Level up. Find the missing artifact. Build the settlement. Defeat evil. Sometimes be the evil. The answer changes from world to world, but there is almost always an answer because somebody designed the world to have one.
Even the most complicated fantasy worlds ultimately operate according to rules. Magic has limits. Actions have consequences. Certain things make you stronger and others get you killed. There are places you can go and places you aren’t ready to enter yet. You learn, gain experience, acquire skills, make choices, and hopefully get better at navigating the world.
Sometimes the rules are hidden from you, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
Maybe that’s more important than I realized.
In our world, we spend entire lifetimes searching for the same certainty. What am I supposed to accomplish? How should I live? What makes a good life? Does my life have a larger purpose?
Religion may come closest to giving us the kind of structure we find in constructed worlds. There is a creator. There is a reason we’re here. There are rules for how we should live. Our choices have consequences. There may even be an ultimate destination or reward.
Philosophy offers other possibilities. We can seek happiness, knowledge, virtue, service, relationships, personal fulfillment, or create meaning for ourselves. We can choose our own quests.
The problem is that nobody hands us the official rulebook.
We can believe we’ve found one. We can have faith that an answer is correct. We can build our lives around it. But we can’t open a menu and see Life Purpose: 73% Complete.
In a constructed world, I have something my real life rarely gives me: confidence that somewhere, there is an answer.
I may not know where the artifact is, but I know it exists. I may not understand how the magic works yet, but I know there are rules governing it. I may wander around for hours wondering what I’m supposed to do next, but somewhere in the game there is something to discover that will move me forward.
Even randomness usually isn’t truly random. Somewhere beneath what I’m experiencing are systems, probabilities, rules, and cause and effect created by someone who knows how the world works.
Perhaps that’s one reason we enjoy spending so much time inside these places.
We usually talk about fantasy and virtual worlds as a form of escape. We get to fight dragons, explore impossible landscapes, wield magic, travel between stars, become heroes, or simply become someone other than ourselves for a while.
But maybe the deeper escape is from uncertainty. An ability to reload if we make a mistake.
For a few hours, I can exist somewhere where progress can be measured. Where problems have solutions. Where learning the rules makes me better at living within them. Where failure may hurt, but usually teaches me something I can use the next time.
Most importantly, I can assume the world makes sense because somebody created it to make sense.
Which raises a much more uncomfortable question.
What if our world works the same way?
What if some of what we call randomness or chaos only looks random because we’re experiencing the world from inside it? A character in a game doesn’t see the code, the probability tables, or the designer’s intentions. From inside that world, an event might appear to be coincidence even though someone outside it knows exactly why it happened.
Maybe that’s why religion, simulation theories, fate, destiny, and ideas about a larger cosmic purpose remain so compelling. In different ways, they all offer the possibility that there is something beyond what we can see and that our world has an underlying structure we don’t fully understand.
I don’t know if ours does.
But I think I better understand why I enjoy visiting worlds where I know it does.
Perhaps dragons, fairies, magic, distant planets, and impossible civilizations aren’t the greatest fantasies those worlds offer us.
Somewhere beneath the fantasy, we know there are rules. And somewhere within those rules, there are answers.
About This Seed
This Seed grew from What Is the Meaning of Life? and a connection I hadn't considered until I started thinking about the question through something I love: gaming and worldbuilding.
In our world, we can spend a lifetime wondering whether there is a purpose and what the rules are. In constructed worlds, I usually know both exist. I may have to discover them, but somewhere there is an answer because someone created the world.
That made me wonder whether part of the attraction of fantasy is not escaping reality so much as escaping its uncertainty.
There are countless directions you could take this idea. Write a story about a character who discovers the rules governing their world. Create a game world where everyone receives a life quest at birth. Imagine a religion that is actually correct about the world's mechanics. Or create a world where everyone believes there are rules, only to discover there aren't any.
Worldbuilders, I'd particularly love to see some lore. Create a Seed containing a small piece of lore from an existing or newly imagined fantasy world that defines one of its rules: what magic is, what happens after death, what makes someone good or evil, why a kingdom exists, what a particular creature is supposed to be, what everyone is expected to accomplish, or something else the inhabitants simply accept as part of their reality.
It doesn't need to be an entire world. Give us one rule, belief, definition, or piece of lore and let someone else wonder what could grow from it.
Or take this somewhere none of those suggestions anticipate. Add a Seed of your own, or join the discussion and tell us what you think.