Was it Played Right?

Some time ago, my brother sent me a link to an online game. The premise of the game was that you were given “land” and a small number of items to “implement” on the land (water, plants, and so on). There were maybe 8 or 10 items total, and the “game” was to implement the items in the correct order (obviously determined by the programmer) in order for the little planet to function at 100%... the way it had been intended to function.

I was sitting alone this morning on the steps outside my office smoking a delicious Djarum clove cigarette, feeling somewhat insightful, when I remembered the game. I started thinking: maybe that game is representational of our earth? God (the first ever programmer) gave us this mass of land and various resources along with it, encouraging us to use them for good and to prosper. What if we didn’t do it in the right order though?

In the online game, you could implement several items before you would be able to tell if you had used something too early. Sometimes, if step two was where you messed up, you wouldn’t know it until step six. Now, here we are, running out of fossil fuels, with holes in our ozone, a failing economy, and wars that seem to have no end, and I can’t help but wonder if maybe we did things out of order. Maybe the world wasn’t ready for cars when they were invented decades ago and we are running out of fossil fuels because we started using too much of them too soon… and because that step was out of order, there was way too much pollution and no way to get rid of it or know its dangers, and therefore we have holes in the ozone. Everything is just a big chain of events, and perhaps we screwed up too early (because I have a hard time believing that this was the way our land was supposed to evolve into utopia).

Or maybe, we just didn’t ask our Programmer for enough help…