Resetting the World

I noticed something very odd the other day. I was playing this game online, on a test server, when I noticed the oddness. On this test server, people were going to very dangerous places, trying out all sorts of stuff that they do not normally do within the game. I admit, I was swept up in this and tried it too. I found that a lot of what I was doing I would have considered impossible to do in the real game, though it was actual quite easy on this test server.

See, the test server is a copy of the virtual world where the game developers let people test out the latest changes to the game before the "go live" in the real game. They run these for about 2 weeks at a time, and anything that happens within this test server game has no impact on the characters one has in the real game. This is why people try stuff that they normally wouldn't, this world is reset and cleaned, while the live world remains untouched.

The odd thing was that people would try new things, because they had no fear. The question became for me, "Why did they have fear in the first place?" See, the online game only lasts as long as one pays a monthly fee. In reality, at some future point, the "real" game will be gone as well, and yet people play very conservatively there. There is no reason to, since neither of them are real - people should be pushing their characters to the limits all the time, since there really is no downside. And yet most don't.

This applies to our world as well. This world will reset at some point, either as a whole or for each person one at a time. And yet do people live like that? Most do not. Most live like this current snapshot will be the way things are forever. Advancing slowly, careful not to step too far in case of Consequences. And yet in the long run, the only consequence is that one didn't get to explore the whole world because they were too conservative.

My advice - don't assume that what you have is a stable point. Reach for things. Try risky things that have a good chance of failure or bad consequences. If you succeed, you will be much further ahead! And if you fail, you will have had fun, and you can always try again before the reset when it all gets wiped anyway.

The Edward