Yes, the title of this article is accurate. I will be discussing the meaning of life by examining two popular video games. You may be supposing that my aim is to declare that the games are a waste of time and to recommend that, if you want to find meaning in life, you should turn off the screens and go outside. This, however, is not my point. I enjoy video games, and I enjoy thinking about things. At times, then, this leads me to thinking about video games. In this case, I have been reflecting on the ways that two games—Breath of the Wild and Minecraft—illustrate two different ways of viewing the world.
If you do not play video games yourself, I ask you to bear with me. I will do my best to explain the games, but if I do not do an adequate job, I suggest turning to your friend, child, or grandchild for supplemental information. And may I also suggest that, when you are done reading this article yourself, you hand it off to a gamer in your life—perhaps that young adult who loves both playing games and asking big questions.
With that prelude, let me begin by asking a question: What makes a video game realistic? We might start by looking at the graphics. Does the game look like a photograph, or does it look like a cartoon? Or, if it is old enough, does it look like a bunch of dots? We could say that the more a game looks like a photograph, the more realistic it is.
Or, to take another approach to the question, we could look at a game’s content. In the game, are you a knight fighting the dark elves with your pet dragon? Are you an F.B.I. agent trying to rid the world of shapeshifting aliens? Or are you planning the traffic flow of a city? The third case is the most realistic, since urban planning is something that happens in real life. In this way of looking at realism, I suppose that the most realistic game would be one with an endless supply of laundry and homework to take care of!
In this article, I am not going to focus on either sort of realism I just mentioned—graphics or content. One of the games I will discuss—Minecraft—has a world built entirely out of cubes; it is not even trying to achieve graphical realism. And both games involve using swords and potions to combat fantastical enemies; they are not trying to imitate my daily life. Rather, in asking whether these games are realistic, I want to look at the experience of playing the game and ask if it feels like real life. In particular, is a game that gives a player more freedom more realistic? The answer to this question, I will argue, depends upon how you see the nature of reality.
To show the kind of freedom I am talking about, let me first give a history lesson. (I am qualified because I have been playing video games since the 1900s.) When I was a kid in the 1980s, I played Super Mario Bros. (on the original Nintendo). It was a 2D platformer game, so the character was constrained to move within the flat, two-dimensional TV screen. In this game, you played as Mario, and your goal for each level was to reach the flag at the end. In order to achieve this goal, you could basically move in one direction: to the right. You also had limited movement up, down, and left—in order to avoid obstacles and stomp on enemies—but the play experience of the game was a rightward march.
In addition to each level being one-directional, you had to proceed though each level in order. Level 1.2 followed 1.1 and was followed by 1.3. After defeating the first world in 1.4, the next followed with 2.1. A few secret warp areas allowed you to skip over certain worlds, but even these did not allow you to do levels in a different order. They merely skipped you down the sequence.
In more recent years, many games seek to supply more freedom. Some of this is due to improvements in technology, allowing for 3D games that provide a whole new axis of movement (up/down, left/right, forwards/backwards). But even a 3D game can have levels with a clear goal and constrained trajectory, and those levels can proceed in a determined order.
There is a genre of game, however, that seeks to free the player of even these constraints. These games get the label “open world” since the idea is that you can travel wherever you want to go in it, and you can decide what objectives you wish to pursue in whatever order you want. Because of this freedom, open world games have a gameplay experience that is arguably more realistic. In real life, I am not constrained only to walk down hallways from one end to the other seeking a fixed goal. Rather, I can choose whether or not I want to walk down the hallway, and I can instead go downstairs to the kitchen or exit the building so I can enter another or go get on an airplane and fly to Australia.
Breath of the Wild and Minecraft are two open-world games that I will describe in more detail, pointing out differences in the amount of freedom each game gives to the player’s choices. Determining which game provides a more realistic gameplay will highlight two different ways that we can think about the world.
I will begin with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In this game, you play as a young man named Link, and at the beginning you wake up in a cave with no supplies. Upon exiting the cave, you see a beautiful landscape spread out before you. Soon you meet a man who sends you on a cleverly designed set of missions that teach you how to play the game. After completing these, you are told where the main enemy is—you can see the castle he has occupied in the distance—and that Princess Zelda is there fighting him.
And then you are turned loose. You can go wherever you want in the landscape: across deserts, over mountains, through rivers. But more than that, you can choose what tasks to perform and what order to perform them in.
You can go straight to the castle that contains the main enemy, seeking to defeat him in battle and save the world. You will die before reaching him, since you are weak and the castle is surrounded by robots with lasers. But you can still choose that path.
You can choose instead (more reasonably) to do the parts of the main quest that strengthen you and prepare you to fight the final boss eventually. In doing this, you will learn the history of what has taken place in the world, what the enemy has done and how he has been resisted. You will also get to participate in the resistance by helping other heroes save their villages from the influence of the enemy. This latter part is particularly satisfying, given that the designers have crafted the story so that each time you help save a village, it changes the landscape in a way you can see from a great distance.
Or you can choose to ignore the main quest and instead talk to the many characters scattered throughout the land. They will often have requests for you, sending you off on a variety of side quests. These interactions are sometimes written humorously, bringing a comic element to the game.
You can also ignore people and instead look around the countryside for shrines—buildings that contain tests of various sorts. Some are designed to test your fighting ability (my least favorite). Some test your targeting skills, such as whether you can get a ball into a hole at a distance. And some test your ability to solve a puzzle, manipulating the objects in the room in order to achieve the desired result.
Finally, at least among the options I will discuss here, you can simply explore the world. It has a variety of terrain, from deserts to grassy hills to snowy mountains. The game cycles between day and night, so you can encounter those landscapes in different lighting—including beautiful sunsets. It is worth exploring the entire map, even the areas that do not have much to do with the main quest of the game. The designers have often tucked away interesting things to find—shrines, characters, unique natural features—even in the most remote locations.
With all this freedom of choice, Breath of the Wild is quite lifelike. In real life, if you are turned loose in a wilderness, you can choose where to go. (That is, if you do not die first.) And in real life, if multiple tasks are available, you can choose which to undertake. The gameplay is realistic.
Of course, there are games that provide even more freedom and so are potentially more lifelike. Minecraft is one such game. It gives only one instruction as you begin playing: Survive. Other than that, you are assigned no tasks and given no tutorial. (Fortunately, the first time I played I was with my then-eight-year-old, and he gave me tips.) So, unlike Breath of the Wild and like real life, you do not start off with someone telling you exactly what your main goal is and how to accomplish it.
In fact, all the goals are up to you. You can mine, collecting the game’s many underground resources (dirt, stone, iron, gold, diamonds, etc.). Or you can collect plant and animal resources, either by roaming or by starting a farm. There are so many resources to collect in the game that you could make collecting them your main goal.
Or you can take those resources and craft. In Minecraft, you can build pretty much anything you want. You could build a mansion to live in. You could build a railway in a glass tunnel under the ocean. You could build a town where the Eiffel Tower and Sphinx are on either side of the White House. Your goal in the game could be to create whatever magnificent visions pop into your head.
You can also, as in Breath of the Wild, make your goal to explore. Minecraft has a variety of biomes to find and examine. A few of my favorites are badlands, mangrove swamps, and cherry blossom groves. Unlike Breath of the Wild, however, the Minecraft world is not laid out according to an established map. Instead, the whole world is randomly generated and practically infinite. Each biome has characteristic features, but which one you start in, how it is laid out, how big it is, and what biomes it borders are all random. This can make things exciting because if you travel in one direction, you never know what you will find. On the other hand, it could be that you will keep traveling and not find anything of much interest.
Setting your own goals is so much a part of Minecraft that even going to an area called the “End” and fighting the boss there (the Ender Dragon) is both optional and not actually the end of gameplay. Things pretty much continue on as before after you have defeated it. (I only know this from having read about it. Fighting is my least favorite part in Minecraft, so I have made other things my goals.)
Let me now summarize a few key features of the two games, so that I can return to the question of which is more realistic. First, both games allow freedom of movement, allowing you to explore wherever you want to in the world. However, Breath of the Wild is designed so that pretty much everywhere you go you will find an interesting landscape feature or gameplay element. By contrast, in Minecraft, you never know what you will find in any given direction or whether there will be anything of interest there.
Second, both games give you freedom to choose what you want to do. In Breath of the Wild, these tasks are handed to you by the game, whether they are pieces of the main quest to defeat the enemy or side quests presented by random people. As you complete them, you are making progress in the game: getting closer to defeating the main boss, satisfying the people, or solving all the shrines. In Minecraft, on the other hand, there are a variety of things you can do, but what you do and why you do it is completely up to you—the game does not “hand” you any tasks. In addition, there is no sense of making progress in the game besides what goals you assign yourself. If you decide to fence off a village to protect it from zombies, you can do so, and when you have, you have made progress (in the sense of having done what you purposed to do). Even this progress is limited, though, given that the world in the game is functionally infinite. After you have fenced off that village, there will always be another, so your goal cannot be “protect all the villages.”
So, which game is more realistic? There is definitely a case to be made for Minecraft. In real life, we are not handed specific tasks by each person we meet. We are not told right after we are born, “Here is the main goal of your life, and there in the distance is the specific place where you will complete it.” We set goals for ourselves and often feel unsatisfied when we have reached them, realizing the need to set a new goal. It is also the case that as we go through life (“explore” it), we can go through times and places where it feels like nothing interesting is there to be found, like everything is random.
I would like to bring in another consideration before deciding which game is more realistic, however. At the beginning of this article, I said that the answer as to which game is more realistic hinges on what view of reality we have. Specifically, the question is whether the real world has meaning.
Many people answer this question by saying that any meaning in the world is something I bestow on it. I choose what life paths will feel significant to me, and achieving the goals at the end of these paths will provide my life with meaning. I could decide that my dream is to win an Olympic gold medal. Maybe I want to be famous for the stories I write. Or perhaps I have more modest goals, such as getting married and having a family or becoming a doctor and helping sick people. Thinking about meaning in this way is to see the world like Minecraft. I can embark on a huge variety of activities in the world, and which ones I choose to make my goals, which ones will give me meaning, is up to me.
Of course, looked at another way, saying that meaning is up to me is another way of saying that life has no meaning. If I am never able to write those stories, then I am never able to get famous for them, and so I can see my life as lacking significance—as meaningless. Or, even if I achieve my goal, it might not end up providing the satisfaction I was hoping for. Michael Phelps has won more Olympic gold medals than anyone else, but he has explained how after the Olympics he would become depressed. Even after winning a record eight gold medals in 2008, he experienced depression when “coming off that high after doing something you set out to do your entire life.”1 One way to describe depression is as a feeling that nothing is worth doing—that there is no meaning. Not just fame and medals are subject to let-down, however. I may also fail to have a family or to help sick people, and even if I do succeed at these, they may prove to be less satisfying than I had hoped.
Minecraft also illustrates this lack of meaning. At least it did for me. After I learned how the game worked, I set myself a few long-term goals, including making it to an area called the Nether and acquiring there the supplies needed to make potions. The game was exciting and fun as I went about pursuing them. Eventually I achieved them all. At this point, it struck me that now it was just up to me to set new goals. What is more, I had not accomplished anything objectively significant in the world. Yes, I had obtained the ability to make potions, but this is really just the possibility of setting new goals for myself—ones that require potions. Anything I had done was only significant to the world as long as I continued to see it as significant, and there would always be an infinite amount of the world untouched by me. Since there was no meaning to what I was doing in terms of the game, and since I currently had no goals of my own, I decided to stop playing for a while.
There is another way to see reality, however, one where we remember the existence of God. If God exists, then the world has meaning. Let me explain by illustrating with Breath of the Wild.
In this game, there is a main goal: Defeat the enemy. In the real world created by God, there is also a goal: Love God. True, it is not announced to you as you wake up from a deep sleep. It is also true that achieving the goal of loving God is not always as straightforward as storming a castle and dispatching the villain. But it is a real purpose set by my creator. It provides my life meaning. And since God is the one who set this goal, it will not disappoint.
The existence of God also matters when I think about exploring the world. As I navigate the real world, I am interacting with the world God made. It is not random. Notice that in my description of Breath of the Wild, I kept referring to the “designers” of the game. Playing the game is a constant interaction with its designers and what they built for you to see and find. Real life is like that as well. As I go through the world, it may feel at times like things are random or uninteresting. But every single thing I encounter is a creation of God. My journey through the world is steeped in meaning because it is continually interacting with my creator.
So, I would like to propose that of the two games I have looked at, Breath of the Wild has the more realistic gameplay. The most realistic game is not the one that gives maximal freedom—freedom to create meaning. Rather, a realistic game will reflect our freedom to interact with a meaningful world.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Colloquy, Gutenberg College’s free quarterly newsletter. Subscribe here.
