There's a popular new movie streaming on HBO called Free Guy, starring Ryan Reynolds and Jodie Comer, in which a side character in a violent video game unexpectedly becomes conscious and seeks to "level up" by being a great guy instead of a bad guy. He goes around cheerfully stopping crime and helping people wake up to their potential -- including the bad guys -- and in the end he wins all characters their freedom from the violent world.
Watching this movie I was reminded of a vision I woke up into nearly five years ago in which I saw an important paradigm shift coming in how games are played. I wrote about it in a Facebook post in which I said...
I saw us go from competition to collaboration, from “my life” to “all of life” consciousness, and from narrow role playing to vast exploration of human potential.
We developed real and virtual games where the objective is to help the other team win. The goal is creativity and depth of impact for others, using our individual and collective skills, intellect and imagination. Everyone can play, and no one can lose.
We also developed games that have multiple objective decision trees, and each decision shows varying paths that reflect the potential for individual experience and collective impact. One can explore any decision deeply or change decisions at any time, and thereby explore evermore possibilities of life, at micro and/or macro levels. Decisions that limit personal or collective growth lead to a stage where alternative decisions must be made in order to advance. The more one discovers the greatest potential for individuals and the collective, the more points one wins.
These games change not just our thoughts but our *way* of thinking. They spark our curiosity to BE differently, thereby creating a different world as they illuminate and reward recognition of our interconnectedness. They dramatically alter our ideas of success and purpose, making obsolete old good-trumps-bad models of entertainment, education, governance, and spirituality. They break the cycle of conditioned belief in limitation and set us free to explore ALL of who we are as possibility-filled individuals populating our everything-is-possible humanity.
As I see a popular movie like Free Guy streaming into the collective consciousness now, planting seeds of a significant mindset shift in the violent world of video games, I'm excited to watch how the game "business" continues to shift. And not just video games. In both the most recent summer and winter Olympics there was rampant talk of the need to prioritize the well-being of the athletes over the glory of domination-at-all-cost.
These important shifts in the collective consciousness eventually create profound shifts in the world, but of course they take time. As I write this post, a war has begun in the Ukraine -- a violent game of domination and defense being played out by real characters who are not yet conscious to new possibilities. But as they say in India, "slowly, slowly..."