Would You Still Choose That Game World If You Couldn’t Choose Your Character?

If you got to live inside a video game world, which one would you choose?

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Today’s prompt asks which video game world I would choose to live in. I am the wrong person to ask. A fortnight ago I confessed that my first video game had no screen at all: a circle in the dust, a few marbles and two pieces of wood.

So I did what an outsider should do. I read what the players chose. Among today’s answers I found a quiet farming village, the world of Pokémon, even the bare court of Pong. Each was chosen with confidence, and each rested on the same unspoken assumption.

1. Every answer arrives as the hero

No one imagines entering a favourite world as the man who sweeps the tavern floor. We picture ourselves as the player: the one who explores, collects, grows stronger and saves the day. That is natural. In a game, you are always the player.

2. Most of a game world is scenery

Every game is built around one person. Everyone else is what gamers call a non-player character: the shopkeeper, the guard, the villager who repeats the same three lines whenever you pass. They exist so that the hero’s story can happen. To live in such a world, rather than play it, means you would very likely be one of them.

3. A test from philosophy

In 1971 the American philosopher John Rawls proposed a test for a fair society.[1] He said we should choose its rules from behind a “veil of ignorance”, not knowing whether we will be born rich or poor, strong or weak, favoured or forgotten. Rules you would accept from any position are fair rules.

4. Run our favourite worlds through it

They change shape at once. Pong has two paddles and one ball, so you have a one-in-three chance of spending eternity being struck back and forth. In the world of Pokémon the trainers are few and the creatures many; you are more likely to live in the ball than to throw it. In the heroic kingdoms, someone must be the villager whose house burns in the opening scene so that the adventure can begin. In the cozy farming village, someone runs the small shop that the big new store is driving out of business.

None of this is a complaint against games. It is simply what the word “live” adds to the word “play”.

5. A poet who measured a kingdom from the bottom

Kamban, the Tamil poet who retold the Ramayana, gives many verses to the prosperity of Kosala, Rama’s homeland.[2] The verse most often quoted describes no palace. In Kosala, it says, there was no charity, because there was no poverty. There was no show of valour, because there were no enemies. Truth needed no defending, because no one lied. Kamban did not measure his ideal kingdom from the throne. He measured it from the place where a beggar would have stood, and found no one standing there.

6. The city with one cellar

Ursula K. Le Guin imagined the opposite in her 1973 story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”.[3] Omelas is a city of music, festivals and contented people. Its happiness depends on one child kept alone in a dark cellar, and every citizen knows it. Most make their peace with that. A few quietly walk away. Choose a world as its hero, and you may never visit the cellar. Choose it from behind the veil, and the cellar might be yours.

7. The fair objection

A gamer will say I have missed the point. Games are escapes, and nobody plays to be the baker. That is true, and for an evening there is no harm in being the hero. But the prompt does not ask where we would spend an evening. It asks where we would live, and living means accepting the place we are given. None of us chose our character in this world either. That is exactly why the test is worth taking.

8. My choice

So I would not choose the world with the grandest adventure. I would choose the one in which I could be content as its least important person. That person never enters the hero’s story and keeps a small field at the edge of the map. He is still safe, fed and fairly treated when the hero rides past. A few of the gentler worlds in today’s answers might pass that test. I shall not name one, because the name matters less than the test.

And the test does not stay inside the screen. The world we already live in deserves the same question: how does it treat the people nobody would choose to be?

Your turn: If you couldn’t choose your character, would you still choose your world? Tell me which world, and who you think you would most likely be in it.

Notes for readers

[1] John Rawls (1921 to 2002) was an American political philosopher. He set out the “veil of ignorance” in his book A Theory of Justice (1971).

[2] Kamban composed the Ramavataram, popularly called the Kamba Ramayanam, usually dated to the twelfth century. The verse appears in the Nattu Padalam (the canto on the country) of the Bala Kandam; verse numbers differ between editions. Its opening line runs “Vanmai illai or varumai inmaiyal”: there is no charity, for there is no poverty.

[3] Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 to 2018) first published “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” in 1973, and it won the Hugo Award for best short story in 1974. She subtitled it “Variations on a theme by William James”. In his 1891 essay “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”, James imagined a world whose happiness was bought by the lonely suffering of one lost soul.

John Britto Kurusumuthu

Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt, 11 November 2026: If you got to live inside a video game world, which one would you choose?

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