I could never handle video games for more than a few hours at a time. After a while, my eyes would get sick of staring at those bulky tube TVs, I would get bored fighting monsters or shooting people in the face, and I would move on to the next terrible thing that ten year olds find amusing.

The exception is something that could only be conceived of in the great country of Japan. Harvest Moon is a game that transports the player to a magical world unlike anything they’ve experienced before: the world of menial labor. It is a farming simulator. You plant seeds in the ground, water them daily, and wait for crops to grow. But wait! You also have the option of taming mythical beasts such as: cows.

All my attempts to explain why I was so enamored by this game through elementary and middle school were met with skepticism. I remember my dad watching me play one afternoon, trying to understand the appeal.

“Is there something chasing you?”

“No.”

“What happens when you sell your crops?”

“You can buy more crops.”

“Hm.”

Every one of the 120 days that comprise a game year is spent performing at least some routine chores. You have to tend to your crops every day. You have to gather all the chicken eggs. Maybe if you’re feeling adventurous you could go into the mountains and gather some roots! By themselves, these tasks were not fun at all as you might expect. But something about the daily grind of a routine made the fun things much more potent. Going to bed at night knowing that the next morning I would have a field full of corn to harvest could actually cause me to grin like an idiot to the empty room.

Aside from the farming component, it was also a life simulator. While you weren’t doing chores, you could go into town and build up relationships with your neighbors, and could eventually marry one of five girls. In addition to allowing you to buy more seeds, the money your crops brought in could be put to use building upgrades to your house, farm, and tools. In the beginning you live in a tiny shack with a farm covered in weeds and rocks, and after a few years you could have a two story house with added rooms, a neatly subdivided farm, and tools make the tedious farm work easier. Just by waking up and going past your farm, you are surrounded by accomplishments that you remember working hard for. It’s a kind of satisfaction that explosions and head shots just can’t replicate.

Something particularly vivid for me was running through that isometric world during the summer, and hearing the sounds of cicadas in the background. It was a simple atmospheric decision that certainly enforced the feeling of summertime for the Japanese audience the game was made for, but I had no idea what the sound was supposed to be. After investing a lot of time as a kid playing through the game, that sound constantly droning in the background, the chirp of the cicadas began to encompass my romantic idea of a summer in Japan. I was not so naive to expect that life would one day be as idyllic as Harvest Moon, but yet I felt a strange sort of anticipation for the open-ended nature of life after school, and in the back of my mind I thought about how nice it would be to live in a place with cicadas chirping in the background.

I made somewhat of a jump to translate my feelings playing a video game into my feelings regarding the working world, but I would argue that it’s not so strange of a jump. I’ve always wondered why the excitement people get when playing role-playing games doesn’t translate to actual life. An amusing microcosm for this is watching people play The Sims. This is a life simulator game that is remarkably thorough in its dailiness. You have to go to the bathroom, take out the trash, pay bills, go to work. Sounds awful, right? It’s actually mind numbingly addictive. But any good player of The Sims knows that you don’t let your characters spend all day playing video games or watching TV. Your “fun” meter may go up, but it’s at the expense of all other meters signifying well-being. And besides, if you don’t spend some time developing relationships or improving skills, the game doesn’t really advance.

And yet.

Luckily, it seems that some creative people are finally figuring out how to make this jump easier to navigate, such as the makers of an iPhone app in which you can check real-life tasks off of your to-do list with video game like rewards. Spend some time at the gym? You can earn strength experience points. The whole concept simply adds a tongue-in-cheek mask to a simple but unpopular concept: working on something will cause you to get better at it. The objective with the iPhone app is still just to improve a fake character’s abilities, but in so doing, the player will unwittingly improve themselves.

These improvements can be internal, such as typical RPGs where you improve your stats, giving you new abilities, or capitalistic, in the sense that by working hard in Harvest Moon, one can buy a roomier house with more convenient features. Either way, the idea that the degree to which you “play the game” can lead to these improvements in both ways was always an abstractly exciting idea to me, and I looked forward to being in a situation that felt like the beginning of the role-playing games of my childhood. An open-ended adventure sits in front of you, and the extent to which you succeed or fail is dependent on your ability to forgo immediate pleasures in favor of reaching personal milestones.

It’s a slippery slope to interpret what I’m talking about as a condonement of rampant consumerism or cutthroat ambition. The objective of life should not be to live in the biggest house or have the most prestigious job. Also, the worth of a person cannot be measured objectively by the ratio of time devoted to work versus the time devoted to entertainment or relaxation. The impulse I’m referring to is far more eloquently personified by the life of Benjamin Franklin, who believed in self-improvement for its ability to transcend social hierarchies; the original rags-to-riches paradigm before the industrial revolution hit America. Himself the son of a candlemaker, he used ingenuity and industry to improve his social reputation in a way that would have been impossible in England during the time. Once he reached a position that could influence the world around him, he helped lay the foundations for America to become a society of go-getters. He opened the first lending library, created volunteer firefighting guilds and militias, spread wisdom through print with his Poor Richard’s Almanacks, and formed a Junto for like-minded learners to discuss intellectual topics of the day. It’s in Franklin’s meritocratic ideal of social mobility that I’m speaking; a concept from before the day the word “ambition” became a dirty one.

So many words, Mr. Henry. Three entries in a row about this. In an attempt to do what?

In an attempt to make sense of the bewildering amount of options that stand before myself and peers. In an attempt to come to terms with a world that no longer accepts the currency we have been using up to this point. In an attempt to convince myself that the best years of life are not behind us, but in recognition that an adaptation to a new paradigm is necessary. This is the stuff of commencement addresses, but it’s what I feel is currently necessary.

My tiny shack is a guesthouse room that is just big enough for a bed and a desk. My farm is my camera and computer. And instead of gathering roots, I must act intentionally to go to experience that in life which truly has value. By working hard in my job, I am able to afford an apartment of reasonable quality. In this sense, there is some level of excitement to living within my means in an attempt to save money and resources for the future. And yes, there is still the need for menial labor and dull routine, but the open-ended adventure still waits in the future. Riding forty minutes on a subway every morning is as much a part of it as the exploration will be.

But at least I’ll be able to do it with the sound of cicadas in the background.