Once all the hard work's done, you get to test out your skills on a blank canvas, seeing how many orcs you can kill in as many different ways or as quickly as possible. It's great fun, and feels a proper reward for your achievements. Of, you know, killing lots of orcs. God talking about games sounds lame sometimes.
Anyway, bouncing off John Scalzi's famous quip that being a straight white male was playing life on easy mode, I thought I'd refine that - being a white straight male (or to list all my privileges *deep breath* a straight cis white able-bodied slim home counties privately-educated Oxbridge male from a loving stable two-parent wealthy book-filled household in a wealthy part of a wealthy country surrounded by lush green space) is like playing the bonus round.
Having by virtue of being born almost all the stuff that everybody else is working their way through the game to get, for their children if not even for themselves, playing to win seems to miss the point a bit. Anything short of Prime Minister is basically a disappointment. And even Cameron can't really look at himself in the mirror and be too impressed with an Etonian petty aristocrat having made it to No. 10.
I hereby pledge to treat my life as the bonus round of a videogame. That means doing something impressive, but impressive in the same way that achieving a triple Scourge of Mordor combo or jumping a motorbike off Liberty City's highest building is impressive. It doesn't mean attempting to make money or climb the career ladder. That shows quite a staggering lack of imagination to me. Any white straight privately educated male who sees all the extraordinary world laid out in front and thinks that money or prestige are the best things to gain in it has not been paying much attention. Those are the things to lust after when you're struggling, not when you're cruising.
So go and do some backflips in life. Go crazy. Go help people. The risk for you is so comparatively light it's almost insulting to everyone else not to. And there are plenty of people to whom I wish I could go back in time, to that Home Counties private school, the people who wanted to win all the rugby matches and come first in all the tests and see life as an endless competition and just put a hand on their shoulder and say "It's fine. It's OK. You've already won."
Because if more straight white males realised they'd already won, they'd be a lot happier, have a lot more fun, and probably sort out a lot more problems.
Or they could fill up the courtyard of a castle with watermelons. Whatever floats their boat.
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