That sounds pessimistic doesn't it. Sucks that its true.
Let me first preface this by throwing this mindset at you: Your life is a story, and you are the hero of that story.
When you die, imagine your life in movie form, and you as the hero. How awesome would your movie be?
Well, unfortunately for the vast majority of people their movie would quickly be thrown into a trashcan as they went back to Netflix to watch little kids save their friend from a Demogorgon.
The average life is: job that brings no happiness, plop on couch and watch someone with an exciting life, sleep, repeat. My first point is we need a way to change our stories.
And holy crap, let's say someone breaks this cycle and tries to do something exciting over the weekend. Laser tag might be fun, two times. Bowling might be fun, two times. These "fun" activities quickly lose their fun after a couple of times.
These activities are a one time activity that rid of boredom, short term. Once or twice they might be a fix to add some fun or excitement into your life, but that is it. They are not a long term fix that can continuously bring fun, or even make your story more exciting.
We need a long term cure.
First, your job is a big part of your story. Make it something exciting to you and make sure you will love it.
But where I come in is where your job stops. Free time outside of working can be completely transformed to make our lives into exciting stories - and that is what I strive to do.
I want to create forms of activities that aren't short term, like laser tag. Play for five minutes and the winner is at the end. If you play a season long, the winner is chosen in three months. Ya that is cool to win, but that is such a boring story.
Time to create something you can do outside of your job, with your friends and family, to create a story. A long term game or activity - and this game or activity can be based in reality or far fetched ideas calling upon creativity.
Imagine a catalogue of stories, or picture a video game room. Different storylines, different plots - you and your friends can pick one and begin. Except unlike a videogame, the storyline is based in reality with YOU as the hero.
It is almost an MMO in real life - millions of people could be choosing to play the exact same story as you, but they are still the hero of their story through their lens. The story will be ongoing, much like an MMO. Large events will happen to excite everyone who plays - such as one day a massive event happening that no one was prepare for.
The catalogue can range from new sports, to dungeons and dragons. There will be something for everyone.
The next step would be to take that story, and begin to tie it with the real world to add immersion. For example, imagine driving through a coffeeshop Disney created, and looking through the window seeing Mickey make your coffee. Small, but really really ups the immersion. Doing multiple things like this could make the story feel so, so real. Tying the story with reality in different places would be so cool.
Now these mission oriented would make our stories more amazing, and more exciting. It definitely would help people get up out of bed in the morning. But there is a second part of the problem which is social entertainment.
Not all entertainment should be mission oriented, sometimes people just want to have some fun that doesn't effect anything. Wanting to have fun, and doing activities that ruins your storyline would not be cool. So I have another idea: social activities. Now these are your standard laser tag, bowling, etc. And you already know my problem with these: they get boring so quickly.
My idea is to create REPEATABLE social games. Games that you could do every day if you wanted to. The idea is to apply principles stolen from video games. Fortnite changes it's themes every season to keep things interesting. Games have added battle passes giving you additional challenges within the games. So apply some of these methods to real life social games - Mini golf this summer is Egyptian themed but when Fall hits, the entire course looks completely different and it is alien themed. And as you play golf, if you "get 10 hole in ones" or "sacrifice your score to make your buddy lose," you get tangible rewards such as an exclusive miniature golf ball or legendary golf club. On top of that is competitive rewards, where each game is tied to an app - if all players choose yes - which will contribute to their group games. If your family goes regularly, this would create a group. Each game all players agree, this game would be counted. The winner would get a point at the end of the game. This competitive feature would create more games played as well. There are many many more ideas that could be implemented as well.
But I also want to make NEW forms of social entertainment. The newest we have is escape rooms, which are amazing, but are so similar. My business will continuously make new social innovations. Imagine being on a game show - but you don't have to wait months to see if you got accepted. Just schedule a time, and show up with your friends. Making a game show an actual activity instead of something you would be lucky to do. Maybe the game show could be uploaded to youtube as well.
My goal is to make the world more fun. And these are just the beginning ideas.
Chase Taake
