* Photo: Mauricio Alejo * "Shall we play a game?"

For those of us who grew up playing videogames in arcades, hearing that computerized voice in WarGames was the moment when gaming became more than a frantic quest for quarters. That voice — tempting Matthew Broderick into nearly setting off a global thermonuclear war — signaled a new epoch: Reaching the next level in Donkey Kong wasn't enough anymore. Games could be serious.

Two decades on, that revelation is now conventional wisdom. From the military's use of America's Army for recruiting to quarterbacks researching tactics via Madden NFL, we've gone from games representing life to becoming life. Ask yourself: Do you believe that your club moves have improved from playing Dance Dance Revolution? Have your driving skills matured because of Gran Turismo? Does cleaning out your RSS reader remind you of playing Pac-Man? Does the action of the iPhone's bouncing icons recall Mario Bros.? Have you tried to convince your friends that the invasion of Sudoku and Tetris into your dreams is proof of high-level brain activity? Welcome to the arcade called you.

Of course, the basics of gameplay — competing against opponents, setting records, winning prizes — are as old as human civilization. But the gaming mindset has now become pervasive. We use game models to motivate ourselves, to answer questions, to find creative solutions. For many, life itself has turned into a game. Our online lives are just twists on the videogame leaderboards, where we jockey to get our blog a higher rank on Technorati and compete to acquire more friend-adds on MySpace than the next guy.

Even on more serious social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, you rack up friends, accrue hipster points, try to score high on identity tests. At iminlikewithyou.com — a dating site with bidding, competition, winners, and losers — you pose questions (or "games," in the parlance of the service) for potential mates to bid on, and the resulting interactions are less stilted and artificial than conventional online dating services. That's right, a gamelike environment feels more real than trying to mimic the experience of real-world dating.

And the gaming mentality continues right into the real world, where we are finding ways to compete for bragging rights in even the most mundane activities. Chorewars.com lets you turn the grind of household tasks into a quest for experience points. And who are those Prius hypermilers, obsessed with optimizing their driving techniques to wring every possible mile out of a gallon of gas, but Forza Motorsport players honing their skillz for a perfect lap?

Pop culture, too, abounds with game scenarios. Turn on the TV: Reality hits like Survivor, The Apprentice, and *American Idol *use psychological game theory to create competition, intrigue, and adventure. Even shows like Lost and 24, with their respective number theory and time obsessions, seem influenced by gameplay. (Lost is to The Legend of Zelda as 24 is to Pitfall! — it makes sense!) And the burgeoning phenomenon of ARGs (alternative reality games) — which pull the narrative thread of videogames into real-world environments — demonstrates that there's no escaping the game onslaught. With ARGs seeping into TV shows and commercials, you may be participating in a game without even realizing it. And as we play through our lives, we don't reach for a Coke — the pause that refreshes. Instead we grab a high-octane energy drink, a liquid power-up to refill our health bar.

As games and the gaming mindset take over our lives, they've also gone professional. In baseball, the cult of stats-guru Bill James has let a legion of fantasy baseball players enter the ranks of real-life scouts. There are competitive eaters, air guitar champions, pro gamers, poker players, WoW gold farmers — all now legitimate occupations.

Of course, some gamers deal in the semi-legitimate. With billions of dollars at stake, the line has blurred between principled players and unscrupulous schemers. Spammers and Digg manipulators represent the dark side, but their tactics differ only slightly from those of earnest search engine optimizers and prank-driven Google bombers. "Gaming the system" has become the prevailing narrative of our time.

How did we end up with a world we play like a game? It's no historical coincidence that gaming ascended right along with the rise of the information age. As the ever-rising flood of new data threatened to inundate our lives, we developed tools to organize all that information — sort it, filter it, cut it, mix it. Desktop editing apps let us manage our data, but they also let us manipulate it. As we got better at controlling pixels and bits, games became a handy metaphor. And more than a metaphor. Like a Sim city come to life, we've moved from a society that creates goods to one that solves puzzles.

As Broderick's character in WarGames asks the computer at one point, "Is it a game, or is it real?" The computer, which has now taken on a human identity, replies, "What's the difference?"

Rex Sorgatz (rex@fimoculous.com) wrote about T-shirts as media in issue 15.02.

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