The ‘Pasapalabra’ contest already has a winner and it is fascinating how the outcome of the program has summoned so many millions of people in front of the television, or pending the latest news about the lucky one. Families with their headaches, worries and illusions all overturned, expectant, before the result of a game, and no, it is not about that of the opium of the people. The gamification of life has been a fact for a long time, and at least since Shakespeare, the idea of the transience of life and that we are all actors on a stage has crept into our culture to the point of becoming a genetic inheritance: we are one generation after another of gamers, more or less aware that we are here successively passing screens and lives.
Rafa Castaño has won the highest jackpot in the history of ‘Pasapalabra’, but even if you have never seen the contest or are not interested, you will see in the different interviews he has given at the end of the program that they are a mirror in which we can all look at each other. What will the money be spent on?. How your life will change, how you got there, the secret to your success. Respect also for the opponent, Orestes, with a name that evokes great classical myths. Everything you want to know about the mystery of our irrepressible attraction to games is there, compressed into a handful of questions and answers.
Day-to-day life sometimes makes you the protagonist of a video game by jumping over obstacles: you solve tasks, get around problems, get rewards at the end of each screen, which can be a closed month, payroll, an approved budget, your commission. The youngest in the schoolyards have already normalized the use of the word NPC. You are an ‘enepecé’ if your role in life is accessory, like video game characters that provide assistance or serve to support the plot but are not protagonists, do not play or compete. The RAE has not yet collected this term that comes from English acronyms (‘non playable character’), but that role that is now used in a derogatory way among the youngest is not, and they will see it when they grow up, so irrelevant. There are moments in life when one would prefer to stop playing for a while and become that, in one more character that decorates a stage, without the constant pressure to make important decisions, the fear of losing that game. Even Orestes and Rafa, the finalists of ‘Pasapalabra’, will have crossed that dark path.
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Gabrielle Zevin has not devised a video game where Rafa and Orestes fit, but she splendidly portrays our ‘gamer’ generation, burning lives, until a final outcome? About Shakespeare and his Macbeth, another player undergoing painful tests in his case to obtain power, about video games, but above all about the life we live he writes the novelist of the bestseller ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’, the most recommended book of 2022 on the digital reader platform Goodreads. It already spreads word of mouth as a phenomenon that portrays us in these times. It is impossible not to connect with the story of the protagonists, who meet as children in front of an arcade machine in a hospital games room and meet again as programming students, passionate about video game design, which is also the design of other worlds where morality, dreams, expectations have another path to walk, new forms of expression. The game as a test of life and its possibilities, trying again and again, in a loop that gives us the illusion that it is infinite so that we can continue there, betting on moving forward despite everything, because nothing is final: lose or win in a game there is always another possibility to start over.
‘Pasapalabra’ continues, with other players, and Rafa will soon start a new game where he will have to choose how he wants to live the rest of his life. To continue playing.