Lift the Veil / No. 26 / Science, Metaphysics, AI

Is Life aVideo Game?

The physics, the brain science, and the ancient texts that say reality renders, repeats, and respawns. Explained so it finally makes sense.

byCHRIS12 min readAustin, TX

Is life a video game? Not provably, but it behaves like one in measurable ways. The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics confirmed that particles do not hold fixed properties until they are measured, your brain renders only what you pay attention to, and ancient traditions from Egypt to Tibet describe a life review followed by a return. Read life as a game and its rules get simple: lessons repeat until learned, every level brings a new boss, and you write part of the story.

You have felt it. Same fight, different partner. Same boss, different job. Same wall, different year. Like you already died on this level and the game dropped you right back at the checkpoint.

That feeling is not random. It is a pattern. And once you see the pattern, you can play it differently. Let's lift the veil.

Did a Nobel Prize prove we live in a simulation?

The short answer: a Nobel Prize changed how we see reality, but not in the way the headlines suggest.

The prize most people mean is the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, not the Peace Prize. It went to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger. They ran experiments on entangled photons, light particles that share one state across any distance (Nobel Prize, 2022).

Their tests broke something called Bell inequalities. In plain words: the universe cannot be both local (things only affected by their surroundings) and real (things hold definite properties before anyone checks). Headlines summed it up: the universe is not locally real.

MEASURED

A particle's answer is not set until it is measured.

Measure one entangled photon and its partner's result is instantly correlated. No script was written in advance. Fifty years of tests agree.

The honest part: the Nobel committee never said we live in a video game. That leap comes from a match people noticed. Game engines also leave things undefined until a player looks. Physicists still argue about what the result means, and whether we give up locality, realism, or both.

Fact check: the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics went to John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis for quantum behavior in electrical circuits, the hardware behind quantum computers. Also real. Also not a simulation verdict.

The prize did not prove the game. It proved reality waits to be asked before it answers.

Does the universe only render when you look?

Every open world game you have played is mostly empty until you turn your head.

Try it: the observer lens

Drag, hover, or tap to observe.

Unobserved tiles flicker as 0s and 1s. The lens collapses them into terrain. Turn on memory to keep what you have seen.

Rendered 0% Compute saved 100%

You just watched frustum culling. Here is what it is and why physics looks the same.

Game developers use a trick called frustum culling. The engine only draws what sits inside the player's view. Everything behind you exists as data, not pixels.

Quantum physics looks similar. A particle is a cloud of possibilities until measured, then it "collapses" into one result. Physicists also found the quantum Zeno effect: measure a system often enough and it stays frozen in place. In 1990, researchers at NIST held beryllium ions in their starting state just by checking them repeatedly (Itano et al., 1990).

Your brain is a render engine too

MEASURED

About half

of people counting basketball passes missed a person in a gorilla suit walking straight through the scene (Simons and Chabris, 1999). Their brains never rendered it.

MEASURED

1 hole

Try it: bring the screen close, about a hand's length from your face. Close your left eye and stare at the +. Keep your eye locked on the + while the red dot slides. At one point it vanishes. That gap is always there.

in each eye, the blind spot where the optic nerve exits. You never notice it because your brain paints the gap in.

Here is why that matters: the rendering is not only out in space. It is happening behind your eyes right now.

Neuroscientists call this predictive processing. Your brain does not record like a camera. It predicts what should be there, then checks against a thin stream of sensory data (Clark, 2013). What you call "the world" is your brain's best render.

You are not watching reality. You are watching your brain's render of it.

Is reality made of code?

The physicist who coined "black hole" thought the deepest layer of reality was information.

John Archibald Wheeler called it "it from bit." His idea: every "it" in the universe comes from yes or no answers given at measurement. Matter is the screen. Information is the source.

Now the wild part. Game designers borrowed quantum math to build worlds. An algorithm literally named Wave Function Collapse, released in 2016 by developer Maxim Gumin, fills a blank map with "superposition" tiles. It collapses one tile, then ripples rules outward until a whole world appears (Gumin, 2016). Indie hits like Townscaper and Bad North use versions of it.

Coders trying to build convincing worlds ended up copying particles. Coincidence or clue.

Code is how we speak worlds into existence

This one comes from my own work building software. When we code, we are literally creating what we want to see. We speak to technology in a language, and what we describe appears.

Entire realities. Whole experiences. The only limit is the technology we have available. Communicate clearly with the machine and it changes what is real on your screen, and often in your life.

ZOOM THE GAME

Slide all the way in, then all the way out. Watch what changes and what does not.

You

10⁰ meters

The avatar. About 37 trillion cells running one player.

Seen with: your senses

Now zoom out. A video game is simply a reality inside another reality. So which reality are we part of?

You can keep zooming in and out of life and find new layers every time. The only limit is the tools we have built to see the smaller and larger ones we have yet to discover.

PROPOSED TEST

In 2012, physicists Beane, Davoudi, and Savage proposed a test: if the universe runs on a simulation grid, the highest energy cosmic rays should show a faint pattern revealing it (Beane et al., 2012). No such pattern has been confirmed.

DEBATED

Physicist Melvin Vopson proposed a "second law of infodynamics": information in a system tends to compress over time, like a computer deleting redundant code (Vopson, 2023). It is published, early, and not widely accepted. Interesting signal, not a verdict.

When our best world builders copy physics to make games feel real, the line between game and world gets thin.

Are we Sims with a higher self holding the controller?

The Sims is short for simulation. Look closer and it reads like a manual for being human.

In The Sims, released by Maxis in 2000, each character has needs bars: hunger, energy, hygiene, fun, social, comfort. Let one drop and the Sim gets cranky or stuck. Your body runs the same dashboard. Neuroscience calls it interoception. If your energy bar never refills, start with Energy Without Stimulants.

The game also has a setting called free will. Turn it off and the Sim waits for the player. Turn it on and the Sim acts on its own until the player steps in. Many describe the higher self this way: autopilot most of the day, then a nudge. A gut feeling. A sudden knowing. That nudge is what I unpack in The Science of Intuition.

The science behind the controller idea

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that evolution shaped us to see a user interface, not reality itself. Your desktop shows a folder, but inside the computer there are only voltages. Hoffman says space, time, and objects are icons like that, built for survival, not truth (Hoffman, Singh, and Prakash, 2015).

So who is the player? That question is the heart of What Is the Soul? Physicist Tom Campbell goes further. In his My Big TOE model, consciousness is the player, the body is the avatar, and physical reality is a virtual reality built for learning. He and colleagues even published experiment designs meant to test it (Campbell et al., 2017).

MODEL

The higher self as player is a working model, not a measured fact. Here science hands the mic to metaphysics.

You are the Sim and the player. The work is getting them on the same team.

Why does time disappear on psilocybin and ayahuasca?

Games run on a clock called a tick rate. Pause it, and the world freezes while you keep existing.

People back from psilocybin or ayahuasca say the same thing. Twenty minutes felt like a lifetime, or hours vanished in a breath.

Brain imaging points to the default mode network, the system that runs your inner narrator, your sense of "me," and your mental timeline. Psilocybin lowers activity in its main hubs, and the strength of that drop tracks how intense the experience feels (Carhart-Harris et al., 2012). Ayahuasca quiets the same network (Palhano-Fontes et al., 2015).

Lab tests show it in the clock itself. Under psilocybin, volunteers lost accuracy timing intervals longer than about two and a half seconds (Wittmann et al., 2007).

MEASURED

Quiet the narrator, and the timeline loosens.

In game terms, it is the avatar's sync clock. Dim it and the player glimpses the world without a frame rate.

Safety first: psilocybin and ayahuasca are illegal in many places and carry real medical risks, including dangerous interactions with antidepressants. This is research, not a recommendation. Talk with a qualified clinician. For the full picture, read What Is Ayahuasca? My own story lives in my upcoming documentary, Dieta.

Time may be a setting of the avatar, not a law of the player.

Is Facebook the collective unconscious?

Every multiplayer game needs a server, a place where every player's world syncs up.

Carl Jung described the collective unconscious: a shared layer of the mind holding the same images and stories across every culture. Now look at Facebook. Log in and you plug into billions of minds at once. Scroll and you read the mood of the network. Open a chat and you go one on one, like proximity voice chat in a game.

Groups work like cities. Cities gather trades, beliefs, and personality types. Facebook groups do it worldwide: founders in one lobby, astrology nerds in another. Gamers call these guilds.

MEASURED

689,003

Facebook users were part of a 2014 study showing emotions spread through the News Feed. Show fewer happy posts, people post fewer happy words (Kramer et al., 2014).

MEASURED

About 150

Online networks show the same size limits as offline life, with tight inner circles of about 5 and 15 people (Dunbar, 2016).

The effect in the emotion study was small, but it was real. Moods move through the server. That is about as close to a measurable shared mind as data has gotten.

The feed is the collective unconscious with a scroll bar. Choose your lobbies like you choose your city.

Why do the same life lessons keep repeating?

In a game, you do not get the next level until you beat this one. Life runs the same rule.

Psychology has names for it. Freud called it repetition compulsion, the pull to recreate old situations. Schema therapy calls the patterns lifetraps: the same kind of partner, the same kind of boss, the same ending.

Brain science explains the engine. Dopamine neurons fire on prediction errors, the gap between what you expected and what happened (Schultz et al., 1997). No new response, no new error, no new learning. So the brain serves the same level again.

AI learned to play the same way

In 2015, DeepMind built an AI that taught itself dozens of Atari games using only the pixels and the score (Mnih et al., 2015). It lost. It died. It respawned. Thousands of times. Each loss updated its strategy until it played at a human level on many games. That method, reinforcement learning, is modeled on how your dopamine system learns.

Repeating a lesson is not punishment. It is the game giving you another life.

Is there a different devil at every level?

The old saying is game design in one line: new level, new devil.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found that people feel most alive in flow, when the challenge rises right alongside their skill. Too easy and you get bored. Too hard and you panic. Good games, and good lives, raise the difficulty as you grow. That is why the boss at 35 is not the boss at 20.

Ancient traditions mapped it first. Gnostic texts describe the soul rising through layers guarded by Archons, gatekeepers who only let you pass with the right words, the original cheat codes. Mythologist Joseph Campbell called them threshold guardians in the hero's journey.

Level	Common devil	What beats it
Survival	Scarcity and fear	Structure, one stable income stream
Belonging	People pleasing	Honest no's, chosen people
Achievement	Burnout, proving	Rest as strategy, recognition over hustle
Meaning	Doubt, isolation	Service, a body of work that outlives you

The table is my working model, drawn from flow research and the hero's journey. Your levels may run in a different order.

The devil at each level is proof you leveled up. A small game never sends a big boss.

Do ancient texts say we respawn after death?

We were taught you die and go to heaven. The oldest texts describe something closer to a stats screen and a reload.

Egypt: the post game review

In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Spell 125, the soul enters the Hall of Two Truths. The heart is weighed against the feather of Ma'at, truth and balance. Pass, and the soul moves on to the Field of Reeds. It is the oldest recorded life review, though Egyptologists read it as a journey onward, not reincarnation.

Enoch: the lobby

In 1 Enoch 22, Enoch is shown hollow places in a western mountain where the spirits of the dead are gathered and sorted into four groups until judgment. 2 Enoch describes heavens stacked like levels. I walk through all of this in The Crossing: What Happens When You Die.

Tibet and Plato: the respawn

The Tibetan Bardo Thodol guides consciousness through up to 49 days between death and rebirth. The visions are projections of your own mind. Recognize that and you exit the loop. Miss it and you load into a new life.

Plato's Myth of Er, in Republic Book X, is the clearest respawn screen in ancient writing. Souls review their past life, choose the next one, then drink from the river of forgetfulness before they are born (Plato, Republic X). Character select, then memory wipe.

ANCIENT RECORD

Review. Choose. Forget. Return.

Four cultures, separated by centuries, describe the same loop a game designer would build. Weigh the evidence in Is Reincarnation Real?, then dig into the lives before this one with How to Remember Past Lives.

Death in these texts is not game over. It is the loading screen.

How do you write your own part of the story?

The story is agreed on. Your moves are not.

Wheeler called it a participatory universe: observers do not just watch reality, they take part in shaping what gets measured. Your brain backs this up on a personal scale. Since it renders from predictions, changing what you expect and attend to changes what you notice, and what you notice changes what you do. That is the practical side of manifestation I break down in Prompt Your Subconscious.

Five moves to play your current level

Name the level. What skill is this season testing? Money, boundaries, patience, visibility?
Spot the loop. Find the scene that keeps repeating with a new cast. Same ending, new faces.
Find the boss. Name the fear or belief guarding the gate. That is the devil for this level.
Change one input. Give the old situation a new response. That creates the prediction error your brain needs to learn.
Check your character sheet. Know your build: your energy type, strengths, and timing. That is exactly what EDEN maps for you.

You cannot edit the game. You can always change your next move.

What do skeptics say about simulation theory?

A good player reads both sides of the map.

The evidence ladder: game mechanic by evidence strength

Tap a filter. Which game rules have hard data behind them, and which are still theory?

Undefined until measured

MEASURED

Bell tests, 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Personal rendering

MEASURED

Blind spot fill in, inattentional blindness, predictive processing.

Time as a setting

MEASURED

Default mode network changes and timing shifts under psilocybin.

Shared server

MEASURED

Emotional contagion on Facebook, network size limits.

Repeat the level

MEASURED

Prediction error learning, reinforcement learning AI.

Difficulty that scales

MEASURED

Flow research on challenge and skill.

Life review and respawn

ANCIENT RECORD

Book of the Dead, 1 Enoch, Bardo Thodol, Myth of Er.

Bosses at each gate

ANCIENT RECORD

Gnostic Archons, threshold guardians.

Reality is code

MODEL

It from bit, proposed lattice test, debated infodynamics.

Player and avatar

MODEL

Hoffman interface theory, Campbell's My Big TOE.

We live in a simulation

MODEL

Bostrom's argument. Probability, not proof.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2003 simulation argument says one of three things must be true: civilizations die before they can run simulations, they choose not to, or we are almost certainly inside one (Bostrom, 2003). That is a probability argument, not proof.

Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder pushes back hard. She calls the simulation hypothesis unscientific without testable predictions, and notes we cannot yet model the physics a universe simulation would need (Hossenfelder, 2021). Fair point. That is why the ladder you just used sorts every claim by strength.

You do not need to settle the simulation debate to use its rules. The rules work either way.

Key Takeaways

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics showed the universe is not locally real. It did not say reality is a video game.
Your brain renders a prediction of the world, which is why you miss gorillas and never see your blind spot.
Psychedelics quiet the default mode network, the brain's narrator and clock, which is why time bends.
Lessons repeat because learning needs a new response. Change one input and the level changes.
Ancient texts describe review, choice, forgetting, and return. The original respawn.

Frequently asked questions

Is life a video game?

Life has not been proven to be a video game. It behaves like one in measurable ways: the universe has no fixed properties until it is measured, your brain renders only part of what is in front of you, and lessons repeat until they are learned. The simulation idea is a model, not a settled fact.

Did a Nobel Prize prove we live in a simulation?

No. The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for experiments with entangled photons that violated Bell inequalities. Their work showed the universe is not “locally real,” which fuels simulation talk, but the prize made no claim that reality is a video game.

What does it mean that the universe is not locally real?

It means particles do not carry fixed, preset answers that only their surroundings can change. Entangled particles stay correlated across any distance, and their properties are settled when they are measured. Physicists still debate whether locality, realism, or both should be given up.

Why does time feel different on psilocybin or ayahuasca?

Both compounds quiet the default mode network, the brain system tied to your sense of self and your personal timeline. Lab studies show psilocybin changes how people judge intervals longer than a few seconds, which helps explain why minutes can feel like hours.

Why do the same life lessons keep repeating?

Your brain learns from prediction errors. When the same situation gets the same response, the pattern grows stronger, so you meet it again. Psychology calls this repetition compulsion, or a lifetrap. Change the response and the loop changes, like clearing a level.

Do ancient texts say we respawn after death?

Many describe a life review, and several describe a return. The Egyptian Book of the Dead weighs the heart, 1 Enoch sorts the dead into four places, the Tibetan Bardo Thodol guides consciousness toward rebirth, and Plato’s Myth of Er has souls choose a new life and forget the old one.

EDEN | GPS FOR THE SOUL

Decode the Game of Life.

Every game starts with a character sheet. EDEN reads yours through astrology, Human Design, numerology, and Gene Keys, so you know your build, what charges you, and the level you are on right now.

Stop guessing the controls. Play as the strongest version of you.

Decode the Game of Life

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Chris Douglas (byCHRIS) is a Creative Technologist in Austin, TX. He built Unify the Self, a personal brand ecosystem that helps multi-passionate people unify who they are into one brand and a practical business, and he designs the content, web, and software to run it.

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Sources

Every claim above comes from published research, primary texts, and expert work, so you can open the sources yourself.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2022, press release. NobelPrize.org. nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2022/press-release
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The Nobel Prize in Physics 2025, press release. NobelPrize.org. nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2025/press-release
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