So, the more I’ve played World of Warcraft, the more I’ve noticed that it seems to correspond, spookily, to life itself.

As if you haven’t heard enough about the game from me, the way it works is that you create a character. This character can have a class (warrior, hunter, mage, paladin, etc.), and then have a number of professions (first aid, blacksmithing, cooking, etc.). The character fights through battles and works through quests, the entire time gaining experience. Once you get a certain number of experience points, you hit a level, and your statistics go up– you get to fight faster, hit harder, and so on. The most levels you can have in the game is 60, so if you’re playing the game, and you see a level 60 character running around, you know that person playing that character has been playing for a looong time.

But 60 is also the average human lifespan in real life. Which is where World of Warcraft starts to get interesting.

When you first create your character, everything is pretty easy. You don’t have many abilities, so there’s not much to do but run around and hit stuff. You gain experience very quickly, and your quests are super easy, so you shoot up in levels very quickly. Your character changes fast, because every level you get a neat new ability that you never knew existed, but you’re coddled everywhere– lots of in-game people are telling you exactly what to do, and treating you with baby gloves, because, up until level 15 or so, you are still a baby. No, you don’t actually look like a baby in game, but it seems to work the same as I remember life working as a kid: you learn lots of stuff fast, and the older folks kind of take care of you.

After you hit 20, it’s time for you to head out to another area of the game, and it gets harder. Now, the animals you were pounding on before start to pound on you. Where before you might get instructions like “Go to this person, who’s just left of the big barrel on Maple St.”, after 20 you start to get instructions like “Go to this person. She’s somewhere south of here.” By the time you hit 35 or 40, the quests get really hard– it could take up to an hour or so just to finish off a quest that you used to blow through. And the monsters are harder, too– they all come at you hard, and usually in twos or threes.

And it occurs to me that this is what happens in life, too. Once you’re a grownup, things get tougher. It takes a long time to finish things (when you were a kid, your biggest project was usually finished by dinnertime). There’s often no safety net, and a lot of times, you just don’t have any idea where you’re going.

But here’s the saving grace of playing a character up to the higher levels: The toys all get better. Much, much better. You get more abilities than you’ve ever had, and really cool ones. You can do things like stop monsters in their tracks. You can learn to heal your teammates, or make them really strong, or even bring them back from the dead. One class can tame any animals you see, and it’s much cooler to have a gorilla as a pet than a deer (which is what you get at lower levels). Your equipment gets better, too– there are swords you can get that will not only hit for damage, but attack with magical spells, too. It’s still not as easy to beat the bad guys, but you’re given so much more cool stuff to do it with.

Which is the way it works in life as well. When you’re older, you get to have a car, your own house, your own stuff. You get to use things like irony, and sarcasm, and love (you may have thought you used that stuff as a kid, but trust me, no one took you seriously enough to let you use that). You get the coolest toys, and you don’t have to get anyone’s approval to buy what you want or do what you want to do. Sure, things are still harder than they were, but you’ve never had so many cool abilities to take on the world with.