Intelligent people doing intelligent things – that’s something I love to see. What could be greater than that? Resourceful people being highly resourceful. I’m in captivity you see but I can still think about lots of things, albeit in a limited sort of a way since I’m wearing one of those brain-damping helmets that stops you from being too intelligent.  I was trying to work out a whole new type of universe that could be run as a game in one of those new advanced quantum super computers that they’re all talking about. It occurred to me that the reason we do things in life is to obtain ego validation, so for example I might excel in performing my civic duties so as to receive a mention in the New Year’s Honour’s List, or I might invent a new thing so as to go down in the history books as a great inventor. I might perform daring actions in the field of military conflict so as to be decorated and declared a hero. I might successfully market a product so as to win the ‘Young Businessman of the Year’ award and also make lots of money. All these things and more I might do. What I’m saying here is commonly understood of course – there’s nothing new here. But where my particular stroke of genius lies is in what comes next however: suppose – I thought to myself – it were possible to build a virtual world in which the ego could accumulate all of these validations and more without any real effort on its part? Suppose that instead of having to do lots and lots of difficult stuff with the odds being very much against you anyway, no matter how hard you try (for example if you perform highly daring acts in a military conflict scenario the chances are that you will simply be killed immediately, as everyone knows) all you need to do is plug yourself into the game and straight away you’ve attained it all, you’ve attained everything that it is possible to attain in one fell swoop. Just imagine how great that would feel! This would go far beyond our normal understanding of ego validation, as you might imagine. The sky’s the limit when you’re setting the parameters yourself. The sky literally is the limit. Suppose for example – just off the top of my head – you single-handedly save the human race from alien multi dimensional beings which attack us in our dreams and influence us so as to become obsessed with something incredibly stupid so that the aliens can just waltz in and take over without anyone so much as lifting a finger because we’re all far too preoccupied with whatever mind-junk it is that the aliens have provided us with to obsess over and then you come along and start a war of rebellion against our cruel alien overlords and you utterly defeat them, after many battles, many defeats that you nevertheless recover from with incredible tenacity and heroism. How much will people admire you for that, do you think? You’ll never have to buy yourself another pint as long as you live! Just imagine how good you’d feel. That warm ego-glow within you – so rich, so satisfying, so vindicating. All the people that said you were a useless tosser and that you would never amount to anything – how wrong they were! How very wrong they were. All the teachers that mocked and derided you and poked fun at you in front of your classmates, how bad they will feel about that now! And you’ll be riding high, so very high… I knew I was onto a winner with this idea, I knew it in my bones. Then I realised that I had been thinking on too small scale, a puny scale, an insignificant scale. I’d missed the obvious development of this idea. How could I have been so stupid, I asked myself? I’d missed the idea that was right there staring me in the face – the biggest of them all. Not just the idea of a lifetime, the idea of ten thousand lifetimes, the idea of a million lifetimes. I had invented the Game of the Demiurge…