The real adventure in school is finding a way to make the journey more enjoyable.

To some, the notion that any level of enjoyment can be had in college is nearly impossible to fathom. Without the proper view, college will always seem a rather drab affair. For these people, I offer this simple idea which has helped me along the way.

Gaming has always been my outlet of escape when the trials of life have left me drowning in boredom. So, I began seeing the challenges in college as games. Thus, I became determined to rank high on the leaderboard.  This is not difficult to imagine as the structure behind many of the experiences in college is similar to that within many games.

A research paper, that possible element of a class that sends chills through many students, is essentially a puzzle. One must solve it by finding all the pieces, or evidence, and combining them into a narrative that supports the thesis. The knowledge gained through this could be thought of as the experience one gains when completing a role-playing game.

Once students gain enough experience, they progress on to the next level. In many classes, this trait is shared between both entities as a numerical value. Hence, Algebra is level 1, Geometry is level 2, Trig is level 3 and so on.

Overall, the similarities are obvious to anyone with a long history of gaming. In MyMathLab, a program commonly used by math students to complete homework, students are given up to three attempts on a problem before they must try again with a new problem. This easily resembles the dynamics of the game Super Mario Brothers where a player is given three chances, called “lives,” which, if failed, means that the player must restart from the beginning once more.

The last “boss,” or challenge, in each game is the player’s final examination, which is meant to test the accumulated skills gained while playing. A high GPA is exactly the same as having the top score on an arcade title or the leaderboards present in many online games. The degree that awaits the student who has completed college’s many challenges is a reward similar to the Triforce in The Legend of Zelda. Fortunately, a degree offers far more than the brief sigh of relief the player feels after besting Bowser or Ganon or saving the eggs of the Angry Birds.