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It occurs to me that there should be a Buddhist computer game. It would be just like any other computer game, but with infinite lives. No matter how well or badly you play the game, win or lose, it just restarts with you controlling a different character. And there would be no ‘quit’ option, no way to make the game cease. Some people might wander away from the game, avoid it completely, but it would keep running. In fact, the only way to exit the game would be to be present but not playing, allowing your character to collect bonuses and suffer pitfalls, without being involved in either. Working out how the game would detect this state is left as an exercise for the advanced philosopher.

In fact, the idea of a Buddhist computer game has been posited before, but they tend to limit themselves to promoting the five precepts. This idea, in contrast, goes deeper to samsara itself (samsara is the Sanskrit name for a type of torture wheel, and is used to refer to the cycle of endless rebirth and suffering), and is perhaps subconsciously influenced by Geoffrey James's idea from ‘The Tao of Programming’:

A master programmer passed a novice programmer one day. The master noted the novice's preoccupation with a hand-held computer game. "Excuse me," he said, "may I examine it?"

The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the master. "I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium and Hard," said the master. "Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human."

"Pray, great master," implored the novice, "how does one find this mysterious setting?"

The master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it underfoot.

And suddenly the novice was enlightened.

In effect, the idea is already expressed by multiplayer games with respawns. Often if you have played and had a bad outcome (quite apart from any external idea of playing “well” or “badly”), you will choose to keep playing, but as a different character class or from a different starting point. Similarly is the choice of rebirth entirely in the hands of the individual, but when you are too engrossed in the game, you click ‘respawn’ without even being aware of doing it. And just like the choice of rôle in the game is in the hands of the player, the Buddha-nature is reborn into a new body depending on the karma the individual has brought himself.

Philosophising aside, IMO a truly Buddhist game would promote mindfulness and meditation by presenting a task that demands utmost concentration from the player, but interrupting every so often to ask you to describe the sound of your fingers hitting the keys, or the texture of your chair, or the feel of the draught in the room against your skin.