Are we being played or did we just happen to play ?

I think I will start with God.

I have always wondered about the big guy who seems to be out there just to get you - Bruce Almighty dealt with that angle in a more funny way. World over, people have wondered about the exact nature and function of the almighty - omniscience, omnipotent and omnipresent seems to be His/Her basic attributes. I mentioned 'Her' because the Hindu mythology dabble a lot with the female almighty; but for simplicity of contemplation, in future, I will refer to the 'alpha and omega' as Him.

So what is his deal anyway ?
There is a school of thought which considers the physical world as an illusion, where each individual is seemingly slugging it out for survival but in reality is just a plaything for Him. So let me try to explore that argument with my limited logic.
Consider that you are playing a board game or a role-playing game. Your avatar or that small plastic figurine has absolutely no control over its actions unless you decide on a course. Now you are infinitely more powerful than your avatar, simply because you can choose when to shut down the environment of its existence. But still you decide to play with it at times, confining yourself to a much smaller virtual world and character for a few hours for the sake of entertainment which you cannot have, if in your actual self. God, I think might be doing something very similar, we all could be part of His entity and he plays with us simply because it is more fun. The counter argument here could be that the avatars don't have a thought process of their own, but we do. Well, I guess we aren't there yet - the virtual world with artificial identities all of which are controlled by a different parts of the same player's very nature and each taking its own course, for our amusement. In such a world, the differentiation in characterization would be accomplished by randomizing the attributes of each, and commonality limited to only one aspect - survival.

Now, my understanding of the major religions in the world is that they all goad us into committing good deeds so that we can be with Him, once this 'life' ends. This fits well the 'Game theory' of explaining the physical world as we know it. The game ends and the character returns to the higher consciousness of the player. It is simply like flowing back to the ocean as droplets of water in a river or in rain. The ocean is very much there, regardless of how much water is vaporized by sun - it is just a cycle of birth and death.

So now the question arises, why all the suffering in the world when He can flip it all in a click of His fingers ?
Hmm...that is simply the biggest of all arguments atheists have against believing.
And the answer I guess, is beyond the limited intelligence we possess, like trying to measure all the water in the world with a spoon; but let's speculate.
I am reminded of the observation of Agent Smith in Matrix 1, when he is speaking to a tied up Morpheus. He said that 'Humans identify reality with suffering'. A similar observation could be made from the sci-fi flick 'Serenity', where the world of Miranda dies because the inhabitants were exposed to a calming agent which took away all the suffering, aggression and ambition - which invariably are the reasons and the will, to fight and live.
Now that, wont be a good idea for the sustenance of His 'Game'. So apparently, we need to fight for happiness, satisfaction and contentment, to be alive and to feel alive. I don't like this conclusion one bit, but I cannot counter the validity of the argument, as I have seen time and again how people simply never hit the 'ceiling of contentment' through all the pleasures and materialism in the world. To aim for the next higher target is what we are programmed for, sadly.
People with a higher 'social awareness' seems to have found a good solution for this endless rat race - expending their time, energy and resources for the betterment of others. Interestingly, the same logic applies to soldiers - fighting for a cause bigger than their individual selves. The takeaway in both cases is the 'collective consciousness', being part of the whole, redistributing the energies from surplus to deficit. The new movie 'Avatar' presents this very idea in a more beautiful physical world, one with a more tangible proof of this interlinking - and death of the individual is not the end of all. I would have actually like this idea to be better explored in the 'Harry Potter' series, where Prof. Dumbledore seemed so fearless with the idea of death, and it was just 'the beginning of another great journey' (and that was all we got to read about it).

I will come back to this line of thought in the future, maybe after exploring other explanations for the actions of the mysterious one.