When I was a child I wanted to Do Great Things at all costs. By the time I was twenty years old, I was living in the heart of Manhattan studying acting, hard-driven, dying quietly inside.

Eventually I surrendered my early twenties to an unimpeachable sadness, an illness of the heart that literally ate me away.>During a year when sleep eluded me and standing was difficult, I started my first spindly-fingered, cautious attempts at writing in the vague hope it might lead to something sustaining. And when night came, some kind of terrifying pall I fought like a too-heavy blanket, I kept calm and took a little nourishment by playing Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town.

I don’t want to talk too much about what was wrong with me; it was ignoble, desperate, gutting. It’s good that I got better, that I negotiated a truce with life, and now we’re cool. There are already a million essays from people who say that video games dug them out of tragedy. I don’t need to add one.

But I do want to talk about life simulations, so.

At that time I had nothing resembling a life, yet in Harvest Moon I eked out a little plot of land and then grew it. I had nothing resembling consistency, but in this game I rose with the sun, I cared for my animals. No career, but I sold virtual crops with discipline, I invested thoughtfully. I had no social life, but in this game I could make gifts, make friends. In the game I built a kitchen where I could cook and eat all the things I could not, would not cook and eat in real life, and that was significant to me.

What’s interesting is the way games that simulate life slot into our real lives. They give us a sense of control over the uncontrollable, they flex the part of our brain that make us feel like skilled managers of growth. Within the context of a system, elements feel manageable.They call some large-scale simulations “god games” because you play god – but maybe they take a role in our lives like religion, a repetitive ritual that makes us feel less afraid, like success is always attainable because the system is fair.

These days, what I see people doing with smartphones and tablets resembles worship; they thumb and palm the screens, they divide their attention across the sort of distractionware that rewards them for daily input. They even tithe in the form of microtransactions (Ian Bogost has already done an art exhibition aiming to connect our relationship to iPhone games with religion).

Someone dear to me loves city-builders and procrastinates arch, less-tangible communications work in favor of managing a virtual restaurant on the iPad.

We get along in part because we have the same control issues, the kind that are salved by setting ever more complicated buildings, accruing resources, performing carefully-plotted rituals of maintenance. We were a similar kind of driven child. We’ll always be frustrated that we’ll never build real cities. We might not even concede it’s impossible, not wholly.

Harvest Moon’s persistent, sufficiently-complicated and charming simulation of entrepreneurship, of starting a new life in a new place and tugging oneself up in the world through patience and a healthy awareness of one’s own limited resources helped me, perhaps, feel that real life might be manageable in the same way – and in a large way, it helped me realize how much I loved games and that I had things to say about them.

To say that it “saved” me would make for one of those inspiring personal essays, but it wouldn’t be true.

It’s more accurate to say that it medicated me, depressurized me. The real world has no adoring chickens to pet, no spouses to be won by years of rice cake gifts. The real world has too many affordances, too many sliders, is overwhelming, unpredictable. Uncontrollable. You cannot ever know if you will “win” or at what cost. That’s terrifying.

It’s crushing, the kind of fear that once made me curl savagely inward on myself and stop time, stop growing, rather than step blithely up to the helm of adulthood. I think it’s what makes people curl their bodies over the screens in their laps, faces looming over miniature kingdoms that make them feel powerful.

So many of us have stories about how we got good at games because we could not get good at life. A week ago I lay awake at 4AM, shaking a hangover, lit by the phone screen. I was sweeping my virtual pet’s apartment. Only later did I notice my actual cats making restless noise in the kitchen. Exhausted I picked my way over patient laundry piles to the kitchen to feed them by fridge-light, because I haven’t changed the lamp bulb. On the table are all my terrifying tax documents, unpaid bills.

These are minor insults to me, really, considering where I came from. The social media platforms where we’re supposed to share all our achievements, in games and otherwise, make us increasingly ashamed of the reality of our inner lives, but we’ve all got them. We are imperfect. It’s mostly okay.

But then there’s Cart Life. It’s a game about making a simple life as a cart vendor, but unlike every other ‘life sim’ this one’s as far from self-gratifying and empowering as one can get. It celebrates the brutality, the tedium, the unfairness of life, and the quiet, unmagical victory inherent in going through the motions. You can be downtrodden, defeated; success means no more and no less than fulfilling again today the hard-won checkboxes you struck yesterday. In feeding yourself today. And again tomorrow. And again.

It induces in me such panic I can hardly endure it.

In the end it was writing and not video games that saved me. But what if I couldn’t write anymore? What else could I do? Suddenly my unswept corners, my fridge only containing half-finished juice smoothies, the dread unopened windowed envelopes, seem like glaring mistakes. I’m not comfortable, I’m not finished. I can never be finished. We can’t win, we can only sustain.  I have not won myself a simple, a noble life. Have any of us?

I became a millionaire in Harvest Moon by learning to cheat on an apple-guessing game, really.