It is no longer a news that general things like AI and others things have been trending for a while now and they will keep trending due to the circumstances that is surrounding them. But just last week, a friend posted a picture on her WhatsApps status about a game that is trending.
I did not consider it to be a big deal the first time I saw it because it was all about Lagos Life that was turned into a mobile phone game where someone had taken ordinary Nigerian stressful life and became creative with it, and said, “Okay, now try to survive this version yourself.”
And when I started seeing it all around again, I became interested in it. Seeing a Nigerian made game turning everyday struggles of Lagosians into something people can play during a evening like this in a bus or BRT while returning back from work, joke about and share on social media feels different from the frequent things going viral here. Everyday we complain about the stress we go through and we have become used to it. And one morning, that thing we have been complaining about started trending because it has become entertainment.
What caught my eyes and attention was not the game itself. But how fast people were easily to recognize themselves inside it. That little humour worked perfectly because we know the little things behind us and that is the usual paying of rents, finding good jobs, moving around, being prudent and calculative in the way we spend our money, and searching for time to rest in-between. Someone can just play few seconds of the game and easily say they have gone through that before.
As an architect, the aspect that got my interest more is that I spend some time calculating and thinking how we all move through soacest, where we stop, what brings frustration to us and make somewhere looks easy or feels difficult. And coming across a familiar city life that was turned into a game made me realise that every information is useful but we ignore most of it because they look too ordinary.
And to be sincere, that looks funny and at the same time, looks slightly uncomfortable. We can make humour out of the virtual version of what we experience everyday while leaving aside that the real version can be so tiring for those who are living through it. Seeing a virtual landlord asking for house rent seems funny. But in reality, seeing that same landlord asking for house rent does not always seems funny.
Still, I cannot ignore the fact that I like the message this trend says about us. We do not only survive our environment; we observe it closely enough to turn it into jokes, stories, art and now, someone has turned it into a games.
And maybe that is the most important aspect. From what I have seen online, those who are now playing the game Lagos Life are not playing because it is a game. They are playing because they see themselves in it even though it is virtual. And for once, I feel someone turned that life into something that is worth looking at because we are not trying to escape it.
Thank you for reading.
Images created by Gemini AI