Are we all playing one giant videogame?

[The Grand Nudger]

The whole simulation idea is based on the idea that something happening in a computer can experience what we experience (what people call "consciousness").  Let me know when it happens and I'll take these theories seriously.

It's actually not.  That's you misapplying the computer analogy, lol.

You sure it hasn't already, though, since you mentioned it?  How do you think that our minds work? What would a serious answer sound like?

[brewer]

OP, no.

[robvalue]

Well, it's a very fucking boring video game if we are.

It is so badly designed that we're constantly looking for mini-games to distract us from the main story arc.

[Fake Messiah]

But also, OP, why do you assume they'd create a whole simulation as complex and extensive as this one just to study the humans on planet Earth? That seems a bit silly, no?

I don't assume anything. I don't believe that we're playing the world as a game because there is no evidence for it and, yes, as it always is with these type of situations where evidence can't be provided (like religion), you can make up as many answers as you like, but it still doesn't make it truth. To make something truth you need to show the evidence, although religion fails even when it is left only to the philosophy, like this will probably.
So I think this won't be interesting very long, I was more interested how much Musk and his brother can talk to so I go back to the answers...

Maybe they are aliens and playing us as a civilization that they found in ruins and now want to re-create why they doomed.

Maybe they're not aliens but humans in the future whose lives are so bland and undemanding that they sit all they long on the sofas being served by their butler robots that they have to play this game from the past (or at least creatures that are based on them) that it is demanded by law they play this game as their right of passage. I mean this reason would not be so far fetched because for some decades now I do hear that people complain how they lost their rites of passage - the moment that tells them when they're adults. Like few decades ago in some parts of the world boys were only allowed to wear short pants and they could only wear long pants when they reached certain age and so on.

It is so badly designed that we're constantly looking for mini-games to distract us from the main story arc.

You're right maybe there is some story arc. Maybe our mission now is to somehow survive the impending global warming disaster. If temperature rises few more degrees, polar ice starts melting and methane reserves underneath it start going out and whole world turns into lifeless desert.
So maybe this game has catchy title in "real world": Play the game where over 7 billion people must co-operate. You don't know who you're getting born as - maybe as child in India destined to live on streets and die of crime or CEO of some big company - both have same chances to do something.
Before this global warming expansion those people played how to battle Polio, how to stop world wars, Napoleonic wars, how to get right scientific ideas trough superstitious society... maybe one of the first was few millennias ago when people killed off all the animals that fed them and had to turn to agriculture. Before that "be one of the smarter apes that will come down the tree and live on plains harder life, but more rewarding in terms of intelligence.