As illustrated by this raging debate between me and two guys at GiftHub. (If you want to get straight to the metaphor-gone-awry goodness, Ctrl-F “life partner.”)

Meanwhile, talking to people about my video game analogy, I’ve realized the biggest problem with it relates to the role of enjoyment. Enjoyment is the ultimate goal of playing video games, but not of charity. That’s because video games are about pretending to do what charity REALLY does (kill bad guys). Charity is enjoyable even though (in fact because) enjoyment isn’t the point.

There really is just no possible analogy that can capture how awesome it is to be actually spending my time trying to kill bad guys. Nothing else is remotely comparable.