What If Life Were Just A Video Game?

I love to play The Sims. I love to make them get jobs, keep them, and raise enough money to make a super cool house so they can invite all their friends over until 2:00 am and then get up for work in the morning (since they have no weekend...). But I got too thinking..."Do my characters know they are in a video game? Do they honestly think that they are living freely, dependent on only their own freewill?'' How sad would it be to find out that we, too, are in existence for the mere purpose of entertaining some 32 year old who still lives with his parents and relies on our success because he cannot achieve his own?
If we are, in fact, living in a game console, does that mean our "money" is the "points", and we trade them in for "life elixer" (food and drink)? Where are the magic beans and the mushrooms that make you shrink? And why is it that we cannot jump 7 times our own height, or fall from the same distance and not get hurt? Perhaps if we hit the "Z" button just before landing, we could leap off of the world trade center and only lose one heart container of life. The big question, though, is how come, when things get too difficult for us and we don't know what to do next, we can't just "save" and go look up the cheats on the good old web?