'Lifepod' and LitRPG

"Lifepod" is a good example of what I consider a weak story. A guy does some stuff, but there's no larger significance to it. There's also not much conflict for something involving a starship crash. The hero's personality doesn't really change either because there's not much internal conflict. What's there is, "guy is proud in the end that he used his technology to become somewhat independent of tech, because he can catch fish and build an ordinary fire". If I were to play that angle up I'd rewrite the story to emphasize that he's very dependent in the beginning, and terrified of being alone, and makes some kind of moral decision that probably involves the otter TF, changing his attitude toward technology and being a shipwreck survivor. I'd also want actual conflict such as a threat to his omniprinter, so that he might risk his life to protect a machine. But what exists in this story is "guy is transformed, the end". So I don't like it.

On a related note this is why I'm skeptical of some of this "LitRPG" stuff. If the action takes place literally inside a game, then you're saying up front that none of it matters because it's "just a dream". You then have to justify why the audience should care by saying "people are mentally trapped in the game" (which means you're writing science fantasy). Or, "the hero needs to win the game for external reasons". ("Ready Player One" is all about the loser hero wanting to win to keep the bad guys from taking over; "Project Daily Grind" has the hero trying to earn real money for his kid's medicine; in "Learning To Fly" the hero fights basically to establish a tradition of How Things Are Done). Or, "there's a mysterious secret thing in the game itself that has larger significance" (the AI is dangerous, the game gives you superpowers IRL, the designer left a hidden thing the hero's curious about). the otternative alternative is that you don't write about a game so much as a world that happens to run on game logic. Eg. "The Slime Dungeon", in which the hero controls a standard fantasy dungeon but there's an in-universe reason why there's a regenerating maze full of monsters and treasure.

I got an interesting reaction somewhere that I mentioned "Learning To Fly". Someone went off on a rant about how transhumanism is stupid and some of its cheerleaders (Kurzweil, Yudlowsky) are cranks. Most interesting to me was this person's point about how techno-utopia fails to help most of the world; it's something for a few rich Westerners. In LtF and the series in general the characters worry a lot about how to continue being relevant and useful now that they live in a techno-utopia. Their world really is mostly for a few rich customers, not counting the many people who play Thousand Tales as a normal video game, but the situation starts to improve by 2040 thanks to the characters' actions. Once again I'm at that "time barrier" in the timeline, where I want to know what happens after uploading starts to be available to more people and uploaders start to become a serious threat to humans' jobs. I'm proud that I am at least exploring this theme instead of just going "live in a video game, whee, awesome!"