Ok, so here's a hypothesis on life:
What if we're all omnipotent immortal beings living in some eutopian world? One of the downsides of living forever and having no hardships is that boredom can really set in. So... a new game was invented....
Anyone who pays top dollar to play gets to be born as a baby in this virtual reality world called 'Earth'. As the game starts all memory of the entrants' real existences are completely wiped and they have to start living their lives from scratch, believing that it is all completely real.
....We are all contestants!
The twist is, the rules of the game are never explained to you... they can't be - you don't even know it's a game, but the reality of it is all the while you're on 'Earth' you're constantly racking up or losing points depending on all your actions or inactions.
The goal, I think, is not necessarily to be a good and worthy human being, but to gain as much fame (or indeed infamy) as possible in whichever way you see fit and to change the world as much as possible in whichever way you deem appropriate.
So the people that scored highest probably include the likes of Mother Theresa, George Washington, Martin Luther King and William Shakespeare, but equally the likes of Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler will also be right up there.
The people that get really low scores and end up feeling a little bit silly for wasting all their money on this game are the average joes who have led normal, run of the mill lives with little or no excitement. They may have been decent worthy people, but they haven't explored anything like the potential of the game. This makes up about 99% of all the contestants no doubt.
The game ends, of course, as soon as you 'die'. At this point you wake back up in the real world and are given all your past memories back. You then have a good old laugh about how you had no idea you were in a game the whole time and if you've done really well probably end up going on talk shows about it and receiving awards.
The fact that the game may take 70 or 100 years to play isn't really a problem because you're immortal and omnipotent remember, so it was probably a good way to kill some time.
You never know!!!
