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MGTOW: I learned how to live my life from The Sims

I told you fireworks were a bad idea.

Over on the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, one Redditor tells his comrades how he developed his philosophy of life:


I learned mgtow from the original Sims (self.MGTOW) submitted 4 days ago by onbakeplatinum Way back when the original Sims came out and I was 14, I tried to play as my actual family. That turned out to be a complete nightmare, trying to control multiple people, always being short on money, dealing with their moods and unwillingness to do anything, etc. Then I played as just a single Sim. The game became ridiculously easy. I only had to manage one person, could live in a small house, and train/go to work all the time. My Sim was extremely happy. She became rich and I pimped her small house (I tried to make the smallest house possible) with the highest quality items. I maxed out all her stats. I don't remember much else. But it occurred to me way back then that this was how I wanted to live my life. Alone and simple. I didn't NEED to have a family like everyone else and manage/deal with other people. I could live in a small (but nice) place because it's just me, and even though I don't make much money, it's only me I have to worry about.

This seems a bit weird to me. I also played the original Sims game when it came out, and that wasn’t the lesson I drew from it at all. The lessons I learned were a little, well, darker. Some that I remember:

  • If you place a bunch of people in a house with no bathrooms and no doors, they will be extremely unhappy, and will start leaving puddles on the floor.
  • If you place a bunch of people in a house with the only toilet in the middle of the living room, they will be nearly as unhappy as the first bunch of people.
  • If you build a house with no doors, chairs, couches or beds, the people trapped within it will also be really unhappy, and will ultimately try to sleep standing up or lying on the floor.
  • Building a fence around them while they’re out in the yard will do the trick as well.
  • If someone is swimming in your backyard pool, and you quickly build an insurmountable wall around it, they will eventually drown.
  • Actually, never mind, I think if you simply “forget” to put a ladder in the pool, they can’t get out either.

So I guess I mainly learned some very basic “don’ts” in home design, such as the importance of having a door. And in fact I have not designed any doorless — or bathroomless, or bedless — houses since then. Or any houses at all, actually.

I’m not the only one who learned lessons about the importance of doors, as the following videos I found on Youtube make abundently clear. Also, shooting off fireworks inside a doorless room is pretty much a disaster waiting to happen.

Well, you get the idea.

Have you learned any important life lessons from the Sims, or any other videogames?

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yutolia
yutolia
9 years ago

The Legend of Zelda taught me that if I break something important, I should just leave the room and come back again and everything will be right again.

dhag85
9 years ago

– Broke? Just kill some animals.

Broken Butterfly
Broken Butterfly
9 years ago

Saints Row taught me that if you give guns to completely psychotic people, the world will end up better than it was until aliens come down and ruin all your hard work.

Megaman X taught me that if you’re going to make robots with actual feelings, make sure that humans know they have actual feelings and don’t treat them like indentured servants otherwise you’re probably going to get a lot of humans shanked. (Until a random Virus goes crazy and then they get shanked for completely different reasons)

Sonic taught me that if you find seven jewels that all look the same except for color you can do literally anything which probably includes blowing up the whole world. Also, gods are real and don’t like it when you abuse your cute virtual pets that love you from the egg and CHAOS WILL DROWN YOUR ASS GODDAMMIT.

Final Fantasy XIV taught me that you can literally do and be everything in the world, you just have to have no life and be willing to grind.

Broken Butterfly
Broken Butterfly
9 years ago

Oh right, there’s also “Don’t be a genocidal asshole and kill everyone or a skeleton will turn your ass to dust and kill you over and over, then mock you when you come back to keep trying because he knows you’re reloading.”

katz
katz
9 years ago

Sonic taught me that if you find seven jewels that all look the same except for color you can do literally anything which probably includes blowing up the whole world.

I learned the same thing from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Broken Butterfly
Broken Butterfly
9 years ago

@katz
Truly, it is a lesson everyone should learn, then.

Paradoxical Intention
9 years ago

Wait a minute…I learned that from Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door!

ಠ_ರೃ I sense a conspiracy…directly leading to the jewel mines and their owners!

They want us to line our pockets with magical gem Maguffins, at a high cost to ourselves, so they can pocket all our hard-earned coins and gold rings!

katz
katz
9 years ago

Actually hang on, there are only six gems on the Infinity Gauntlet.

Broken Butterfly
Broken Butterfly
9 years ago

@Paradoxical Intention

*GASPS, FANS SELF*

How could I be so blind?! We’ve all been duped!

lhazelgold
9 years ago

Sunless Sea taught me that you’re safer from monsters in the dark. Also, pirates.

More relevantly to the discussion at hand, it taught me that you can manage (almost) any amount of blinding, mind-blanking terror if you have a loving, supportive family.

occasional reader
occasional reader
9 years ago

Hello.

I hope you had a good week-end.

I had forgotten some games in my previous post.

– From Worms (any), i learnt that there is nothing like a false rebound. Only my bad precision and any damn almost invisible solitary pixel remaining from a former explosion/shot/you name it that can stay in the air with not support.

– From Clockwork Tower, i learnt that you can play a woman which is not shaped and trained like Lara Croft (i.e. a normal woman) and successfully escape a strange mansion while being pursued by a vicious criminal.

– From Sword World (Super Famicom), i learnt that when a slope is hard to climb because you slide when you walk normally, you have to set up in the options the speed of your character movement on screen at max in order to climb successfully. In the same way, when an old NPC says you “What ?” because he is a bit deaf, you have to set the sound at max in the options in order to make him hear you (and whine about how too loudly you speak…).

– From Gender wars, i learnt that if this kind of dystopia had to really happen one day or another, well, we are all doomed…

Have a nice day.

EJ (The Other One)
EJ (The Other One)
9 years ago

@lhazelgold:

Sunless Sea taught me that you’re safer from monsters in the dark.

Darkest Dungeon taught me the opposite. Perhaps we need some sort of fusion of the two games in order to resolve the issue (and soak up all my time forever.)

dhag85
9 years ago

@EJ

Steam lets me know every time you play Darkest Dungeon. :p

ayy lmao
ayy lmao
9 years ago

Hope I’m not necroposting at this point. Anyways, some of the things games taught me:

– shooting rockets under your feet makes you jump really high (Quake 3 Arena)
– gamers are raging assholes, especially in team modes (Quake Live)
– archers are good offensive units (Civilization 3)
– Gandhi was a warmongering bastard (Civilization)
– you can break stones with what is essentialy a wooden stick (that you make after chopping up wood with you bare hands) (Minecraft)
– science labs on another planets where dangerous experiments are carried out use primitive security systems with a total of three different keycards. So does Hell, for some reason (Doom 1, 2)
– drinking from a smashed urinal will make you healthier (Duke Nukem 3D)
– You can distract security guards by dropping coins. Also, people drown instantly. Also, women are either overweight or have hourglass bodies. Men are either overweight or musclebound hunks (Hitman Blood Money)

Then there’s Morrowind, a goldmine of important life lessons:

– all those people you see on the streets actually just loiter around all day.
– nobody likes short people with squeaky voices.
– you can sell N gold for the price of N+K gold, where K is a reasonable amount. You will thus make a profit of K gold out of nowhere (in one of the earlier versions, I think)
– if you drink enough alcohol, you can punch a god to death.
– it’s fine to read books at the bookstore, as long as you don’t take them. Also, if a book is supposed to teach you something, you only need to glance briefly at the first page to learn everything from it. (Damn, I wish this one was true)
– “polishing one’s spear” doesn’t mean what you think it means. Neither does “three-legged guar”.
– M’aiq is a liar.
– cliff racers are literally Hitler.
– animals have no survival instinct whatsoever.
– you can equip/unequip items and drink potions while paralysed.
– casting a rage spell on someone to make them attack you is not a crime, even if you kill them as a result.
– we’re watching you, scum.

Slightly off-topic, SFHC, do you mind me asking why you picked that particular video of OoT? Just wondering.

EJ (The Other One)
EJ (The Other One)
9 years ago

@dhag85:

But that’s like all the time as it is. The last thing I need is to add the Unterzee to it.

Moggie
Moggie
9 years ago

lhazelgold:

Sunless Sea taught me that you’re safer from monsters in the dark.

Wait, you mean I’m not likely to be eaten by a grue? That’s such a relief!
*moves*
*is eaten by a grue*

Paradoxical Intention
9 years ago

Bina | October 30, 2015 at 4:09 pm
And from Textris (like Tetris, but with words), I learned that I suck at making verbiage from falling blocks with random letters in them.

And I’m an English major. Huh.

I’m a little late with this, but you might like Words for Evil Bina.

Think like an old-school RPG mixed with that old game Bookworm. You have to spell words with connected letters on a grid (that you can shuffle if you get stuck), and that creates attacks for your little pixel friends to attack with (I had Santa Claus and a snowman in my 3-person party at one time, 10/10 would Christmas again).

You go along in different lands facing different monsters, and there’s all kinds of fun traps and treasures you can get by solving word puzzles.

My favorites are the chest ones, because they give you two rows of letters, and tell you there’s a word that goes from left to right in there, and you gotta shift between the two rows to get the letters. (And they do tell you all of the words you could have made in there, and tell you the definition of the word if you didn’t know what it means)

My advice: Use your keyboard, not your mouse. It’s easier to find words, and you don’t have to do any weird clicking.

Also, there are some words that the game doesn’t recognize, and a hell of a lot of words I didn’t know were words.

EJ (The Other One)
EJ (The Other One)
9 years ago

– if you drink enough alcohol, you can punch a god to death.

– cliff racers are literally Hitler.

– we’re watching you, scum.

These are the most true things that I have ever heard.

Orion
9 years ago

Okay, getting serious for a moment: Let’s go back to Final Fantasy 8. I played it when I was 10, and I got more out of it than my fashion sense. I was pretty much converted right then to the protagonist’s philosophy. For those who don’t know, Squall is an orphan who was, as an orphan, abandoned by someone important in his life. He entered a special academy for mercenaries and worked so hard he rose to the top of his class. He’s serious, responsible (by 17yo) and willing to put himself at risk to protect others. He also says stuff like this:

“I don’t believe in relying on others.”

and this

“As long as you don’t get your hopes up, you can take anything… You feel less pain.”

“Someday you’re bound to lose everything. Everybody around you will be gone. Then what are you left with? Nothing. Nobody… It’s so miserable. And inevitable. It’s so hard to recover from something like that. I never want to deal with that again. I can’t. Even if it means being alone…”

and even

“I don’t want to carry someone else’s burden.”

I wasn’t an orphan, but I was abused by my parents and isolated from my peers. His attitude just made sense to me. So I absorbed it uncritically, and over the years it’s done me a lot of damage. Even so, even now I can’t bring myself it regret it. It was comforting at a time I needed comfort, and I don’t know what I’d have done without it. Years later, I played is again, and I noticed something funny. See, those quotes are all from the first half of the game, and the point of the game is that Squall is wrong. Later on, he’s saying stuff like

” I don’t know anything. I’m confused. I don’t want to depend on anyone. How can I do that? Someone tell me… Someone? So I’ll end up depending on others after all…”

and

” I worry too much about what others think of me. I hate that side of me… That’s why I didn’t want anyone to get to know me. I wanted to hide that side of myself. I hate it.”

and even

“It feels great to have friends who believe in you, and adults you can rely on.”

So that’s why video game criticism is important to me and always will be. Because I know that games can be powerful, and I know that understanding them –getting it right — can make all the difference.

Paradoxical Intention
9 years ago

Orion:
comment image

Well said.

I feel the same way, considering that I connect with Angela Orosco from Silent Hill 2 for some very personal reasons, and I literally cried when I realized what she went through, and again when she died in the game after I played it again.

Games can be powerful, and they can be fun without a message or some kind of driving story. But both have to be done right.

Orion
9 years ago

FF8 also *should* have been my first clue that I wasn’t straight, but unfortunately I wasn’t paying attention.

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