Categories
MGTOW reddit video games

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?

221 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
zyvlyn
zyvlyn
9 years ago

Have fun with Recettear. My brother was on the localization team for that game, so I’m glad to see when anyone recommends it.

Lessons from video games, eh…

1. You can kill just about anything by jumping on it. Unless it has spikes or is made of fire. (Mario and Sonic games)

2. Never trust a young man with good looks and long, silver hair. (FF7, FF9, Skies of Arcadia and many, many others)

3. As long as I’m the main character, I can be a total asshole to everyone and they will still love and respect me. (FF8)

4. Connecting a lawnmower blade to a gas tank gets me a wicked looking flaming sword, and not, as you might think, 3rd degree burns all over my body. (Fallout 3)

5. The secret to any girl’s heart is to listen to her talk once every day and give her truckloads of expensive presents. (Harvest Moon: Any)

6. Drinking too much vodka can make you sick. But as long as you throw two bottles of vodka in a blender first, you can drink as much as you want without getting sick ever. Also you become nigh impervious to harm. (Dead Rising 2)

7. Any group of people who go by the name “Team _________” are dangerous criminals who must be stopped. (Pokemon)

Also, sticking with Pokemon, anyone who looks like this

[img]http://cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/thumb/c/c7/XY_Lysandre.png/150px-XY_Lysandre.png[/img]

is most definitely the bad guy, holy crap what are you people thinking trusting this guy?! He’s the freaking bad guy, I’m losing my mind over how much like a bad guy he looks!

zyvlyn
zyvlyn
9 years ago

Crap. The image didn’t embed. Anyone know how to do that?

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

Things I learned from Dwarf Fortress:

– All situations can be improved through the addition of water sprinklers. There are no exceptions to this rule.

– A whip is the best weapon to use against an opponent in plate armour.

– The best way to prepare for military training is to spend several years as an accountant in order to develop muscle tone.

– A transparent glass roof is the best protection against sunlight.

– Any room which children spend time in can be improved through the addition of spear traps and berserk feral dogs.

– If you give a person severe burns they normally die, but if you do it just right then they become entirely fireproof and can never be burned ever again.

– If you’re going to make bread, then rather than grinding the grain into flour, brew it into beer and then bake that. You’ll get more bread that way.

– All homo sapiens have the unerring ability to remember everything they’ve ever seen.

– Elves are invisible except to dogs. Have you ever seen a dog bark at thin air? That’s probably because of elves.

– The mass production of mugs, trumpets and necklaces is the foundation of every export-driven economy. Nobody will ever saturate the market for these goods.

– The greatest threat to the safety of any fortification is socks lying around outside it.

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

Zylvyn: Use angular brackets (less than and greater than signs), not square brackets.

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

zyvlyn, sorry.

Scented Fucking Hard Chairs
Scented Fucking Hard Chairs
9 years ago

What I learned from Resident Evil 4 and Ocarina Of Time: It is possible to scare me after all! I might be desensitised to the usual horror stuff, like gore and body horror, but even the most plain-looking undead thing will make me shit myself if it makes noises like this or this. (And that’s why those are two of my favourite games. I love it.)

Scented Fucking Hard Chairs
Scented Fucking Hard Chairs
9 years ago

@zyvlyn

Just post the URL with no coding at all. ^^;

karalora
karalora
9 years ago

The Legend of Zelda series taught me not to put on Iron Boots in deep water without some way to breathe underwater. But it also taught me that drowning just means you wash up on shore minus one heart of life, so…

megpie71
9 years ago

What I’ve learned from Video & Computer Games

* A lot of life consists of doing the same thing over and over and over and over again. So you might as well have fun with it. (All of them, starting with the little LCD game I got as a 12-year-old).
* Many people don’t have much to say for themselves. So listen to what little they have to say; you never know, it might be helpful. (Every single RPG since time began).
* Eventually you will die. This is unavoidable. (Angband and Persona 3)
* Having routines makes things a lot easier. Plan for getting as many things done in as short an amount of time as possible, and moving on from there. (The Sims series)
* Yeah, your life sucks. But there are other people who have it worse. (Final Fantasy VII)
* Sulking in a coffin for thirty years doesn’t help anything. (Final Fantasy VII again).
* In a world where a nordicly-pale culture lives in the middle of a desert wearing skimpy clothing and yet nobody ever gets sunburned, the bunny-girl who wanders around in armoured battle lingerie is NOT the most egregious fail in world-building. (Final Fantasy XII)
* You would make a lousy barista. (Lumosity’s “Trouble Brewing” game).
* The conclusion is often a bit of an anti-climax, considering the fun you had on the way (Final Fantasy VII; FF7:Dirge of Cerberus; Kingdom Hearts; Kingdom Hearts II – those being the games I’ve actually played all the way through to the end).

Kagato
Kagato
9 years ago

@Scented Fucking Hard Chairs:

As long as the URL ends with a web-friendly image extension — .png, .jpg, .gif — it should embed automatically.

If the URL is a raw path, some other extension (eg. .php), or has parameters on the end (eg ?id=12345), WordPress will just treat it like a link. This is almost always why people’s images don’t embed.

I imagine these can be made to work with a full image tag: <img src=”http://example.com” />

StarStorm
9 years ago

Let’s see:

I learned that if you have rhythm, you can kick all sorts of ass (Crypt of the Necrodancer).
You need to be careful when you’re playing tabletop RPGs lest a great evil from your game breaks through to kill everyone, and fail miserably (Knights of Pen and Paper)
Psychic powers are the best and useful in all situations (System Shock 2)
You can dominate multiple universes with the power of baking (Cookie Clicker)

Hmmm, what else?

weirwoodtreehugger
9 years ago

I learned playing Oregon Trail that I’m going to die. Not someday when I’m old. I’m going to die pretty much now.

Aerinea
Aerinea
9 years ago

I have a few things I’ve learned from games.

Sonic the Hedgehog series: Huge air bubbles underwater are a great way to breathe.

Left 4 Dead: Zombies are attracted to car alarms. Also, the pretty minor interval music punctuated by sobs is to be avoided at all costs.

Borderlands 2: Everything can be solved with a good acid- or electricity-spewing gun and a summonable killer robot. Having health stealing grenades helps too. Also, jerks who turn their alien-overpowered daughter into a living AI deserve whatever you do to them.

All platformers: I need to take up parkour (I have taken up parkour).

MYST: You should write everything down, no matter how unimportant it seems.

Final Fantasy series: It doesn’t matter how immediate and inevitable the end of the world is, there is always time to collect things, breed animals, or play dress up.

misseb47
misseb47
9 years ago

The only things I have learnt from playing Skyrim are: The only Draugr you have to worry about are the ones we with clothes on. Oh and wooden doors are indestructible. Fus Ro Dah does nothing!

nightmarelyre
9 years ago

I learned from Super Mario that eating suspicious mushrooms, flowers and leaves found laying around outdoors is a SUPER idea!

megpie71
9 years ago

Oh yes, one more from FFVII: If the worst thing that happens to you today is that you’re pushed into a dress and letched on by a crime lord, it’s a Good Day. If the worst thing you’ve had to do all day is fight a giant mecha, then you don’t know you’re born, kid.

Taffer
Taffer
9 years ago

If anything else, this post reminded me about Electric Funstuff.

Zyvlyn
Zyvlyn
9 years ago

Ok, let’s try that one again. Anyone who looks like this:

http://cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/thumb/c/c7/XY_Lysandre.png/150px-XY_Lysandre.png

is most definitely the bad guy, holy crap what are you people thinking trusting this guy?! He’s the freaking bad guy, I’m losing my mind over how much like a bad guy he looks!

Kat
Kat
9 years ago

My boyfriend has this wisdom to offer (suitable for a Silicon Valley fortune cookie):

The game goes on despite real life and vice versa.

Dreamer
Dreamer
9 years ago

I learned in the original Sims that

A You need friends to get promotions

B Work is never visible

C Big families with many adults works best to make sufficient $

D Kissing causes pregnancy

C Never cry at a grave

gelar
gelar
9 years ago

I learned that if you want your own custom graveyard, you have to make it yourself.

Also, that there was a limit of 8 people to a family…

Shaenon
9 years ago

The Sims came out in my senior year of college, and I made a house based on myself and my housemates. We all got addicted to watching the dramas of our tiny, bisexual doppelgangers to the point that it cut into our real lives.

I’m still working out what I learned from this, but I sense it was important.

Leda Atomica
Leda Atomica
9 years ago

I never played Sims, I became disinterested after seeing one of my friends’ girlfriend playing it night and day.

But Sim City 2000 taught me that if you don’t have a decent finance planning your city is really hard to re-build after an alien attack. Also, a city needs a fire station.

BTW, I don’t think the point is that there is something sinister about wanting to be single. I just reckon a MGTOW is really explaining away his fear of women to be oh so logical and efficient.
Other than that, if you truly have major issues with other people having problems outside yourself, it’s best to not live with any. Still, if you are drawn to the MGTOW crowd, sour grapes is a strong possibility.

I’m single and everything is more expensive. I pay the exact living expenses that would otherwise be shared between two people. Food is only less expensive in ‘family sized’ packages, and only in the case you have a family to consume it. Otherwise you’re either paying way more for smaller packages or way too much for food you are wasting. There was a study in Finland that showed how much more expensive it is to live alone when everything is designed for families. It was something ridiculous.

I’m single because I’m an introvert with severe trauma from my past. I’m allergic to anything remotely seen as abusive behaviour and back away from people easily. On top of that, I’m a hopeless romantic and find that it’s rare to find other people who are as well. I doubt someone like me would get the amount of emotional security I need from a human. I live with a dog. No, not romantically!

Upside: I don’t have to answer to anyone outside the law enforcement. I can just up and leave to see my friends all over Europe. Also, as an artist I get to keep the stupid hours I need to be creative. I doubt a sane person would want a partner who sleeps until the afternoon and stays up until next morning, mostly doing art stuff. Bliss!

Downside: I broke my foot earlier this year. I also caught a vicious cold and as I was dragging my fevery arse to the kitchen on a small rug I used for easier transportation, I fell on my face. I admit to having a little cry on the floor until I realised how pathetically hilarious the situation was and started laughing. It would have been nice if someone was there to get me tea, the dog doesn’t have thumbs.

D.T. Nova
9 years ago

Walking through lava hurts a little bit, but it’s really the safest path because there are no monsters there (Final Fantasy)

Catalpa
Catalpa
9 years ago

Undertale taught me TO NEVER EVER EVER trust flowers.

And also that the spiders in my basement want money and will likely sell me spider-based baked goods if I request them.