Over on the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, one Redditor tells his comrades how he developed his philosophy of life:
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?
I learned what can change the nature of a man.
Y’all have truly sucked the marrow of knowledge and wisdom from vidya
I extend this message to any lurking gators – well, the first four words of it at least.
*snort*
My game-given life lessons:
– Tiny-Kootie was right: Animatronic bands are horrifying and evil and ought to be avoided at all costs. (FNAF)
– The best way to break up a traffic jam is to yell at it from a helicopter. (SimCopter)
– Nothing in the world is more persuasive than the word “Wololo” (AoE1)
– Water slide dinghies are surprisingly explosive. Don’t crash them. (RCT 1, 2)
– When in doubt, turn into a brick. (SSB – Kirby FTW)
– I should make eight decisions a day. (Stanley Parable)
– Gold-digging gophers are freaking useless. (Yukon Trail)
– Life as a silver sprat is pretty much terrible. (Odell Down Under)
– T-rexes are simply triceratops that got hopped up on pineapple. (Trog)
– If your teammate is running the other way, you probably ought to turn around and follow them. (Any FPS involving grenades)
– Delivering newspapers from your bike is one of the highest-risk professions on the planet. Also: people newspaper subscribers are super fickle jerks. (Paperboy)
– My brother is a dirty cheater, even when games are programmed in a way that do not leave any room for cheating (Mario Party – SERIOUSLY HE NEVER LOSES, NOT EVEN THE LUCK-BASED THINGS)
– You probably won’t be good at something straight away. It takes patience and practice. Don’t give up too fast. (Technically my parents are the ones who taught this to me—I got an NES for my sixth birthday, and had dissolved into tears on Super Mario Bro’s 1-1.)
I learned from Final Fantasy that I would much rather commute via Chocobo. RPG console games also taught me that carrying capacity rules fly out the window when it comes to gold coins or other currency.
@Kat – thanks for the link to the SXSW article. That the author considered having her mom swatted as being under the radar reveals how much bullying is considered normal.
Oh, and one actually from the Sims: Keep your most expensive piece of art on the top floor, so police can get to your house while your burgler is still leisurely sauntering down the staircase.
Oooh, I have also learned from Pro Evolution Soccer 2016 that if I pick the default appearance for my manager character and name him “Manbro Everyboy”, I will never ever stop giggling to myself.
In a way, Pokemon taught me that eye contact is terrifying and should be avoided when you’re trying to get something done.
There’s one game that I actually learned a lot of non-comedy things from: Victoria 2. From it I learned:
– The geography of China, including where all the cities and provinces are.
– The geography the US.
– The history of the runup to the American civil war.
– The history of the runup to German unification.
– The story of the Congo conference.
Point-and-click adventure games taught me to pick up absolutely anything and store it somewhere on my person for later use. This includes other people’s property. It’s not robbery if you’re a hero!
testIf someone rambles incoherently, may respond to questions by apologizing and saying that voice isn’t here now, and speaks in obtuse metaphor, pay extremely close attention to everything they say and hunt through it for knowledge of the future. (VtM:Bloodlines)
In shadowrun Dwarves are Homo sapiens pumilionis
@sheehank:
9: Never carve bedrooms in a marble layer, it creates too much wealth too quickly.
10: People hate it when they have to walk past their dead relatives every day.
11: Be patient, the dwarves will get to it eventually, even if you need it right now.
@Garen Truscott:
I wanted to rob a place in the capitol once, so I waited until after dark. When the wait screen went away, the first thing the game did was scream “VENGEANCE!” at me. I jumped six inches.
(If you buy certain Bethesda games off GOG, they’ll give you Arena and Daggerfall free.)
Well, the important thing is that you’ve found a way to feel superior.
@Viscaria:
Grim Fandango taught me to pick up a fire extinguisher early, and carry it around with me for years, because it will eventually become useful.
Talk about being on the cusp of self awareness.
He was just this close to learning that he can live a happy fulfilling life if he doesn’t try to control or manipulate people.
More Bioware games than I can count off the top of my head have taught me to beware recruiters. Whoever gets you running around Neverwinter, or recruits you into the Jedi Order, or maybe even just survives the destruction of your village and dojo with you, will eventually Turn Evil and you’ll have to fight her. For some reason it’s usually a her.
Here’s another one:
Someone crouching is definitely about to steal your stuff. (Fallout and the elder scrolls)
Nuclear Armageddon actually represents a slight economic improvement for lots of small towns in the Mojave. (Fallout new Vegas)
On top of the important lesson “it’s not theft if you’re a hero!*” I’d add “if it’s important, it probably glows at least a little bit”.
* Sometimes, though, it’s only unless a guard sees you.
Oh! From Red Dead Redemption: Shooting a vitriolic anti-Semitic shopkeeper in the face can be both fun and relatively consequence-free as long as you flee the scene with enough haste.
– I am exactly 2 blocks tall.
Woohoo! A (potential) convert!
Some advice: The game has a fairly intricate ‘economy’. Each character (they have heroes and villains) has three strong colors (out of six). Most of them have powers for each color (a few only have two, with the third color still being strong on base damage, but not generating any special ability). You improve powers by collecting covers of a particular character. Powers are ranked from one to five, and you can have a total of 13 ranks across all three. Min-maxing is almost always the way to go–two powers at 5, one at 3, is typically your best bet.
Covers are usually awarded as random card-draws, or as specific prizes for progress through the stories. Covers are given star-ranks; there’s currently 1-4 star characters, with Silver Surfer having been given a test-run as a five-star. Different star-rankings of the same persona are considered different game-characters; there’s, like, three or four distinct Wolverines, Storms and Spider-Men.
In addition, the game centers around an element called ISO-8. Your character level cap increases as you gain powers, but you have to use ISO-8 to scale up. Over time, you earn plenty of it, though, so go mad. You can also use ISO-8 to buy the baseline random draw, but honestly, it’s better to hold onto it for leveling. If you get a cover you’ve already maxed the power for (say, 1-Star Black Widow’s Blue power is already at 5, and you get another one), you can sell it for ISO-8. The higher the star rank, the more ISO-8 you get for it.
Then you have hero points. These have many uses, but the only one you should ever actually use, ever, is opening up additional spots on your team. Anything else–cover draws, health packs, power upgrades–is pretty much a straight-up waste of the rarest commodity in the game. (If you ever want to spend real money on the game, this is where you should put it–never buy ISO-8.)
Finally, there’s Health Packs. The game structure is head-to-head teams, you against the AI (there’s technically a Versus mode, but then it’s you against an AI running whatever the other player has as their base team). Each battle represents a story event, that can be replayed for more rewards, and for story points that also get rewards (and you get rewards at the end of the event based on your ranking. Seriously, you get an almost constant flow of stuff if you play a lot.) The goal of each battle is to knock out your opponents. Between battles, you heal slowly (initially, your intro characters heal in about an hour from KO’ed; three-stars can take 5 or 6 hours). However, you also get Health Packs that insta-heal a character all the way. These accumulate over time, up to a maximum of ten in the bank.
The game will offer to sell you health packs. Never buy them.
Oh! I have an actually applicable one from Witcher 3:
Even your most well-intentioned acts can have horrific results.
From Tetris, I learned that the reward for frantically stacking and organizing stuff is: more stuff to frantically stack and organize! And do it faster this time!
Parenthood is pretty much like that, except without the Russian folk music.
Apparently, Marvel Puzzle Quest also taught me how to rave about Marvel Puzzle Quest. Sorry for the teal deer.