Real Lives Website.

Real lives is the current "rage" of gaming world at the moment and an article was demanded so here I am at 1am typing one up for you. (The things I sacrifice...  )

Narrowing it down to basics real lives is pretty much a "simulation" game where you take control of the life of your character. But Real Lives is not just a game... It's education. You don't just hop into the life of your character at whatever age you feel like, in you desired home that you can pimp out with sofas and manage your toilet schedule. In Real Lives you start at Age 0, you grow with your family, you deal with the effects of real life issues and events that happen in the country you live. And you can pretty much live wherever you want in the world.

There is a fairly nice built in character creator but it allows you to give yourself a significant advantage in the game so I wont be using this today. Your family, Gender, Name and Country are all generated randomly at the start of each game presenting you with the task to survive and grow old with the conditions that you're faced with. Some of them are obvious, WOULD YOU LIKE TO SMOKE Y/N and some of them are more subtle and your answers will affect the outcome of your game. Grow Rich, Die old or live fast and die young. It's all determined by how you play your life.



Each life is not a long series of events and some of them can last only ten to fifteen minutes. But there's more to the game than just dealing with YES or NO popup boxes. Depending on the country and your circumstances your character may have to deal with being raped, being abused by your family, being beaten by your spouse with a brick, drafted into the army, political activity. You can also take school and career paths of your choice, study, make money and even invest your money or take out loans.



I feel that the games only downfall is a real lack of achievement with what you do. You spend this time living an interesting life, building up your funds and then you die and that is the end of the game. Take one of my recent scenarios for example. I played well, went to graduate college, became a doctor, invested 1 million USD in land and high risk stocks. Quadrupled my money and spend the last 40 years of my life clicking the ADVANCE AGE button until I died.

The real fun of the game comes from experimenting with the more interesting life experiences. Growing up as a young female Haitan lesbian who drops out of school and runs away to mexico at the age of 15 to become an alcoholic, jump the american border and make her way as an unemployed person living off the money she steals from cars, houses and financial benefit.

Real Lives is an interesting craze, as shortlived as I think it might be.