Five Things Video Games Taught Me About Real Life

Life lessons from Super Mario Bros., Rock Band, Animal Crossing and more.

Art imitates life, or life imitates art? Does anyone know? Maybe it's both. I don't want to open a new tab just to Google it. But listen – art can teach us things, and sometimes that allows art to bleed into our lives in surprising ways.

This has happened to me with quite a number of video games over the years. Oh, the lessons I have learned, kids. I could tell you a thing or two. Sonny boy. (Sorry, I just entered my thirtieth year and it has made me sort of hoary).

What follows, here, is an important list of five lessons I shouldn't have had to, but did, learn from videogames.

Lesson One: Sometimes a Girl That Plays Hard to Get Isn't Worth the Trouble (Super Mario Bros. series)

There's a theory that says Mario is not the best boyfriend in the world. I am not making fresh allegations, I'm just telling you what I've heard. Peach? She might have good reason for running off all the time, crying her eyes out to Bowser. And all the goodhearted lizard king can do is his very best to protect the wayward Toadstool until Mario starts hopping up on fire flowers and busting blocks (and heads). That guy's rampages around the Mushroom Kingdom are legendary. Just ask that Koopa who's been bouncing between two pipes since he first got kick-stomped in 1985 – he'll tell you.

But, there are two sides to every story. It's not as if the Mushroom Kingdom is all that easy a place in which to rampage. Moreover, Mario has had to do it countless times over the last 25 years. He's just chalked up a quarter century in the business of rescuing royal skirt and could easily be forgiven for staring at his stone-cold plumber's visage in the mirror while colouring in his ever more patchy mustache and asking himself, "What am I doing with my life?"

How many times has that ditzy princess made him chase her? Too many. Navigating what? Explosives, spiked pits, spiked shells, lava, bottomless pits, falling rock, poison pits, carnivorous plants, quicksand, Bowser's relentless minions... is it worth it? Doubtful.

But Mario's many clouds have had a silver lining for this particular gamer. If his wild adventures have taught me any real life lesson, it's that you should never chase a girl who only wants to see you suffer.

Getting crushed for love? Poisoned? For love? What is this, Romeo and Juliet?

Peach, blissfully aware of Mario's peril. Again.

Lesson Two: Don't Give Up Your Day Job (Rock Band)

Harmonix tried to trick me into thinking that if I bought a guitar and put pieces of metal into my facehole that I might truly be able to rock out. I mean, really, truly, rock out. Alas, it was all a pixel-soaked fantasy world.

For many 80s kids, and even more 90s kids, the allure of easy money makes us dream about shirking real jobs, and instead making it big being famous. Games like Rock Band are important shackles on those dreams. There can be only one Bieber, after all.

You know that noise a garbage disposal makes when it's broken? Like, when it gets jammed up with some kind of fibrous root vegetable, or you throw a small deceased mammal into it before your little sister finds out? Rock Band helped me realise that noise is not unlike how I sing. And you know when you pass a busker in the street and you turn to your friend and you grin knowingly at how bad his rendition of Wonderwall is? Yeah, that guy is better at the guitar than I will ever be.

The magic here is that as I am describing myself, you will start to see how easy it is to admit that you are rubbish at music too, and that it's barely worth the hassle. This is one of the reasons that the music genre is so popular; real music is hard work. In Rock Band, Guitar Hero and their ilk, hard work is swept out in favour of outrageous character upgrades and the ability to name a band after whatever body part you like.

But just because you can play Brooks & Dunn's stunning opus Hillbilly Deluxe on Expert doesn't mean you can flip off your boss and buy a Kombi. Not yet, anyway.

Lesson Three: Fruit Picking and Furniture Trading is Far From a Solid Financial Plan (Animal Crossing: WW)

Nook was rumbled some time ago. The fact that he's a pointy-faced little loan shark that deserves to be chucked in a river (curiously well stocked with fish, given its size) with sacks of Bells tied to his smock is pretty well known. But in Tom Nook, we learn a valuable lesson about debt.

Don't get in it. Especially don't get indebted to a raccoon with enough nous to correctly wear people clothes.

Michael Corleone was talking about the Mob when he said, "Just when I think I'm out... they pull me back in." You could say the same thing of Tom Nook and his strategy for selling debt. You pay off your first mortgage, he gives you a non-optional home upgrade. Etc.

But like I said, Nook's evil genius is not news. What's even more startling than his method for burying you, though, is your own method for digging yourself out: collecting fruit, amassing odd furniture, and selling everything you have ever owned like a drug addict frantically raising funds for their next rush.

But there is no rush. Just a cold, impersonal exchange with a pelican and another paltry subtraction from that insurmountable six-figure sum.

Tom Nook - the face of evil.

Pears, oranges, watermelons, peaches... three at a time. Cherries. It doesn't take you long to realise that in this wild world, it's hard to get by just upon a smile. And you're not going to get your debts paid back in any hurry. I remember the moment I looked up from my DS, into the swirling tunnel of my future and voted no on fruit picking.

A friend of mine went fruit picking once, for a summer. He got food poisoning and spent so long hunched among the capsicums relieving himself that he got a mean sunburn. True story. But even that didn't put me off like Tom Nook's reign of tyranny did.

Lesson Four: I Love American Football (Madden series)

Who'da thunk it? I mean, here's me, a natural aptitude for sports not dissimilar to that of a parched lichen nestled in a toxic slag heap, strategising and making plays and actually caring about how far a yard is.

Football's DNA had always been a little bit alien to me. The game is little played in the South Pacific, after all. NFL is somehow three hours long, despite each quarter being 15 minutes. Coaches seem to do a lot of clipboard waving between those things they called plays. And a lot of drawing, too. The guys in helmets seemed to get it, even if their sage-like nodding was in strange juxtaposition to their brutish objectives and obscene pants.

When I came to the Madden series it was the final year of last millennium; I got Madden 99 for the N64 because one of my friends had it and he was the competitive type. I am talking elbow drop onto the kidneys while you're sleeping because he lost, competitive. I wasn't about to go around to his house and get beaten up and down the turf every weekend, so I was going to have to put in some hours myself.

But what happened was far more than thumb-numbing proficiency in a fake version of a bizarre and complex foreign sport.

What happened was ESPNlightenment.

I started to get it. Play by play, yard by yard, I started to appreciate how American football came together.

From there, I never looked back. There aren't many sports I will sit down and watch for hours, but American football is most certainly one. The Super Bowl ads don't hurt much, either.

Lesson Five: Life Would Be So Much Easier With a Jetpack (Scribblenauts)

One of the flaws of the delightfully imagined Scribblenauts was that too many of the levels could be solved if you just conjured a jetpack. Essentially, this meant that even people who were very baked could play through the game quite easily.

Don't do drugs.

Okay, I am sort of cheating now. I could just as well say a fantastic life lesson would be that the daily commute would be a lot faster if you had spinnerets in your wrists. I get it. But if you take a minute to think, how many situations could you potentially have improved if you had a jetpack?

If jetpacks are good enough for worms, they're good enough for us.

Are you thinking of them? There are lots, right?

While you're doing that, I'm gonna go tell Mario that she's just not that into him.


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