I'm Climbing Up Those Walls Again

I've been 'playing' the demo for a 'game' called Real Lives recently. I recommend you pick up the trial and give it a whirl. Basically it uses real-world statistics to allow you to live out the life of a person anywhere on the globe. You can either make up your own character and choose where they start out, or the game automatically generates a person and determines through probability where you are born (most of the random generated characters end up in China or India).

The game then uses various social and economic statistics from that country to determine the probabilities you'll get certain diseases, etc. You make all the important choices, like who you want to get involved with romantically, whether or not you want to go to school (Although you may not be smart enough). What sort of job you want, etc. There is a lot that is out of your hands though, and so the game has this great "Oregon Trail" feel to it.

I've lived out the life of Matthew Collins, an economist who never could quite get into an NGO, and so remained the head of an econ department before he was forced out because of ageism. He waited too late to have children, and eventually died a sad, poor old man at the age of 105.

I've lived out the life of Gilluiamo Hernandez, a Mexican policeman who was stunted at birth. He was arrested and jailed many times in his life for political activism and eventually died of an early heart attack.

I've lived the life of some guy in Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. All I remember is he died pretty young.

It gets boring eventually, but is fun for a little while, and is good at showing the huge gap in quality of life and life expectancy around the world.




I managed to see Secretary, which is a movie starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, who is a young girl fresh out of the psych unit after a period of self-mutilation. She soon finds a job as the secretary of a strange young lawyer (James Spader) who is very commanding.

Spader becomes more and more dominant as time goes on, and one day, when Lee (Maggie) makes a spelling error one too many times, he gives her a spanking. She soon finds that she really really enjoys this, and so the two embark on a dominant/submissive relationship that is bewildering to the average viewer. It makes for an interesting twist on a love story, although I was annoyed to see they included the typical on-the-side boyfriend for Lee who just doesn't understand her, just so she can reject him at the end of the film.

I'd recommend it to anyone sick of traditional romantic-comedies, or who want to see what a dominant/submissive relationship is really like.