Summary
If you ever played a video game as a child, you might have had the same experience as me. You play the video game for a few hours, and then your parents tell you to put the controller down and go play outside. So, you and your friends start imitating the game outside, instead of actually playing it.
Or, maybe you just thought your adult life would be like how it was in the game. Either way, it’s easy to model your personality off a video game accidentally. Or, at least it was for me. So, here are some games we all tried to emulate as kids.
I know at least three separate people who played this game as children and then went out and begged their parents to buy them a skateboard. And yes, before you ask, I am one of those children. That skateboard is still languishing somewhere in my parents' garage.
Anyone who has played any iteration ofTony Hawk’s Pro Skaterknows the frustration of being amazing at the game and terrible at the actual act of skating on a board. Turns out, it’s a lot harder than it looks. Who would’ve known?
When I first got Animal Crossing for my GameCube, I regret to admit that I genuinely thought it was a good imitator of what adult life would be. Sure, I knew that when I moved out of my parents' house, I wouldn’t be greeted bycuddly, adorable neighbors. But, I did think I’d be able to pay my mortgage at any pace.
Turns out, also not true! But, anyone who was a childhood fan of Animal Crossing knows the pain and the joy of designing your house just like how you’d want to design a future apartment of yours. I personally am still waiting for my indoor jacuzzi and Master Sword model.
Another life sim that let me down. I was personally a lover of The Sims 2: Double Deluxe. But anyonewho ever played a Sims gameto death on a warm summer’s day knows that life is rarely as exciting or as fun as a Sims game.
However, that didn’t mean I didn’t try to emulate my Sims growing up. Was that idea perhaps misguided? Absolutely. After all, I’m still waiting to meet Bella Goth. I do think the one thing this game taught us was that sometimes you can physically see someone’s negative response to something you said floating above their head, even in real life.
Hear me out on this one. This is definitely less about emulating a personality archetype and more about how I spent my time at recess, all the way through middle school in fact. As soon as I got my hands on a Tomb Raider game, I spent most of my days pretending to be Lara Croft on the monkey bars.
Is this a unique experience just for me? You let me know in the comments. Either way, every time I see a set of monkey bars, even as an adult, I think of climbing through a subterranean temple as Lara Croft, style icon.
I played Rollercoaster Tycoon to the point of tedium. So much so that, by the time I reached early high school, I would proudly tell anyone who asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up that my dream was to design rollercoasters and operate theme parks. And while yes, that is definitely a full-time career one can pursue, I didn’t realize at the time how much math that involved.
So, while my dreams of designing theme parks went out the window, I also recall a number of my friends expressing the same dreams. This also happened in a lot of other tycoon games, like Zoo Tycoon, for example. I know at least one person who is actually a zookeeper because of that game.
Everyone has to admit the way Guitar Hero shaped them. Much like my old skateboard, there is currently a dusty guitar sitting in my apartment that is being criminally underused. When I first got my hands on Guitar Hero as a kid, I thought, ‘Oh, this isn’t so hard?’
I know dozens of people who, in the wake of games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, went out and bought various musical instruments. Are any of those people in actual bands? Definitely not.
I’m using Wii Sports as the template, just because it had so many different sports that my friends and I tried out later in life thanks to this game, but really, I’m talking about all sports games. Many Madden fans or Wii Sports fans know how much these games convinced us to try out different sports, to varying degrees of success.
As a personal sidenote, I actually do play tennis because of Wii Sports. I got so addicted to playing the tennis game that I knew I had to try it out myself, and I still play. So, video games can count as exercise, it turns out!
This game is a menace to parents everywhere. If you never played Mirror’s Edge, allow me to explain why. This game is all about using parkour to navigate through a vast city. Hopefully, at this point, you know where I’m going with this.
My friends and I would play this game for a few hours, stock up on a few ideas for parkour, and then go running around the neighborhood trying to leap between fences and apartment buildings. Thankfully, nobody was actually injured in the process. But we were scolded several times for pretending that the tops of two dumpsters were two skyscrapers and that we were parkour masters.
