As I talked about earlier this week Escapism is the little white rabbit that leads Alice down the gaming hole and turns her into a human meatslab that lives on cheetos and posts ten thousand word JRPG plot summaries on IGN FAQS. In short Escapism is gaming. So it shouldn’t surprise you then that not only are game characters designed to satisfy our demands for escapism but so are the worlds they inhabit.
Designers quickly realized that not only could the characters that populated their made up worlds be completely detached from reality so could their profession. Take Crazy Taxi for example. They took a job known mostly for uncomfortable working conditions, horrific levels of tedium and racism, and made it into something awesome. So what else have they lied to us about?

3: “Oh God there’s shit everywhere” – Plumbing

Before I started my career in not getting paid to write about games on the internet I actually tried my hand at being a plumber’s apprentice. Lured in by promises of hefty paychecks and nubile big busted housewives who needed their pipes servicing I approached the job with the bright eyed, cheerful attitude people posses right up until they have to spend a day up to their knees in someone else’s shit. Needless to say the job wasn’t for me.

Super Mario would have you believe that plumbing is in fact a mystical adventure complete with princesses, rainbows and drugs that give you magical powers but the unfortunate truth is that yes, you’ll be mooching around (quite often green) pipes but usually with the intention of removing what’s blocking them and let you tell you, it’s not often piles of floating gold coins. There’s money to be made for sure if you don’t mind defrauding vulnerable old ladies but the anything else the game tries to pass off on your is pure bullshit. You’ll probably encounter some turtles but not the kind you expect and the only mushrooms you’ll find are those growing on the inside of your lungs after you accidentally inhale a big chestful of human waste.

Unfortunately. No. Not like this.

You don’t even get to fight giant alligators because rumors of giant fire breathing lizards roaming the sewers of New York are unfortunately entirely false and the only princess your likely to come across is ‘Princess’ an aging hooker whose decapitated head was blocking some Yuppie’s kitchen sink.

What Mario promises you: Hot chicks who want to make cakes for you, gold coins, drugs, adventure.

What you get: Human waste. Salmonella.

2: “CHARGE!” – Soldier

It’s unusual how games are the only form of media that get away with trying to tell us that the second world war, which killed 72 million people (47 million of which were civilians), was in fact, totally awesome. If a movie tried to show WW2 as anything but a series of tragic death scenes with a haunting ethereal soundtrack it’d be bounced out of the theaters by angry critics before you could say “Spielberg” But if video games are to believed the Normandy landings were like a 1940’s Thunder Mountain with allied soldiers lining up to experience it ‘just one more time’ before they had to go back home. If there’s still any veterans alive by the time the next generation grows up they’re going to find themselves answering a whole different set of questions. Gone are the innocent days of “What was it really like Grandpa?” and instead kids will be asking questions like ” Did you ever headshot any n00bs with the springfield Gramps?”

I… wait… what?

Getting shot in real life is a deeply traumatizing event that causes you, in most cases, to shit yourself instantly, but in games it’s barely more than an inconvenience often easily solved by walking over the next medpak you see or by simply waiting a few seconds for your wounds to heal via magic. As for mental side effects like say, horrifying flashbacks of your friends being roasted alive by flame throwers aren’t really an issue either. The only flashback you’ll be having is playing the game again in ‘Hardcore’ mode.

Even if you do bite the bullet, and by bullet I mean about 400 of them, your ‘death’ is barely even a setback as a quick tap of the quickload key brings you back Jesus Christ style to unleash some groundhog day-esque whupass on your Nazi murderers. Forget rigorous training and harsh assault courses, Boot camp lasts at most about five minutes, just long enough for a guy doing a bad impression of Tom Sizemore to teach you how to throw a grenade before you’re dumped into a firefight in the middle of France.

What Call of Duty promises you: Honour, glory, invincibility, the ability to drive any vehicle and fire any weapon without training, the occasional zombie.

What you get: Shot in the face, shot in the throat, shot in the back, shot in the ass, shot in the legs, shot in the eye, shot in the balls, blown up by tanks, blown up by planes, blown up by blimps, post traumatic stress disorder, dysentery.

1: “So I was on the toilet last night and…” – Doctor

Med school is an 8 year nightmare of constant work and study which can reduce even the most hardy student into a sniveling prescription abusing wreck. It doesn’t get any better when you qualify either. Not only must you know the illnesses and intricacies of the human body so intimately that everyone you love seems only a few heart murmurs away from instant death you also have to practice being nice to obese women so they don’t sue you when you accidentally leave a thermometer stuck up their rectum at the end of a 28 hour shift at the clinic. Games often show the best part of Medicine, that is, the part about making people not die an gloss over all the hard work, research and above all, the piles of paperwork, that come with it. This is true of just about every game ever made. When was the last time you saw Gordon Freeman crack open one of those medkits and use the supplied tweezers to pull a manhack out of his forehead? How exactly do green herbs cure zombie bites? Do you eat them or what? In gaming the medical profession has generally been reduced to leaving medical kits scattered around the place so the wounded can just walk over them and heal instantly. No need for expensive and difficult to perform procedures. No need for the slow process of actually extracting bullets and stituring wounds. Hell, most fps characters don’t even bother removing the enormous amounts of lead their bodies are riddled with which presents a whole boat load of problems when it comes to airport security. Old school games take this even further. In pretty much every brawler ever made no one ever uses medical supplies to treat their broken ribs and torn muscles, they just eat some god roast turkey or chug a soda they found in a dumpster.

“Lung Cancer? Please, step into my office”

Games like Trauma Centre tell us that surgery lasts closer to 2 minutes than 8 hours and that you’ll spend most of your medical career defusing bombs and using lasers to fight intelligent mutating bacteria instead of treating the usual assortment of skin sores, genitals legions, and extracting foreign objects from people’s rectums and none of it’s true, not one tiny little bit of it. These games would have us believe being good at ‘operation’ the board game makes us all excellent doctors.
But by far there’s no better example of Medical escapism than Team fortress 2. You never see a medic putting a heavy’s torn off hand on ice so he can sew it back on later or trying to hold a scouts guts in while performing vital surgery and you sure as hell never see him applying topical cream to the Sniper’s haemorrhoids. Instead he shoots his team mates with a healing gun. If that doesn’t sum up video games entirely, I don’t know what does.

What they promise you: Life saving techniques at your fingertips, magical powers that let you slow down time to perform medical procedures, exciting cases in volving helocopter accidents, a gun that makes people invincible.

What you get: Old women with anal prolapses, bodily discretions, close contact with all kind of wonderful contagious diseases, shit loads of paper work, student loans up your arsehole