New Nintendo Switch life simulation game is ruthlessly real, depicts harsh reality of the academic world 

Japanese toy producer Tomy Company released Jinsei Game for the Nintendo Switch on October 6. Jinsei game is a new take on the famous “Game of Life” board game. Soon upon its release, Jinsei Game caught users’ attention for some ruthlessly realistic details it depicts and unexpectedly deep dilemmas it puts forward. 

The Game of Life is a life simulation board game that originated in the US and got its own unique version in Japan 55 years ago. Since then, it has received multiple video game adaptations, the latest of which is the Nintendo Switch version titled Jinsei Game (lit. Life Game). Jinsei Game’s base gameplay functions much like the original board game, and even has an analog board game mode. You spin the roulette and move along the field according to what you get. Depending on your luck, various positive and negative events take place, and you keep developing as a person. The game can be played VS player both locally and online. 

Jinsei Game also features avatar creation and personal stats such as intelligence, strength etc, which you can develop depending on your career aspirations. You can work on building a career, creating a family or pursuing romance, but the winner is the one who accumulates the most total assets to their name. 

As it is designed to emulate how life works, many aspects of the game depend on luck, but interestingly, different career choices are designed to depend on luck to varying degrees. For example, if you’re an office worker or doctor, you will rank up gradually as long as you keep working on your stats, but success in career options such as baseball player or idol will depend almost entirely on your luck in the roulette. 

Furthermore, it seems that smaller details within the game take things even further in presenting how reality works. One user who chose to go down the researcher career path in-game shared how the game depicts the harsh reality of the academic world. 

The screenshots provided show a scene where the player’s character is about to present their thesis at a conference, confident in their fool-proof preparation for the event. But then, it turns out the thesis is judged too similar to an existing one and as a result “isn’t spared even a glance.” 

They follow up with more details from the game – the researcher has pulled a “Slump card,” which negatively impacts characters in the manga artist and researcher career paths. The researcher laments, “It’s no use, nothing comes to mind, my research has lost all progress. My body’s also at its limit as I haven’t been taking breaks…” 

The all-to familiar harsh reality presented in the game gathered the attention of users, many of whom found the events painfully relatable. Many suggested that someone’s personal experience in the academic world must have gone into the game’s production. 

A further update from the same player shows their researcher haggard, saying “My research results are 0.01% off-target…could it be just a calculation error? They are then presented with the choice to either redo the research from zero or report on the results as they are. 

This ethical dilemma was once again a surprisingly minute detail that one would definitely not expect from a board game, and users gathered to give their own takes on what would be the correct thing to do. One user reasons, “Even if you redo the research from scratch and obtain an on-target result at this point, if you stop your analysis without finding out the cause, you could risk p-hacking. For the time being, I think the correct answer is to “report the results as they are” (i.e., the results of the analysis that deviate from the theory).”

On the other hand, another player reported a completely different turn of events in their own run as a researcher. Having luck on their side, their thesis was celebrated as a new discovery, they won an award, got applauded by their peers and superiors and even obtained a research center of their own. 

The differences in outcome are quite shocking, but Jinsei Game also features many other career options, which, according to the developer, all feature their own unique events. The buzz on social media this time around has generated a lot of new interest for the title and its unexpected depth. 

At the moment, Jinsei Game is available only in Japanese for the Nintendo Switch.