Real Lives

Real Lives is an interactive piece of software that allows you to assume the role of a character, find out its family background and follow the course of its life according to the decisions you make.

This type of tool can help you understand the conditions in which people from other parts of the world live in, based on many aspects. For example, the country of origin plays an important role as it can directly affect the character's family.

The interface of the application is clean and pretty intuitive. Real Lives can automatically generate a new character or you can customize it by specifying a country, local city of town, surname, given name, locale, gender and attributes (e.g. happiness, intelligence).

Based on this information, Real Lives automatically generates a story where you can find out your parents' and siblings' names and ages. Additional information is provided, such as religion and language.

Once you are born, you can advance through life one year at a time. With every click come potential opportunities for the character. For instance, you can choose to go to college at 18 years old, make an investment when you have enough money, get romantically involved or adopt a child.

However, certain factors do not depend on your actions. For example, one of your parents may become ill or your spouse may want to get a divorce. Real Lives allows you to view family statistics, actions you have taken, details about the country's politics, society and health, as well as statistics of your character's attributes.

In the "File" menu you can save your current character and configure issues regarding life aspects (e.g. conscience, natural disasters, country and culture, crime and abuse, health, discrimination, vices).

The program requires a massive amount of system resources and has a good response time. No error dialogs have been displayed throughout our testing and Real Lives did not freeze or crash. Unfortunately, there is no help file available. Real Lives proves to be a reliable educational simulator that can be used by children and adults alike.