15 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games

Life lesson: The road to fulfillment is littered with compromise, also dysentery

Unless you're some kind of history buff, playing Oregon Trail will open your eyes to how rough the pioneers had it. While it's just a simulation, though, its enormous pixels conceal a considerable wealth of knowledge: You might have a beautiful dream of living in a land of opportunity and prosperity, but life has other plans for you. Your wife will die of snakebites, your oxen will desert you, and your precious food supply will get claimed by the undertow. Unless you're willing to sacrifice everything for your dream, you're probably better off at home with a box of Nilla wafers and the Travel Channel.

Life lesson: Take risks

Whenever you reach the other side of the road in Frogger, your reward is another, more difficult one to cross. Junior-high-schoolers dissecting frogs have never been able to discern why amphibians crave death-defying exploration, but it's safe to say that even the ones that can't swim have seen more of this planet's racecars and floating logs than anyone wagging fingers. Unless they're being dissected.

Life lesson: The little things help you cope

Computers are here to stay, and proficiency with them is a must for any number of jobs in the soul-crushing world of data entry. Solitaire originally came bundled with computers not only to train people how to use the expensive gadget that came in that huge, cow-patterned box, but also how to cope with all the inevitable hours of down time they'll have at their future go-nowhere careers. Don't forget to turn on mouse trails.

Life lesson: Get hitched, you'll live longer

The upside of life being pointless? It's short. Or, as Passage shows, it's about 200 steps longer if you take up a life partner. At least your march towards inevitably dying a sudden death isn't lonely. Unless your spouse dies first.