10 Things Chaos Says Are Somehow Harder in Games Than in Real Life

Video games make a lot of impossible things look easy. You can become a master assassin, a world class pilot, an expert lockpick, or a high ranking soldier without ever getting off the couch. But every so often a game takes something completely ordinary in real life and somehow makes it unbelievably difficult. Here are the things I think games have made harder than they actually are.

Walking Becomes a Struggle in Physics Heavy Games Like GTA 4

Walking is something most people have not thought about in years. You stand up, put one foot in front of the other, and that is pretty much it. Unless you are playing something like GTA 4, or basically any other Rockstar game built on a physics based engine. Move too quickly and your character stumbles, falls over, kicks their own legs, and occasionally manages to travel about three feet before collapsing.

You know how to walk in real life without thinking about it. But games like this take all that invisible coordination and, as I put it, throw it down the toilet. It is funny watching a character keep falling over, but it is also completely counterintuitive for something this basic.

Cooking Turns Into High Pressure Teamwork in Overcooked

Cooking has a strange relationship with video games. In real life you can spend an hour on a complicated meal, carefully measuring ingredients and making sure everything is cooked properly, or you can make a grilled cheese sandwich in about five minutes. Games like Overcooked take something this mundane and turn it into a high pressure team sport, with chopping, cooking, washing dishes, plating, and delivering all happening at once.

The game gets especially ridiculous with other people involved. You end up yelling at friends because someone put the tomatoes in the wrong place while three orders are burning in the oven. In reality, the worst thing that happens making dinner is that you overcook something. In Overcooked, or Cooking Mama for that matter, dinner becomes a catastrophic logistical failure that can genuinely strain real friendships.

Surgeon Simulator Makes Basic Hand Control Feel Impossible

Surgery is obviously hard in real life, but actual surgeons at least have full control over their own hands. I cannot think of a single game that gives you proper hand control during surgery, and it feels like one giant practical joke across the industry. Surgeon Simulator hands you a collection of medical instruments and no real help beyond that, forcing you to perform operations with deliberately awkward controls where even picking up a tool becomes an ordeal.

I know Surgeon Simulator is not trying to accurately simulate surgery, it is a comedy game. But after playing it for a few hours I have to wonder, "would you be better at real world surgery than you are at Surgeon Simulator?"

Getting Over It Turns Mountain Climbing Into Comical Punishment

Climbing a mountain in real life is far more dangerous and physically demanding than doing it in a game, but some games are not interested in realism at all. They are interested in making you suffer, often to a comical level of difficulty. Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is the perfect example. The objective sounds simple, climb a mountain, and you control a man using a sledgehammer to propel himself upward.

The problem is there is nothing stopping you from losing an hour of progress in three seconds. One bad swing can send you flying backward, forcing you to repeat sections you already finished. If you were actually climbing a mountain you would have handholds, climbing equipment, ropes, and an experienced person telling you what you are doing wrong. In Getting Over It, you have a hammer and the growing realization that you made a terrible decision.

Microsoft Flight Simulator Overwhelms With Buttons a Real Pilot Would Know

Flying a plane is an extremely complicated skill in real life, but pilots have one major advantage, they know how all those buttons work in the cockpit. Some games dumb the act of flying down way too much to still be realistic. Others, like Microsoft Flight Simulator, do a really good job of making you feel like the dumbest person on the planet for even trying, between altitude, air speed, navigation, fuel, landing gear, flaps, and radio communications.

Suddenly you are looking at a cockpit with more buttons than an old Nokia phone. Modern flight simulators can be extremely realistic, and that realism makes you realize just how much the average person does not know how to fly a plane, or should not ever be in charge of flying one.

Resident Evil's Inventory Management Makes Packing a Nightmare

Inventory management is something almost nobody considers a real life challenge. If you own five bottles of water, you do not open a menu to decide which slot number three goes into, you just shove them in a bag and shimmy things around until everything fits. Video games have decided that carrying objects is an advanced organizational skill, and the most famous example is Resident Evil, especially four and five.

Your character can carry guns, ammunition, herbs, keys, grenades, medical supplies, and various random objects, but somehow there is only room for a handful of them. You end up standing in the middle of a zombie infested mansion trying to decide whether a key item is more important than a box of shotgun shells. Real life backpacking has never felt so simple.

The Sims and Planet Zoo Force Every Build Onto a Rigid Grid

Building a house in real life is difficult. You need architects, engineers, construction workers, permits, materials, tools, money, and years of your life. But in something like The Sims or Planet Zoo, you cannot build anything outside of a pre-established grid, no matter how hard you try or how talented you supposedly are at construction.

That is easier than real construction in one sense, but it is also a lot dumber in another. Imagine buying a patch of land, wanting to build something, and having the universe tell you that you cannot build there because it is not perfectly aligned on a set of 90 degree angles.

Kerbal Space Program Makes Getting to Orbit Absurdly Difficult

Getting into space in real life is one of humanity's greatest technological achievements, which makes it funny how silly you look flopping around in space in games like Starfield or Star Wars Battlefront, running into obstructions and blowing up immediately. Then there is Kerbal Space Program, where everything is needlessly difficult and comically obtuse.

Even with proper real world knowledge, your rocket might just fall over, your engines might not be strong enough, or you might make it all the way to orbit only to realize you forgot the landing gear. All of that is entirely impossible in real world space travel, but a fairly common occurrence in actual space simulation games.

Platforming Turns a Simple Jump Into an Exact Science

Jumping is remarkably easy in real life. You bend your knees, push off the ground, and gravity takes care of the rest. Video games have somehow managed to turn this into an exact science. If you needed to get over a gap or onto a surface in real life, you would just hop over it without thinking hard about it.

But in a lot of platforming games it feels like moving from surface to surface requires a degree to complete, which is really counterintuitive when you think about it. Part of the appeal of these games is the challenge of making your way across successfully, but it is way harder than it probably should be. In real life you simply skip the gap or grab the edge, but a game rarely makes it that easy.

Doing Nothing in a Game Is Harder Than It Sounds

The last one is doing nothing. When is the last time you were holding a controller and chose to do nothing? When is the last time you were in a game world where you could do literally anything with no consequence, and instead chose to stand there and zone out? We have all done that in real life, sitting and staring at a wall thinking about random things, but in a video game everything in your body fights you and tells you that you have to be moving at all times.

That is part of why games take control away from you during cut scenes. If players had control during a cut scene, they would be running around, jumping on tables, punching non-player characters, doing everything possible to avoid doing nothing. It is honestly hard to explain why doing nothing in a game is so hard, but it is, and that is why it tops this list. "Prove to me that you're capable of doing nothing in a video game."