Life Choices

A Game/Sim showing life's choices.

Base Units

• Happiness
• Wealth
• Time

The game is played in quarter (of the year). You are given 1600 hours each turn. You also accumulate wealth based on your career and investments.

Curves

Most effects follow an asymptotic curve. They have large effects initially that decrease over time to a steady level. Losses are generally felt more than gains.

Skills

• Home maintenance
• Car maintenance
• Visual Arts
• Musical Instrument
• Writing
• Coordination
• Planning
• Computers
• Medicine
• Cooking
• Finance

Each skill has levels, the first levels are generally available in very few hours (~20), higher levels take successively more. The highest levels take 10,000 or more hours. Working on a skill delivers a small amount of happiness, but it delivers more happiness at higher levels. Gaining a level gives an asymptotic boost, but a small one. Spending money can reduce the time it takes to learn a skill - this follows a similar curve, $100 decreases the time by 20%, but it takes 1000$ to decrease by 40% and $10000 to 60%.

House

Changing houses has one of the largest effects on happiness (in either direction) as is proportional to the change. Buying a new house also consumes 250 hours. Even moving between equal houses produces happiness. And the difference in value.

Where you live also effects your social status. Having an income near or slightly above the average income for your neighborhood increases social happiness, peaking at around the 80th percentile.

Houses also incur unexpected repair costs - each repair has a cheap and expensive option. But if something breaks twice in a row, you have to choose the expensive option. If you have a home repair skill, these costs decrease.

You can also redecorate to increase happiness. Visual art, planning and home repair will all help.

Car

Similar to houses, but much simpler. No social effects. As cars age the number of repairs increase. If you have an automotive skill, costs decrease.

Luxury Goods

These are one time purchases. Each additional purchase decreases it's asymptotic marginal effect, but not the initial effect. You can sell luxury goods, but you feel loss and some depreciate. The pricing will also be effect by skills and will effect entertainment. So if you have computer skills, the cost buying electronics is reduced and you will get more happiness out of watching TV, listening to music or playing video games.

• Electronics
• Art
• Jewelery

Travel and Events

Another way to increase happiness. But this is a big one time injection with no loss. You can travel which takes days or weeks or attend concerts and workshops which takes hours. Travel receives bonuses from finance and planning.

Being married (and having kids) increases the cost of travel, but also increases it's happiness to net increase in happiness per dollar.

Education

The game starts in high-school. The amount of effort you put into education effects your college offerings and scholarships. Depending on the game state, high-school, GRE and career can all effect what colleges are available. Degrees change what careers are available to you and how successful you will be in them.

Education also increases happiness; the increase at graduation is fairly small but the asymptote is high. Enrolling in education also decreases the time it takes to learn a skill.

Career

On of the biggest determiners of happiness. There are 3 paths with a total of 10 jobs. There are low, medium and high-skill jobs. But for high skill jobs some jobs have a path from low skill to high skill (cook), other only have medium and high (manager/ceo) and finally some only have a high skill variant (doctor).

The notation is L:LL, L:LM, L:LH, M:MM, M:LM, M:LH, M:MH, H:HH, H:MH, H:LH.

There are also three approaches to a career; part-time, full-time and over-time. Full-time takes exactly 40 hours a week and earns much more per hour, plus for Med or above comes with health benefits. Over-time earns a little more money per hour than full-time but the hours are unpredictable falling between 50-80 a week. Part time is not available on M:MM, M:LH, M:MH, or any H. Over-time is required to advance from M to H. When you choose overtime, you have to choose up to three places to draw the excess time from.

• LL: Retail
• LM: Auto-repair or Home-maintenance
• MM: Nurse
• LH: Cook
• MH: Management
• HH: Doctor

They also follow a logical distribution of income and happiness. So L:LL gives medium happiness and just above the poverty line of income. H:HH gives very high happiness and income. L:LH gives negative happiness and no income (internship). Prestige from careers also effects social interactions.

Finally, you can have no career. This is being (retired / a bum). There are no positive or negative effects for this.

Diet

You can trade happiness, health, time and money. You choose between happiness, health and money, and then dedicate time to cooking - which increases all of these, gives you bonus happiness for practicing a skill and increases your skill level.

You can also set a "treat" level. Treats disproportionately effect both health and happiness. The point of all this is that the ideal setting for health and happiness is a healthy overall diet with occasional treats.

Diet health is immediate (that's to say it's an immediate change in "velocity") but happiness follows asymptotes. So moving to a healthier diet will make you unhappy for a while, but eventually will stabilize.

Sleep

Simple, choose how many hours you will sleep. Happiness increases up to 10 hours (max) but health peaks at 8. You cannot choose less than 3, but your health will be seriously impaired.

Exercise

Large boost to health, small boost to happiness.

Entertainment

Huge boost to happiness. Particularly by picking time-investments like watching a season of a great show, or reading a great book.

Hygiene

Anything below 2 hours a day will have huge negative impacts on your social life and health. Above 2 hours gives a small boost to happiness a medium boost to social - this represents dressing nicer, putting on makeup/cologne, moisturizing, and so forth.

Health

As we've seen, many things effect health. Everyone has a small chance for bad things to happen; cancer or lupus. Cancer can hit at any time (with changing probabilities) and will cost a lot of money (if you don't have insurance) and you'll have a limited survival rate. Lupus (used to represent all chronic, genetic health issues) will cause continuous issues and if you don't invest additional time and money, will have large detriments on your health.

Other diseases are based on your health rating. Poor health gives you a high probability for diabetes (which behaves like lupus), increases your risk for cancer and raises your risk of heart-attack (you die instantly).

Finally, health effects happiness, but only negatively.

A health rating is calculated each turn and you will move 5% of the distance between the health rating and your current health value.

Social

Time spent socially increases happiness, much like entertainment. But the out come is unpredictable. On average the return is 25% higher than entertainment, with the possibility of much higher or even negative values.

The social algorithm is cumulative. Your social score is calculated and multiplied by the hours. This gives your social rating. If this is higher than your current social value, you will move 5% of the way there, if it is lower, you will lose 10% of the way (it's harder to make friends than to lose them).

Family

You must exceed a certain threshold of scalability and then you may receive marriage proposals. Being married drastically increases the effects of sociability, but failing to put enough time into social will result in large negative values, then eventually divorce which will have huge negative impacts on happiness and reduce your wealth by 50%. You'll also get a random set boosts from your spouse (we'll roll a random person, and they'll have a similar number of 'skill' points, social rating and income).

After you're married you can choose to have kids at any point and 3-10 turns later the first will show up. 2 turns after that you can start working on more. Kids are another huge boost on happiness, but further increase the time you must invest in social to prevent negative results. If you end up divorced after kids, the negative effect will be even higher.

Wealth

How much money you have. You also have a set ROI. Finance skills increase this. You can also pay a fee to increase this for a turn (hiring a professional). You also have to pay taxes on a progressive scale. Again, finance and professional help decrease this.

Having wealth doesn't do anything for happiness (though you can spend it on goods, travel and events) but debt has a huge negative effect. There are 3 debts in-game; student-loans, which have a low level, and don't start accruing debt for a few years (but still carry negative burden). Mortgage which can be used to buy a house and will have medium levels. And credit cards, which is what everything else defaults to.

Happiness

This is the bottom of the stack. Everything funnels into happiness. But happiness also effects everything. So you get into both vicious and virtuous cycles. Your final score is based on your average happiness and minus the standard deviation.