I used to work for an escape room, which is a room where there are puzzles that lead to clues that people must solve to escape it. I’m having a lot of fun. Then, I get this woman. She is lazy and doesn’t want to try to figure out the clues, and insists that I do it for her. We are allowed to only give hints, and I do, but she is so thick that anything but saying the answer confuses her.

Finally, frustrated, she screams, “Well, I guess I’m just too dumb for this! How dare you make me feel dumb?!” and throws a fit. She leaves a horrible review and my boss, who is the one who designed the puzzles, blames and fires me.

And that’s the story of me getting fired because a woman was too dumb and lazy. And the boss was an idiot but in a different way. The moral of the story is: if you’re too poor at logic and deduction skills, go do something else. Oh, and don’t work for someone who blames you for things that aren’t your fault. Plenty of people have failed and didn’t leave bad reviews.

(I’m a producer for a video game publishing company, attending a well-known gaming convention on behalf of my company. We have a few upcoming games on display, and we like to chat with and answer questions for players. A lot of the time, you get questions that might seem sort of silly or naive because people don’t understand the nuts and bolts of what’s actually involved in making a game, but I never mind answering. I’m talking to a guy who is a fan of one of our older games.)

Guy: “I just don’t get why you guys haven’t made a sequel.”

Me: “Well, it would be nice to consider one day if we had a good plan for it! Right now all our resources are tied up in these games, plus a few other projects we haven’t announced yet, but maybe one day!”

Guy: *scoffs* “So, just make it free.”

Me: “The… game you’re talking about?”

Guy: “No, make a free sequel. Free to play.”

Me: “Well, I mean… like I said, we’re committed to other projects right now, so it’ll be some time before we could even consider additional work.”

Guy: *staring at me as if I’m an idiot* “But it would be free.”

Bystander: “Games that are free-to-play still cost money and take time and people and other resources to make, dude.”

Guy: *still looking at me* “But it would be a free game.”

(We went back and forth like this a bit, and being that I was there representing our brand and trying to be professional I couldn’t say what I wanted to which was, “Is this a f****** joke? Are you deliberately messing with me?” To this day, I’m still not sure if he legitimately thought a game being free to play would somehow negate all the human and financial cost required to create it, as if it would be farted out of the ether, but he eventually just walked off looking annoyed. I still love conventions and interacting with fans, but some of them definitely really make you earn that round of drinks at the end of the day.)

(I’m in my apartment with my girlfriend playing a medieval MMO. She’s on her laptop out in the kitchen, while I’m in my office on my desktop. We’re hanging out in the starting town when a random low-level player starts following me. Note: I’m 30 and she’s 27, and we’ve both been playing this game together since high school.)

Random Player: “Hey, [My Username]!”

Me: “Yes?”

Random Player: “Free money, please?”

Me: “You can make money by killing goblins or cows, or by fishing or mining.”

Random Player: “I don’t want to do that! Give me 500k or I’ll do your mom in bed!”

Me: “Okay, that’s actually very disturbing.”

Random Player: “What, can’t handle me sleeping with your mom?”

Girlfriend: “No, he means it’s disturbing that you’re turned on by sixty-year-old married women.”

(The random player briefly stands there, silent, and then runs off without saying another word.)

Me: *shouting out of my office to my girlfriend* “You’re definitely a keeper, babe!”

(She responded by making her avatar blow my avatar a kiss in-game. A moment later, she waltzed into my office and gave me a kiss on the cheek. We have now been married for three years, and we still play that MMO together from time to time.)

At our game store, we used to have a policy that customers could try out any game in the store. It really helped cut down on returns. This meant, however, that we would get a few customers who would abuse this policy.

One man would come in almost daily and spend hours playing games, rarely purchasing anything.

When this happened, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion had come out. The man was coming in daily and spent literally hours standing in one spot and playing the game. 

I would inform him every half hour or so that he needed to take a break and could not just play games all day. He would save, walk away for a minute, and jump right back to it when I started working on something else.

After a few days of this, I was tired of him.

The next time he came in, he played Oblivion for a solid five hours. I didn’t bother him once. When he finally took his leave of the game and I was sure he was gone, I loaded up his game and dumped almost a week’s worth of progress in one part of the map. Then, I sent his character across the map to the woods and left his character naked and alone. Finally, I deleted every save file except this one, and shut the game off.

The next time the man came in, he asked to play Oblivion. I gladly obliged, put the game in, and walked away. I can still remember him sputtering and frantically trying to search for a way to get his progress back.

When he demanded to know what had happened, I politely told him that this was a store game and everyone had access to the save files. If he wanted to be able to play without the risk of someone else having access to it, he would probably want to actually buy the game.

He was practically in tears when he left, but he did finally buy the game and take it home.

(My husband and I are scrolling through the free games on our Xbox to see if there’s anything interesting enough to play. We settle on one and decide we’ll play it once we have our daughter down for bed.)

Me: “Are you ready to play Goat Stimulator?”

Husband: *gives me an odd look*

Me: “I mean Goat Simulator! Goat Stimulator would be a completely different game.”