Quick Facts

• Article source: 你在你的国，过着随机的生活, The Initium / 端媒 (paywalled), 2022-04-02
• Original article author: Zhang Dalü 张大驴
• Online version of the game: Life Restart (Chinese only)
• Game source on GitHub, maintained by Vick Scarlet (神戸小鳥) based in Nanping, Fujian province, China
• The game is free and open-source. Some smartphone ripoffs float around - beware of malware, play the original one.

“Life Restart” (English title of 人生重开模拟器) is a browser-based game in which you simulate your life and subsequent incarnations of it.¹ Subtitled “I don’t want to stay in this garbage life one more second” (这垃圾人生一秒也不想待了), the game allows you to play through your life again and again based on some initial settings, similar to a rogue-like role-playing game.

Playing Life Restart

Initial settings are either based on a “normal life” or based on some famous person from China’s past. Following the normal life, you first choose three talents that tweak your character. Selection of talents change with every iteration of the game and include, among others (translated here):

• under the rainbow - probably gay
• pretty-faced- improved appearance and physique
• Buddhist ancestors - increased chance to enter Harvard
• don’t even think of it - you won’t enter Qinghua university (one of China’s ivy league)²
• sorrowful soldier - when happiness below zero, all other properties +1

In the next step, you assign 20 points to different categories, “beauty”, “intellect”, “physique”, “family circumstances”, after which you’re ready to enter life!

This one is typcial and short:

• Born in the countryside, male.
• Very good at slingshotting birds in one shot, care-free childhood.
• The only window that’s in an ok state at the local school is broken; when it rains, no one can sit close to the windows.
• Leeches bite when planting rice seedlings.
• Going to middle school means a very, very long walk on foot.
• Managed to enter quite a good high school.
• Addicted to drugs through a schoolmate at 16, learned gambling at 17, thinner every year.
• At 21, debts abound, no food around, starved to death.

No worries, restart life!³

Not a China Dream simulator

Of course, one can argue that “Life Restart” makes random-based decisions how a life should unfold. Everything happens randomly, and it’s just a game after all. However, the game is also dubbed “China Life Simulator” (中国人模拟器), and aptly so: It is possible to interpret it and its events as satire on the often harsh realities of living in today’s China. The example above mirrors the ever-so growing gap between country and city life. In another iteration, I was female, had a top degree, became a stay-at-home mom, got a second child because the One-Child Policy was loosened, divorced because my husband had a mistress, died of an illness. Life.

In a sense, the game mocks the “China Dream”⁴: No matter how you set out in life, if you work hard, wealth and good living conditions can be achieved, upward social mobility guaranteed. This may have been true ten, twenty years ago, when you could be born in Guizhou selling chili sauce on the street like Tao Huabi 陶华碧, become the founder of “Lao Gan Ma” and make millions today. The rags-to-riches narrative in China has lost momentum and power over the years, especially with the recent developments due to the pandemic. The promise of a high-income tech job has been accompanied by a deadly “996” working culture, and “teach English, make money” has been brought to an abrupt halt. What is considered to be “The Good Life (tm)” goal is simply not as easy to achieve as it used to be - and not everyone wants to follow the template either. Sometimes it’s even better to just lie flat (tang ping 躺平).

Other games have mocked the Chinese way of life before, as Zhang Dalü notes, who wrote the article on which this blog post is based. Games like “China Parents” (中国式家长) or “MyCompany996” (我的公司996), which I admittedly haven’t played. “Life Restart” struck me in how it determines your life (seemingly)⁵ at random and how, at the same time, it manages to criticise current life goals in China. Born in the countryside? Bad luck. And its subsequent life events are possibly not so random after all.

Footnotes

Last modified on 2022-04-18