In my ideal dream house you can change the settings, like you can on ‘The Simulation World’. I spent many an hour of my childhood building a home, making my simulation people happy, giving them a good life and killing them all when I got bored. But now it’s given me a wildly unrealistic idea of how home design really happens, because now I think it should be as easy as clicking on a wall and changing the colour. Surely you don’t have to actually carry the sofa inside the house and put it where you want it? Oh yes, you do. It doesn’t just appear in your living room as a money-related sound plays.

If you go looking online for designer wallpaper made in Melbourne, then you’d better be prepared for all that entails: it has to be printed, applied, and then if you’re not happy with it…well, you shouldn’t have picked that in the first place. I DID always waste a lot of money having wallpaper applied in my virtual house, only to find that I didn’t like the look of it. I”d buy new stuff, not like that either, and by the time I found the wallpaper I liked I’d have paid about five times more than I should’ve. To be fair, it’s easy to do that in a game where you can input a cheat and get basically infinite money.

All of those things are totally invalid in real life, unless you’re so rich you have print multiple reams of designer wallpaper and stick them onto your wall for the fun of it. Not I. I need to make an informed decision, much like an adult doing home design and NOT like a child playing a video game. Maybe I’ll go for…floral design wallpaper for the dining room? Will that fit with the carpet? There’s so much to think about! Gah, I just HAD to be the type of child who blags my way through every game with consequence-free cheat codes.

-Tina