Building a life with choices, not dice

The first version of the game had no job system. "Occupation" was a single true-or-false variable: working or not working. Forty years of a life passed on one flag, and that is why every life looked like every other.

We reduced the new rule to one sentence: you do not pick a job from a menu.

Becoming a doctor is earned

A thirty-four-year-old player cannot say "let me be a doctor". You become a doctor because a teacher noticed you in primary school, because you chose a science high school as a teenager, because at eighteen you agreed to study one more year, because at twenty-four you sat the specialty exam. Becoming a hairdresser starts at fifteen, when you leave school and walk into a shop.

We accepted the cost from the start: some jobs are closed to some lives. A child born in a mountain village who went into the fields at fifteen will not become a doctor. That is exactly what the game wants to say.

Where you were born is not your fate. But you will pay the bill for it.

Three ways out

If we closed the door completely, the game would say "where you are born is your fate". We do not want to say that, so we left three ways out:

1. A teacher noticed. In primary school, it makes a poor but bright child visible and opens the door to scholarships and boarding schools.
2. A scholarship or boarding school. In adolescence it erases the disadvantage of place and class and keeps the academic path open.
3. A late start. Between twenty-five and forty: open university, a late degree, a change of career. Slow and expensive, but possible.

The difference between pain and bitterness lives in these three doors.

Five doors

The road to a job passes through five stops in a life:

• Primary school (ages 7-12): No job is decided yet, but which doors stay open is. Does a teacher notice you? Is there a place to study at home? Do you help in the field or the shop?
• Adolescence (13-17): The real fork. The high-school choice: science, Anatolian, vocational, imam-hatip, general, open high school, or leaving school. Which of them show up depends on your aptitude, your family's money, where you live and what you chose before.
• Young adulthood (18-29): The university exam, a department, military service, internships, a first job. The job gets its name here.
• Thirty to forty-nine: Work, money, love, children. The job brings its own events: a shopkeeper gets different scenes than a civil servant.
• Fifty and after: Your years of insurance and your worn-out body are tallied. Someone who worked off the books is left with nothing at sixty-five.

Every job has a rank: apprentice, journeyman, master, your own shop. Whether you are insured, whether you work for yourself, how much debt your body has taken on over the years: all of it is tracked.

So there are no dice at all?

Not exactly. When you enter adulthood, the game looks at the flags you have collected and searches a table for a job. The rows of the table carry priorities and weights; when a life fits two jobs, the weight decides. In some uncertain cases the engine also draws a small lot tied to the life's seed.

But the lot does not erase your choices. The table works on top of what you did; it does not invent something in place of what you did not do. There are dice, but you set the table before they are thrown.

A job on the menu that never shows up

Building the system is one thing; seeing that it works is another. All thirty-three jobs are written in the game. When we measured with bot players, only thirty-one of the thirty-three came up in the first round: photographers and unemployed graduates never appeared, and police appeared once in a little over a thousand lives. We fixed it and measured again; all thirty-three come up. We described the measurement in Balancing a life simulation with bots.

When we shortened scenes we also set a rule: if a scene we cut leaves a trace that is read somewhere else, it does not disappear; it moves to one of the remaining options. Because cutting a scene can take a career door with it.