More a quest for education than adventure, Real Lives is interesting enough, if not exactly exciting stuff. Basically, you are born at some distant point on the globe, and your life unfolds under the financial, cultural, political, and medical circumstances of your home country. Life goes by at its own pace, but you can jump forward a year or backtrack to make different decisions. In our case, as a girl in India, disasters, diseases, and cataclysms visited our corner of the world, sometimes affecting the family and sometimes not. The action in our life was limited to home economics, though we found it strange that our heroine was never offered the option to have children; neither could she start a business--her husband was the sole breadwinner, apparently. However, our frustration at having so little control over the shape of our life was tempered by the insights we gained about the geographical lottery of life. Gamers are likely to find Real Lives a bit too rooted in the real world, but sociology students may enjoy the opportunity to watch their curriculums play out in this detailed simulation.