Top 7... Lies games tell us about medicine (and staying alive)

This one? It's all wrong. Like, at a basic level, defibrillators do not do what you think they do. And it’s silly, because if you just knew Latin like the entire staff of GR does, you’d find that their use is literally in the name. In video games (we’re looking at you Battlefield), defibrillators are used for resuscitation, bringing fallen comrades back from a flatline and certain death. But shockingly (HA!) defibrillators do no such thing. They--wait for it--defibrillate someone.

Looking at the image above, fibrillation is the one that looks like a seismograph recording a sumo match, and occurs when the heart gets out of rhythm and can’t fix itself. The defibrillator’s job is to go in and reset a still-beating heart. Think of a computer: you can only reset it when it’s on, right? If the person is already dead, you’re just killing them more. Sorry, Battlefield 3 players--you're just sending an electric shock through a bloody corpse. Oh, and as a side note: resuscitation from a flat line only has about a 5-10% success rate to begin with. So that’s… sad.

The true silent killer. Your hero, after surviving hordes of injustices and hours of struggle, arrives at the front steps of the man who murdered his father… and just dies. Turns out, that roundhouse to the gut at the beginning of that game really did a number on his spleen. It may sound obvious, but bleeding is bleeding; internally, externally, it doesn’t matter. When it’s not in your veins, it’s not helping. If the new Tomb Raider had abided by this rule, poor Lara Croft wouldn’t have survived through a fifth of her game (which would've been a shame, because it was a really good game).

Remember that terrifying moment in F.E.A.R. when you round that corner and WHAM, the cannibal dude lays you flat? Getting knocked out, in real life, is incredibly dangerous. Blood seeping into the brain leads to brain damage and ultimately brain death. Our protagonist really should've gotten himself checked out, as our resident nurse tells us he was at high risk of an intracranial hematoma (duh). And don't even get us started on fighting games.

First off, the thing you think is a tourniquet? It isn't a tourniquet. You can't just grab a rag and tie it around your arm and go, "Check out my tourniquet!" A real tourniquet comes with a twist that you wrench until the band completely cuts off blood flow (just look it up). The thing that video game characters do when they look badass and self-apply by MacGyver-ing a tourniquet from a torn shirt using their teeth and free limb, is... just not even a thing.

And Lara, girl, we're sorry to keep harping on this, but you need to undo that arm bandage you call a tourniquet right freaking now. Or at least change it--while the initial bandage might've been useful when the wound was new and bleeding, after the initial blood clot a tourniquet actually reverses in effectiveness. The primary use of this triage tool in the actual medical field is for short and emergency stoppages of blood flow to a limb of the body, usually in limb loss or surgery. The tourniquet goes on, the limb begins to die from no nutrition flowing in, the medicine gets did, and the tourniquet comes off. The longer it’s on, the worse things get.

Dying last words are crucial to so many relationships in video games. Father-son, mentor-mentee, leader-protagonist, assassin-templar--for some reason, everyone waits until those final seconds to dish out that beautiful wisdom. There’s only one problem… it’s usually never that pretty. The nurses we talked to identified Cheyne-Stokes breathing as the culprit. See, when the body is shutting down, it puts everything it has into sucking in those last few breaths of air. The nurse we spoke to referred to it as “violent and tornadic noises coming from the lungs.” No room for quiet moments of reflection, no soliloquies, no whispers in the ear.

Take every villian from Assassin’s Creed or any Tales Of game. We’d be missing so much if all we had were soft gurgles instead of poignant words! But alas, soft gurgles it is.

Ah, the clean slate approach to storytelling in games. Want to add mystery to your JRPG? Just make the main character forget everything! And it’s so convenient how that happens: they forget seemingly crucial details but wonderfully remember how to talk, walk, breathe, and (most importantly) everything after the amnesia event. It's good for story, though--what else gives you an excuse to have mentors teach the main character about the basic elements of the world? It's the easiest way to shoehorn in exposition, like ever. Shame it doesn't really happen like that.

See, there are two different types of amnesia: retrograde (before) and anterograde (after). An incorrect form of retrograde amnesia is what our heroes get--forgetting everything except convenient plot elements. There are few cases of that--usually someone just forgets a traumatic event, or a few weeks of time, not everything. Anterograde is actually a much more common form, and is characterized by the person unable to remember things from the amnesia event onwards. That… wouldn't make for very fun gameplay, would it?

We just decided to blame the human body. It really sucks at delivering those climactic recoveries. It might be a good thing that video games casually trounce realism--generally there are no complaints, and games are actually better for them. Any other medical mishaps that furrow your brows? Let us know in the comments! Also a special thank you to our fantastic nurse friends for their great (and sometimes unsettling) information.

And if you're looking for more, check out 10 Lies Video Games Tell Us About War and 10 Lies Video Games Tell Us About Women.