Lying or something else?

[Don]

I always thought people just lie about what they do on the Internet, and while this is hardly limited to gaming, I put it here because usually gaming feats of strength can at least be somewhat verified. It's awfully hard to know if someone really is making 6 figure at home only surfing the net or if someone really did survive a 'no one can possibly survive that' fall, while most gaming stuff you can at least check some kind of achievement/scoreboard and even if not, you can usually do some kind of sanity check to see if the claimed feat is possible. However, after thinking about this some more it'd mean some people are perpetual liars and that seems like a lot of effort to go through for just bragging about games, so I started wondering if it's something else. Can it be possible that people just 'misremembered', as Roger Clemens would say, and not really trying to lie on everything? Or is this a "Jedi talks in strange ways", as in someone who told you he beat something in one day really means '24 hours of continous playing'? After all, if we're talking about some MMORPG, the '1 day = 24 hours' is a pretty common unit of time.

Or maybe it's a 'how cold can Antarctica be?' That is, I read an article about some guys who work at the Antarctica research station where they have negative 80 F or whatever temperature and whenever they talk to other people it's always like "I bet it's not that much colder than Minnesota/Alaska/Siberia/Canada/whatever" and the Antarctica guys always had to explain that if you lived here you'd know this place is indeed a lot colder. I mean, I remember when this video came out:



And back then TAS wasn't a thing so people didn't know it was a TAS, a lot of people swear they can totally do this too. And sure if you believe you can totally do things like that, most of the claims on the Net seems to be totally credible too compared to this.

[Julius Seeker]

A different kind of game, but rap musicians like to do this too. They pretend that the words and perfect rhymes just came to them at the first moment that they spoke them, that they have that kind of inhuman skill. Even Tupac Shakur's freestyle rap battles lifted lyrics that were found among his hundreds of recordings. Biggie supposedly rapped Juicy just off the top of his head, but I think this is unlikely considering how long it took him to get tracks out; if he could bang them out like that, he should have had 4 dozen albums in his three years, rather than just the two.

On top of that, you get legions of rap fans and anti-rap people alike who seem to claim that they can rap like that too without effort. It never happens.

[Don]

Well, I can see if you can do something and just say 'LOL that was easy' even if it took you forever to figure it out, but some of this stuff is downright impossible. Nobody can play Super Mario 3 like that video above, but I sure remember plenty of people claim they could do it if they're not aware it's a TAS. I think if you go to the Youtube thread you'll still see many guys claiming they can totally do this unassisted.

I remember there was a guy doing "Let's Play" videos on Civ 5 and he was playing Romans on Deity and it just happens that there was an iron 6 in his starting city boundaries since you need iron to make Legions and you sure weren't expanding against the AI in Deity. I'm pretty sure that guy just kept on recorded himself until he happened to have a game with iron 6 at his starting location (or that he's super lucky), and I know that guy talks like it's perfectly normal to have an iron 6 in your starting city (this must happen less than 1% of the time in all the games I've played unless you put it on legendary start because I think it's seeded to require you to go beyond your first city for the additional resources) but at least this is something that's possible.