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The one drawback of playing imaginative video games is that they have the inadvertent effect of making you sound like a dingleberry. And I don’t mean this in a “playing 24/7, no contact with real-life humans” kind of way.

Just a regular person playing games can sound like he or she is a few tacos short of a combo platter. That’s because video games are disturbingly jacked-up. Any time you try to explain something that, in the context of the game, seems perfectly normal, you will sound like a giant weirdo.

For example, let’s take a game from my childhood: BurgerTime. Try explaining the gameplay to someone and see how many weird looks you get.

“Okay, so you’re a chef, and you have to climb ladders and scaffolding to build giant burgers by walking over each layer so it falls below. Oh, plus you have to avoid the walking hot dogs, pickle chips, and fried eggs, because they will kill you if they touch you. You can stun them by spraying them with pepper, or you can try to walk over a burger layer while they’re under it, crushing them.”

Katamari Damacy: “Shit! I was so close to getting up to 5 meters. If I had rolled up a few more cars into my ball, I’d have made it.”

Fast Food: “Yeah, so I’m a giant disembodied mouth, and I’m trying to eat food that’s flying past me. But I gotta make sure not to eat the purple pickles. No, I don’t know why I can’t eat purple pickles. Maybe it’s a dick thing.”

Pac-Man: “Check it out: I’m a yellow ball, cruising around a maze, eating a bunch of dots. I’m being chased by multicolored ghosts that can kill me if they touch me, but if I eat a power pill, they all turn blue for a few seconds, and I can eat them. Then their disembodied eyes float around and go to the box in the center of the maze, where they turn back into ghosts.”

Even modern games that are pretty normal and straightforward, like Red Dead Redemption, have you saying things that you most likely wouldn’t have the need to say.

“Goddammit, I need to find a skunk!”
“Hang on a sec. I gotta hop on top of this train and shoot five flying birds while the train is moving.”

What game scenarios sound perfectly normal in-game but make you sound like a jackhole when you try to explain them to a nongamer? Put ‘em in the comments below. I know there are tons of them. Crap, just Super Mario Bros. alone is like an acid trip.