Video Game / BitLife

BitLife is a 2018 text-based mobile Life Simulation Game from Candywriter LLC, in which you live out a life from start to finish. You can live your dream life with a college degree and a happy spouse... or you can find out how many relatives you can murder before things get suspicious. Think of it like The Sims, except you're focusing on only one person and things like violence, sex, and drugs aren't bowdlerized.

Two spinoffs, DogLife and Cat Life were released on October 31st & November 3rd 2021 for Android and iOS devices, and on January 4th 2022 for both Android and iOS devices.

Available on iOS and Android.

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BitLife contains examples of:

• Abortion Fallout Drama: If you get pregnant and choose not to keep your baby, your partner may argue with you about it.
• Absurdly Youthful Mother: You can get pregnant as early as 13 if you are in a relationship, although it's rare. If you're 16 and up it's more likely and under your control, since that's when you get the "make love" interaction with your significant other.
• Absurdly Elderly Mother: It's possible to get pregnant naturally up until you're 54, although fertility declines with age. If you live in a country where surrogacy is legal, you can use your eggs to get your surrogate pregnant no matter your age.
• Adoptive Peer Parent: If you are twenty-one or older with a job and a residence, you can adopt, and children up for adoption might be of any age under eighteen, so this trope can occur easily. Moreover, there is no remark that it’s strange, inappropriate and/or creepy, for example, for a twenty-one-year-old man to adopt a fourteen-year-old girl – the game will treat such cases as no different than any other adoptions.
• Ad Reward: A later update added ads to several sections to increase the player's luck, most prominently the ability to "pray" to the BitLife gods in exchange for certain boosts. You can also watch an ad to help clear the minesweeper game in the military career, or skip reading a book by "watching the movie."
• Adults Are Useless: If you're being bullied at school, you can tell the principal. However, they have a chance to do absoutely nothing about the situation.
• Affably Evil: You can be a charming and helpful person who stands up for people in trouble and stages interventions for friends while being a murderer, mobster, or con artist.
• Age-Gap Romance: You can have an affair with a person in any age range, as long as both you and your partner are adults. It is possible to have a date with an elderly person over 80 years old while being 18 years old. If you are an elderly man, this is a perfect way to continue having biological children at an advanced age. Unusually for this trope, no one seems to care about the age difference, and there's nothing to indicate that the youngest member is a Gold Digger or a trophy.
• Allegedly Free Game: The game is free, but runs on a Freemium model. You need to buy Bitizenship to unlock certain features, such as the ability to buy (exotic) pets, go through unlimited generations (compared to two for free), turn on dark mode, join prison gangs, interact with teachers and bosses, go to the optometrist, and get a hair color change. This can be cumbersome when aiming for 100% Completion in the Achievement System. Additionally, free players will be frequently interrupted by intrusive ads, making the game quite tedious. Fortunately, Bitizenship is a one-time purchase, so the free version can be thought of as more of a demo which just happens to include most of the game's features. Later updates upped the price and made certain careers part of a separate package, effectively splitting the game's content into DLC.
• All Crimes Are Equal: Go to jail for any crime, no matter how petty it was? You'll still be blocked off from adopting children and pets and getting certain jobs, although you can emigrate to a new country where they will not pick up your criminal record.
• Amicable Exes:
  • Defied, ending a relationship with someone or someone ending with you, will make your relationship with that character to 0, and you can only contact him or her by cell phone. (That most of the time, the ex will never bother to respond.)
  • Can be played straight if your ex is your coworker. In that case, you can gradually improve your relationship via the usual means (conversations, gifts, going to the movies) and eventually befriend them; it will be treated by the game mechanics as gaining a new friend rather than contacting an ex.
• Anachronistic Orphanage: If both their parents die before a character turns eighteen, the character always goes to the orphanage. Even if the character has living extended family-members.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Completing a global challenge gives you new accessories to put on your characters, which serve no functional purpose beyond adding more individuality.
• Angry Guard Dog: When burgling houses, you're usually being chased around the house by their dog (and sometimes their owner and police).
• Are You Sure You Want to Do That?: The game will give you a pop-up warning if you are going to do things that are potentially dangerous, such as dating a minor or someone of the same gender in a country where it's illegal, or fight your siblings. Interestingly, this only applies to a select few actions, and some actions that are far more dangerous won't get a pop-up (such as literally any crime).
• Arranged Marriage: If you are in certain countries, such as Japan, then one of your parents might arrange a marriage for you to someone you haven't met before. You get to choose whether or not to go through with it, but refusing will likely upset the parent who arranged it.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • For a while, post-op transgender women could get pregnant and post-op transgender men could impregnate others, despite this not being possible for post-op trans people in real life (as the internal sex organs can't be changed, just external organs). This was eventually patched out to be more realistic.
  • Some of the treats you can give your pets aren't things that would be healthy for them in real life.
• Artistic License – Engineering: If you drive an electric car, it is still entirely possible to get a blown head gasket or other fault specific to internal combustion engines.
• Artistic License – Law:
  • Certain countries, like Germany and Sweden, consider prison escape to be a human right and do not penalize the act of escaping (though escaped prisoners will still be recaptured to serve out their original sentence). This game does not reflect that, and getting captured while trying to escape from prison in Germany will still cause one's sentence to be extended.
  • Events involving guns will still happen even if the player character lives in a country that bans civilian firearm ownership.
• Artistic License – Linguistics: And how. Russian Naming Convention, apparently, doesn’t exist, as the names, patronymics and surnames for characters from Russia and other Slavic-language countries are thrown around completely randomly, with patronymics and surnames often ending up as first names. It is possible to have, for example, a male character with a surname such as "Ruslanovna", despite the -ovna part being a Patronymic and a female one to boot.
• Asshole Victim: Some of the people you can antagonise or murder are serial killers, mobsters, terrorists, and other lowlives. You can also potentially become one if you're killed in a botched murder attempt or if you're whacked by the mob for conspiring against them.
• Axes at School: Students can attack you with bayonets, rocket launchers, AK-47s, and the like if you piss the wrong ones off.
• Bad Boss: It's possible to have supervisors who ignore workplace bullying, who side with the bully, who do drugs on hours, who sexually harass employees, and who fire employees over perceived slights. The good news is that you can sue them for the last one. You can also have your underlings murdered for no reason as a mob boss.
• Big Brother Instinct: If you're being bullied and you have an older sibling, telling them about it is an option and there's a chance they'll beat up the bully if your relationship with them is good. If not then they won't do anything or make fun of you.
• Bigger Is Better in Bed: As a male character, you can get penis enlargement surgery. Assuming it isn’t botched, you’ll become slightly better-looking.
• Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head: Some of the insults in the game count as this (e.g. "rumpleforeskin")
• Black Widow: It's possible as a female to off your significant other. There's even an achievement with the name if you outlive five of your husbands in one life.
• Bland-Name Product: Several of the brand names and fake movie titles in the game are reworded parodies of real-world products.
• The Bluebeard: As a man, you could marry as many wives as you want and then kill them.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Made a big mistake? Just pay a cheap price of $0.99 to run the Time Machine and go back in years. An update made it so for $14.98, you can buy a permanent Time Machine, allowing you to go back in time as much as you like, essentially having infinite retries at an age. The only caveate is that you must be connected to the internet to use your permanent time machine.
• The Bully: You'll encounter a few events where bullies pick on you in school, and unfortunately some in the office as an adult.
• Bullying a Dragon: You can antagonise mob bosses or dangerous criminals if you wish. Survival is unlikely and these actions tend to be more about bragging rights than practicality.
• But Thou Must!: In 2020, following Kobe Bryant's death, it was possible to get a prompt asking who the GOAT of basketball is. All four options say "Kobe."
• But We Used a Condom!: Downplayed with condoms, it's rare but there's still a chance of pregnancy when they are used. Averted with hormonal birth control and sterilization surgeries, which never fail in the game.
• Cant Get Away With Nothing: If you are assaulted, you can strike back in self-defense and get convicted for assault anyway.
• Cardboard Prison: Once you get sent to prison, there's little stopping you from just immediately escaping from it outside of one (admittedly fairly tricky) minigame.
• Career Resurrection: In-Universe, if you are a once-successful actor, it's possible to get a good part in a movie or TV show and be propelled back to stardom after a long period of playing bit roles or getting no offers at all.
• Character Customization: If God Mode is bought, you can customize your person's appearance, personality, and traits. Otherwise, you can only customize their name, gender, country, and city. You can do the same to others with God Mode.
• Chocolate Baby: Sometimes your wife might get pregnant with another man's child, though the game will make it clear that it is not yours.
• Clear My Name: Even if you’re sentenced to prison you can still appeal your sentence. It counts as this trope of you were imprisoned for a crime you didn’t commit.
• Contraception Deception: You can keep the fact that you've stopped using birth control a secret from your partner. If you're male, sometimes the women you hook up with will tell you that they're using birth control but then get pregnant, even though hormonal birth control never fails in the game.
• Crapsack World: And how. Nations that have never had hostilities between them in real life find themselves in wars all the time (though it seems to be just background information that has no bearing on gameplay). It's possible to be killed by a landmine in a poor country like Afghanistan. And the "safe" European countries aren't safe, either— one player lost a gin warehouse to a missile strike in Switzerland!
• Critical Dissonance: In-Universe in the Actor career: "Box Office Success" and "Critical Reception" are scored differently and can be different, with the flavor text reporting that the film was a disappointment but was popular with critics.
• Crosscast Role: In-Universe. If you’re an actor, you can portray characters of another gender.
• Cute Kitten: You can adopt cats! Or five or six of them, if that’s what floats your boat. However, adopting from the shelter, if you're not a Bitizen, they stop you from adopting more than four, with the reasons being "Unspecified."
• Daddy DNA Test: Sometimes a woman you hooked up with will ask you to get a DNA test because she suspects you're the father of her child.
• Dawson Casting: In-Universe. If you are an actor, it’s possible to portray characters many years younger than yourself.
• Dean Bitterman: Some principals can be this, suspending or expelling you at the drop of a hat.
• Death of a Child: Anyone Can Die in this game, including your two-year-old nephew who just got struck with a golf ball, or your 13-year-old son who dies from autoerotic asphyxiation. You can even commit suicide before your first birthday. In fact, dying young and not by suicide will net you the Unlucky ribbon.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Attempting to open up the Social Media activity in China will get a message which says "social media isn't allowed in China", noting the very persuasive Internet censorship over there.^note This isn't really true, as China has plenty of social media of their own, and TikTok, one of the social media sites to choose from in-game, is a Chinese property.
  • Regional laws can prevent the player from certain actions based on the real-life laws of the region. For example, you can't go to the casino or marry a same-sex fiancé in the United Arab Emirates as gambling and same-gender marriage are illegal.
  • You have to pay for basic healthcare if you don't live in a country that provides it for free in real-life.
• Diabolus ex Machina: You can lose your parents, siblings, spouse, children, grandchildren, pets and friends suddenly out of nowhere just because of an icicle falling on them. You can also get cancer out of nowhere as a child and die young from it.
• Died During Production: In-Universe. It's possible for a director to die before filming is finished, and in that case they get replaced without much ceremony. Likewise, it's possible for your character to suffer the consequences of Fatal Method Acting, usually involving a dangerous animal.
• Dirty Cop: When someone calls the cops on you, they have a professionalism gauge. If it's low then you can usually just bribe them to go away.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Report a classmate for misbehavior or try to intervene in a crime? If they have a high craziness stat, there’s a possibility that said person will attack you with rocket launchers or medieval weapons. This can also happen if you insult someone, even if the insult is ridiculously old fashioned or just silly.
  • You're also allowed to attack (and sometimes kill) NPCs for doing things as harmless as misbehaving in class or pulling pranks on you.
  • The principal may suspend or expel you for misbehavior (such as generic name-calling) that only warrants a warning or detention.
  • Depending on the actions you choose when attacking someone, it can appear like a huge overreaction when they call the cops on you. You may serve a year in prison because you poked someone's stomach.
• Disappeared Dad: Sometimes your father is listed as unknown. You can also abandon your own kids, though also dying while your kids are young can cause this trope as well, especially when you move to your child's generation.
• Divorce Is Temporary: You can ask your ex-spouse to get back together with you, and sometimes they would accept.
• Driven to Suicide: You can kill yourself whenever you like, though it's referred to as "surrendering" in-game.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: In countries such as Afghanistan, it is possible to die from a landmine without much fanfare.
• Drugs Are Bad: You get the option to do drugs. This can get you addicted, or kill you on the spot with an overdose. You can also have the option of transporting or selling duffel bags of drugs and risk getting caught and handed over to the police. And if you die from an overdose, you will usually get the "Stupid" ribbon.
• Drugs Are Good: You have the chance of achieving “enlightenment” (and your happiness and smarts increasing) by using cannabis, ecstasy/MDMA, acid, peyote or magic mushrooms via the various scenarios the option appears. Additionally you won’t become addicted or overdose with these drugs (aside from MDMA/ecstasy)
• Early Personality Signs: Your innate talent can be hinted at via Flavor Text as early as infancy. For example, a child with a special gift for Acting may have a blurb saying they're a great fake crier and think about what it'd be like to be in a movie.
• Easy Sex Change: You can take a gender affirming surgery, which results in you fully transitioning in less than a year, which is much less than it takes in real life.
• Electrified Bathtub: One of the ways to murder someone is electrocuting them in a bathtub. Family members can also drop a hair dryer into the bathtub on accident and die.
• Everyone Hates Fruit Cakes: Go ahead, give somebody a fruitcake as a gift. They’ll surely love you for it!
• Excrement Statement: With the "act up in class" option, you can potentially defecate on the carpet or urinate in the corner.
• Fatal Method Acting: In-Universe, this is a possibility if you're an actor who does something like take hard drugs or make contact with an animal on the set (not necessarily large and dangerous: even contact with a mosquito can be lethal).
• The "Fun" in "Funeral": After a life ends you can read about yours, including who attended and who blew it off.
• Funny Conception Story: Once you start a new life as a new character, you'll start by finding out how the character was conceived, which could be anything from "my parents went to the Colosseum and dad went gladiator" to "my father visited my mother's bakery and sampled her cookie".
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • If you are famous, you can publish an autobiography via Vanity Publishing. You need to pay for its publication even if you are a famous writer earning millions.
  • The Flavor Text following a fling may say your partner "used to be a man/woman," but unless they're specifically noted to be transgender, the game will treat them as a cisgender person (i.e. if they're a man and your character is a woman, they can get you pregnant).
  • Another post-fling Flavor Text for a character may say "You hope they impregnated you," even if you're on birth control and/or made your fling use a condom.
  • One event in school has your parents ask you to select a school club to join, which is different from the actual activities you can join in school.
• Going Down with the Ship: When going out on a ship or boat, you may encounter an accident and some options will be avaliable for you to choose. One of the option is to go down with your ship. Choosing it will sometimes reveal that you are just having a nightmare.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: As a monarch it's possible to cause chaos for your country, to order the execution of citizens, to support the passage of unjust laws, to get away with crimes by invoking your royal status, and to profit from your fame by writing books.
• The Good King: Alternatively, as a monarch you can become beloved by your people by preforming regular public services and by otherwise staying out of trouble.
• Good Parents: Can be you if you treat your children well by spending time, support them coming out, and keeping good relationships with them. Also the Family Guy Ribbon is achieved with this trope.
• Good Stepmother: In contrast with the opposite trope below, your stepparent can be a kind person you are close with and you can be one too if your spouse's children are open enough for it. If your stepparent has a high kindness level, they will be called "your dear stepparent" after their death, rather than merely "your stepparent".
• Gold Digger: It is possible on the dating app, only looking for old people with a lot of money, and also that they are very old.
• "Harmful to Pets" Reminder: Your pet may die if they get a hold of food or drink they shouldn't have, such as drinking wine at a cocktail party or eating chocolate. Some of the treats you can give them aren't perfectly healthy, though.
• Have a Nice Death: And how! Some of the reasons for death are pretty hilarious too, like getting decapitated by a gorilla punch or being scared to death by a ghost.
• Homophobic Hate Crime: Countries that have anti-gay laws in real life will also have them in the game, so starting a same-sex relationship can result in your imprisonment.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Insulting, pranking, or spreading rumors will cause some NPCs (generally those with a higher "craziness" rating) to assault you.
• Happily Adopted: If you have good relationships with your adopted children. And now with the update of adoptive parents, can be you as well.
• Happily Married: This could be you! ...of course, even if you and your spouse have a full relationship bar, they still might cheat on you out of the blue or ask for a divorce despite not having issues.
• Hate Sink: If you were a truly horrible person during your lifetime, your gravestone will describe you as a 'worthless and loathsome individual'.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Optional; you can type a name in, or accept whatever the game has given you. You can also name your pets and children. You can also add custom names for the game to use on random NPCs.
• Heteronormative Crusader: It's possible for you to react negatively when a family member comes out of the closet, even if you are also gay, trans, or bisexual..
• High-School Sweethearts: If your relationship in high school stays strong without a breakup, you and your partner can be this trope.
• Hollywood Encryption: In the Astronaut career path, you can receive encrypted messages from aliens. Not only are they just "swap one letter for another" codes (the game gives you a single letter hint), but it's a multiple-choice question, so you can just compare letter placements to try and get the right message.
• Honor Among Thieves: If you're in prison and you insult a fellow inmate who happens to belong to a gang, prepare to get beaten up by the said gang, possibly to death.
• Horrible Hollywood: You see this when you become an actor. Directors will ask you preform dangerous stunts, to handle wild animals, or to ingest drugs on set. When shooting sex scenes, it's possible to use the opportunity to have actual sex with your co-stars. Finally, to emphasize this trope, the majority of your colleagues will have high or even max stats.
• Horrible Judge of Character: In the event where someone offers you money to take a briefcase to another country, the narration implies your character honestly doesn’t know there’s contraband inside and is trusting the person because they’re dressed up as a superhero or because they like the same musician as you.
• Hypochondriac: Truth in Television. Looking up one's symptoms on the web usually causes your character to think they have something far worse than they really do.
• Hypocrite:
  • If you are an actor married to your movie's director, the latter, as the director, can demand you gain weight for the role… and then, as the spouse, get angry when you do it.
  • Even if you are gay, trans, or bisexual, you may feel angry if your son or daughter comes out of the closet
• I Lied: A few examples.
  • If your spouse asks you to buy a car or a house, you can go to the relevant store... but then leave empty-handed. They won't hold it against you, though they might make the same request again.
  • It's possible for a loved one (a spouse, a child, a pet) to be kidnapped and for the kidnappers to demand a ransom. Even if you pay they might not return your loved one.
  • If you hold political office then a shady person might offer you a bribe. In addition to doing what he wants or telling him to buzz off, you can also take the money and just not do the thing he asked.
  • You can suspect your wife of cheating on you, have her completely deny it, and then, shortly thereafter, find her pregnant with someone else's baby.
• I Need to Go Iron My Dog:
  • If you're in a band, you may be faced with a scenario where your bandmates want you to party with them, but you're too tired and need an excuse to get out of it. These options include "I need to wash my cat," "I've developed acute flatulence," "My grandmother died," and "I have a headache."
  • If your friend wants you to do something unpleasant, you can make up a quick excuse to get out of it.
• Impoverished Patrician: Downplayed. If your character is royalty or nobility then you'll get a generous stipend from your nation's government, so you'll have to really mismanage your money to fall into debt. The tradeoff, however, is that you're not legally allowed to hold a normal job or do part-time work and the public will be outraged if you try to profit from your fame by writing books. Real estate investment is still just fine though.
• Improbable Weapon User: It's entirely possible for someone to assault you with things like coffee mugs or even water bottles, and the items can kill you.
• Instant Expert: If you focus on learning an activity, you can potentially master it in the same year you started.
• Intergenerational Friendship:
  • Averted in schools. If you're a small child, and try to befriend one of your teachers, you'll invariably be declined.
  • Played straight as an actor. It's possible for one of your co-stars to be a child actor, and you can befriend them as easily as your adult colleagues.
• Jailbait Taboo: It's possible to find someone to date under the age of consent (in your country) when you're over the age. Dating them will definitely lead you to jail.
• Karma Houdini: Goes both ways.
  • If an NPC attacks you, they can flee before the police arrive. Even if you decide to press charges, there's a good chance that you'll lose, especially if you attempt to collect higher damages.
  • Conversely, you can get away with things like murder and assault if you hire a good lawyer.
  • An update released the Assassin's Blade where you can use it to commit murder and get away with it scot-free. The only thing to worry about are murder methods that have a chance of failure.
• Karma Meter: Karma is one of your stats. Doing good things will raise it, and a good karma will usually make things easier for you.
• Kids Hate Vegetables: When at child stage, the character's journal will sometimes express the character's confusion at how people would ever like vegetables.
• Killed Offscreen: Most of the time if your family member or friends die, you'll be alerted after the fact with a quick description of what killed them. The exception is if you're directly involved, such as if you fail to save them from choking or kidnapping or if you murder them directly. With exes, you don't even get a blurb, and may not realize they died until you look them up later.
• Let's Wait a While: It's possible for your partner to refuse sex under the condition they're waiting until marriage. You can respect this decision, argue about it, or simply propose to them right then and there.
• Lightning Can Do Anything: Getting randomly struck by lightning can have a few effects, but all of them are drastic. It could deplete all your stats to zero, it could boost all your stats to 100%... or it could just kill you right there.
• Longer-Than-Life Sentence: You can potentially have your sentence extended by hundreds of years if you are a repeat offender. Your bio will simply say that you're having a life sentence though.
• Loony Fan: If you're famous, you may get a stalker or two. You can let it slide, call a cop, or directly attack them.
• Loony Laws: A common conversation topic for you and your family members/partners/friends is talking about something weird that's illegal to do in a certain state or country.
• Luck-Based Mission: Like real life, the unexpected is always to be expected. Events that happen whenever you do something are random, and you may have to do the same activity many times to get the result you want. This can get to the point where you can be a good worker and get fired for no reason, have people hate you for no reason, or have your partner cheat on you, even if you were nice to him or her.
• Nepotism: Not a family one, but sometimes if you were part of a fraternity or sorority, the interviewer may recognize you for having gone there and hire you on the spot.
• The Mafia: Every country has one, and you can join it if you want. However, you'll be expected to turn over the profits from your crimes to the crime family and only receive a portion of it back. You can also try to hold out on them, or become a police informant.
• Manchild: Even as an adult, you can try to solve disputes with your siblings by going to your mother. She’ll most likely just tell you to grow up.
• The Many Deaths of You: Cocaine overdose, trying to pet a lion, attempting to murder someone only to find they can put up quite the fight... There are even achievements for dying certain ways including being decapitated by a gorilla or eaten by a hippo. More of these deaths are listed in this game's page for them.
• Massive Numbered Siblings: You can start making love at age 16 and have babies every year following that. And if you're a man, you can also knock up multiple women in one year, or get into a May–December Romance to continue having children in your old age. This can lead to a life of 20 children or more. It is also the key to getting the Fertile Ribbon.
• May–December Romance: As long as both people are adults, there is no limit to the age difference a couple can have.
• Medal of Dishonor: A particularly bad film of yours may win an "Asscar Award" for worst film in its genre.
• Miscarriage of Justice: It’s possible for the police to suddenly charge you with a crime you didn’t commit, and if you don’t have a good lawyer (or sometimes, even if you do) you can be found guilty of it. Depending on the crime you can even be wrongfully executed.
• Missing Mom: This can happen if you play as a female and abandon your children or die while they're still young.
• Modern Stasis: The game spans decades, or even centuries or millennia for a long legacy game, but the world the characters inhabit remains resolutely 2020 right down to the popular culture.
• Mouthy Kid: If you're a Bitizen, you're free to insult and disrespect your teachers and even the principal.
• Mugging the Monster: Some NPCs will try to start fights with you. You can do serious damage back to them, particularly if you've studied martial arts.
• Mystical Pregnancy: Rarely, you can be the result of an immaculate conception.
• No Fair Cheating: Altering the time while your character attempts to rob a train will result in death.
• No Pregger Sex: Downplayed. You can have sex while pregnant, but there's a chance your partner will reject your offer specifically because they don't want to hurt the baby.
• No, You: While you're over at a friend's house, every now and then one of their kids will call you a name. If you choose to insult them back, you'll repeat to them the same name they called you. They're childish insults, too, like "knuckle-dragger".
• No Periods, Period: Can be averted, as one of the random events in childhood for an AFAB character is getting your first period and deciding whether to keep it to yourself or not.
• Not Blood Siblings: Defied, as it is impossible to have a romantic relationship with a member of your family, even if the relationship is purely political.
• Office Romance: Asking out coworkers is possible.
• Orphanage of Fear: Some events that orphans can encounter include being underfed or abused by the caretakers.
• Outliving One's Offspring: As death is largely random in BitLife, it's possible for your children to die before you do.
• Paparazzi: If you're famous then they'll sometimes intrude on your personal time or harass you to get a picture. However, taking it in stride by pozing for them generally increases your fame.
• Parental Abandonment: There is an option to abandon your child. Unlike adopting them out, they'll continue to appear in your relationship menu with a relationship meter that will likely never be filled again.
• Parental Favoritism: It's possible to write your will all of your wealth goes to only one of your children. This will upset the others, but if you choose the child you want to continue as then you'll be able to build up a fortune through inheritances.
• Parent with New Paramour: If you marry someone who already has children, they will most likely start as hating you. However, with gifts, compliments and spending time together, you can boost your relationship with them within a few years.
• Police Are Useless: Zig-zagged. If you get assaulted, you can call the police, but there's a chance they might berate you for "wasting their time" even if you just got severely beaten. This can also work in your favor if you're a criminal, though this depends on your luck, your skill in minigames, and the randomized "professionalism" of the cops who arrest you.
• Practically Different Generations: This is most often a thing if you're playing as a man going into May–December Romance in your old age and still having children. Your grandchildren could be old enough to be your youngest child's parent.
• Prenup Blowup: When you get married, you or your new spouse can ask for a prenuptial agreement. Some fiancées and fiancés will sign without a second thought, but others will call off the wedding or even break off the relationship over it. Though the game shows the practical side of this too; if there's a large discrepancy in wealth, and you don't sign a prenup, then you could end up paying your cheating ex a fortune to move in with his mistress. However, the prenup only applies to cash and assets pre-marriage, meaning any profits made during the marriage will still be split between you and your ex.
• Press Start to Game Over:
  • At any time, there's an option you can choose that says "Surrender...", even at age 0. Choosing it will bring up a prompt asking you to not give up on your character's life. If you decide to choose the surrender option, a second prompt comes up asking if you're sure you go on with it. If you persist on it, the game ends and your character's tombstone will have the Wasteful ribbon attached to it, even at age 0.
  • You can set your character's karma and health to 0 before you begin if you have the Bitizenship purchased. Sometimes you can get a serious illness such as cancer at age 1 and then die at age 2 before you can even raise your health to counteract the health drop. This is actually the fastest way to get the unlucky ribbon but it's not 100% guaranteed.
• Primal Scene: You can walk in on your parents having sex and decide how to react: "run away in horror," "watch in fascination," "vomit immediately," or "politely apologize and leave."
• Prison Riot: You can stir up a prison riot by collecting 10 accomplices and avoiding the guards in a Snake-style minigame. It's definitely gonna be violent, and someone may die.
• Rapid Aging: In a weird technical glitch, if you are an actor and start a relationship with your movie's director, the director will then be aging twice as fast as normal, getting two years older every time a year passes In-Universe.
• Really Gets Around: You're free to do as many one-night stands as you like, even if you're already in a relationship. However, doing so also runs the risk of unwanted pregnancies and/or STDs. If you sleep with enough people, you get the "Lustful" ribbon after dying.
• Recursive Canon: BitLife comes up within the game multiple times. The characters themselves often play BitLife and even make YouTube videos about it. If you spend time with a family member by playing it together, your relationship is almost guaranteed to see a nice boost. Buying Bitizenship or the BitLife hoodie as a gift will also make relationships even in the red skyrocket.
• The Red Stapler: In-Universe in the CEO career path: one reason demand for your product may increase is that it appeared in a popular movie or TV show.
• Remarried to the Mistress: You can remarry your mistress (though any gender can apply) if they're willing to enter a serious relationship with you. You can also be the homewrecker who convinces your married fling to divorce their spouse for you.
• Ridiculously Average Guy: If you don't do much outside the ordinary during your lifetime, commit zero crimes, and only earn a modest sum of money, you'll get the "Mediocre" ribbon when you die.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The "Current" category of prompts provides options based on current Real Life events. For example, whenever a certain celebrity dies (such as Chadwick Boseman or Kobe Bryant), it's possible to get a prompt asking your character what their favorite work of said celebrity was.
• Romance on the Set: In-Universe, it's possible to date and marry your co-star or director.
• Sadist Teacher:
  • On occasion, a teacher will mock you either for getting a question wrong or just because they felt like it.
  • Downplayed with some teachers with low professionalism stats who will angrily insult you in front of the entire class, but usually only if you're misbehaving.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Famous!: If a beginner actress (or, occasionally, one with a very low fame level) gets pregnant during filming, she is fired (except for the rare cases where the option "Beg them to let you stay" actually works). A famous one, however, can get pregnant every year till hitting menopause and still remain in the cast, and the film company won't even comment on it.
• Sex with the Ex: Your ex-flings or ex-partners may send you flirty texts or even an outright booty call, or you can choose to hook up with them yourself.
• Shaking the Rump: One of the things you can do with the "mischief" activity is twerk on someone, which is actually a crime. You can be sentenced to life in prison if you get convicted for it.
• Shaped Like Itself: It's possible by the magic of property descriptions to find yourself living in a "modern modern home" or a "palatial palace".
• Shout-Out: There are many pop culture references in the events that pop up:
  • One of the ribbons is "Family Guy", earned by being a Family Man.
  • One of the cliques you can choose to join in school is Mean Girls.
  • One of the text options for getting a fever says that the only thing that could help would be more cowbell.
  • Some of the street addresses in the game are also shout outs: you can buy a house on Sesame Street, Infinite Loop or Lemon Avenue.
  • You, too, can have a man point a gun at your head in a club, and the four options that they give you are song lyrics from "Gimme Three Steps" by Lynyrd Skynyrd.
  • One of the companies you can run as a CEO is an AI company that produces bending units.
  • The names of the horses at the races can be references; one example is BoJockey Horseman or Pony Soprano.
  • In the Astronaut expansion, one of the artefacts you can discover on Mars is a potato.
• Simon Says Minigame: The "Memory Test" is a digital version of the game Simon, in which you must follow and repeat an increasingly-complex pattern of colored lights. Getting a higher streak can increase your intelligence.
• Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: In-Universe. One event in the actor career has the marketing team completely exclude your character's scenes from a new trailer, and you can choose how well you take it.
• Sleeping with the Boss: Seducing your boss is an option and you can do this regularly if they're up for it. You can also seduce them to get out of trouble.
• Sliding Scale of Beauty: Characters with a beauty of 90 or higher will be treated as world-class beauties, to the point of being able to work as models, idols, or as an actor/actress.
• Stalker with a Crush: Sometimes your ex will try to stalk you, but you can always get a 3 year restraining order against them. Of course you can also choose to engage in this behavior.
• Suicide is Shameful: Taking your own life will only ever earn you the Wasteful ribbon.
• Symbol Swearing: This will sometimes occur in a caption box if someone attacks you with a weapon.
• Take That!:
  • The achievement "Markle", which is gained by marrying into the British royal family. The thing that makes it this trope, rather than a Shoutout, is that the achievement is symbolized by the Purple Devil emoji.
  • In the Actor career, critics can call your movie worse than Gigli. There's even an achievement for getting this review, called "Worse Than Bennifer."
• Take That, Audience!: One flavor text has the player hack into someone's Twitter and troll BitLife with "nasty remarks" asking for an incest update, referencing an infamously frequent request from some fans.
• Tear Jerker: In-universe: Several of the books you can read will lower your happiness score, and they tend to be the infamously sad ones.
• Teacher's Pet: In god mode, you can suck up to your teacher, hence decreasing your popularity in school.
• Teacher/Student Romance: In university, you can seduce your professors or even the dean, which can lead to a one-night stand if they're unprofessional enough. And because this makes them a fling, you can then ask them out, date and even marry them – while you are still studying under them. Alternately, you can befriend them and then ask them out.
• Teen Pregnancy: You can choose to sex and consequently get pregnant from age 16. Younger teens in a relationship sometimes get pregnant even if the player didn't make them have sex with their significant other.
• Teeny Weenie: If you have a pet, it may strike at your penis because it thinks it's "a very small baby snake."
• Tilesweeper: If you choose the military career path, you will eventually get a deployment order which triggers a minesweeper mini game if you accept it. You have to clear squares you think are safe and flag the boxes you think the mines are in. Each non-mine square has a number hint on it that tells you how many mines are near the square and/or its corners. If you win, you get a medal of honor. However, if you hit a mine, you might end up getting serious injuries, if you don't die from the explosion, that is. You can always refuse to play the game by deserting your post but you will get sent to jail as a result.
• Toilet Humor: One of the things your enemies can do is text you a picture of poop and ask if it's your mother.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Dying from a drug overdose will net you the "Stupid" ribbon. Even worse, you can consume an entire duffle bag of highly addictive drugs like meth or heroin if you wish, something that will almost certainly kill you.
  • If you're in prison, you might witness one inmate trying to cut off various body parts and mail them to people in a bizarre attempt to escape.
• Train Job: One (illegal) way to earn money is to hold up a train. The train may not always show up, however. Just don't try to mess with your device's clock unless you want to get run over by a train.
• The Trickster: If you make a lot of friends then you're likely to have one who pranks you, invite you to join them in mischief, or will offer you drugs. Usually those friends would have a high craziness stat.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior:
  • Even as a child, there's nothing stopping you from committing crimes, ranging anywhere from simple mischief to pickpocketing to assaulting your classmates and potentially killing them.
  • Your classmates are often no better. If you mess with the wrong student, they might attack you with hatchets, rocket launchers, and water bottles.
• Two-Timing with the Bestie: One event has your best friend's partner come onto you. If you choose to hook up with them, your friend will likely become your enemy within the next year.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: You can have a beautiful wife, even if your attractiveness is in the red or if you play as an attractive woman you can marry someone with very low attractiveness. And of course, the Gender-Inverted Trope can apply as well.
• Ultimate Job Security: Zig-zagged. Your coworkers can play any manner of nasty pranks on you (and vice versa), and there's a good chance that Human Resources or your supervisor will simply ignore it. However, they can get suspended for the most innocuous prank if you have a good enough relationship with your supervisor.
• Underage Casting: In-Universe, if you are an actor, it's possible to play a character many years your senior.
• Ungrateful Bastard:
  • Sometimes after you pay thousands for their university/medical/law school education, your children show no appreciation for you. And they can end up working as a janitor or take another job for which no degree at all is necessary when they graduate.
  • You can agree to work overtime for your boss, and he can still end up firing you for no reason.
  • Of course, you can also be this with your parents, demanding a better car after they offer you one for passing your driving test.
• Unsettling Gender-Reveal: Downplayed. Your flings can tell you they "used to be a man/woman." While it's one of many possible unflattering punchlines, it's just Flavor Text (the game will likely treat them as cisgender if you contact them again) and your player could've still had a good time with them.
• Video Game Caring Potential: There are many kind actions you can do, including supporting a sibling or child or yours who came out of the closet, compliment your family and friends, spend time with friends and family, adopt a pet, and give homeless people money.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: On the other hand, you can do plenty of mean things to others, from being a plain Jerkass to murdering others (even your friends and family). It's possible to have your murders go unnoticed and become a Serial Killer. Even if you get caught, you can just escape from prison, change your identity, and do it all over again. You can also commit robberies, start prison riots, and more.
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: It's entirely possible to name yourself or your children after memes, swears, or just complete buttonmash gibberish.
• Wicked Stepmother: Sometimes you can get a stepmother (or stepfather) who starts at a very low relationship level and is nothing but cruel to you, and you can't do much about it except complain to your other parent and hope for a divorce. You can play this way if you marry someone who already has children, to the point of putting the stepchildren up for adoption, without your partner's permission.
• World of No Grandparents: You can’t interact with your grandparents (or aunts and uncles, or cousins) even if they are supposedly still alive, although you can interact with your grandchildren.

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