Tripping the Circuit Breaker

Because we recently studied circuits, I thought about the time when all the electricity in the living room went off while my dad and my brother were playing video games on the Xbox 360. My dad turned off the fan in the living room and then went in the garage to on some kind of switch. At the time, I didn't really understand what happened, but thanks to physics I do now. There were too many appliances running in the living room, so the current in the circuit was too high. The circuit breaker was tripped in order to prevent overheating or an electrical fire. My dad had to turn off an appliance in order to reduce the current and reset the circuit breaker in order for electricity to run in the living room again. The different switches in the box correlate with the different circuits running in each room of the house. The whole house must not be connected in series, otherwise electricity would only run if every outlet had a running appliance. However, the circuit breaker for a room must be connected in series with the outlets in the room in order for the tripped circuit breaker to shut off all the electricity in the room. Circuit breakers are good alternatives to fuses because fuses need to be replaced every time they are blown (as we discovered in the lab when we connected them in parallel...), but with circuit breakers, you can just turn the switch to restore the flow of electricity.