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Everything I Needed To Know, I Learned From "The Sims"
There's a great article by JC Herz about The Sims and its implications for information architecture versus urban planning. Cool article - I've certainly planned a lot of The Sims, and can testify to its addictiveness. The whole aspect of involving the community with "skinning" and object creation - in an environment *designed* to accept it has made the difference, IMHO, for the game.
There is an obvious trend in the gaming market moving towards "realism". What makes Sim games so addictive is that they offer a superbly close approximation to reality. What makes this all shocking, is that people would rather spend their finite time on earth living vicariously through a computer simulation, instead of trying something new in the "real world".
Lame.
If the /. title here is true, then what I learned from the Sims is awfully depressing: Life is intensely interesting for about 3 days, and then you never want to see it again.
Hmm. I refer you to the phenomena of MUDs. On LP muds (I have more experience with those) LPC (an object oriented variant of C) is used to create objects that interact together. And this was happening a decade ago.
I learned how to do OO programming on a mud. Simple hierarchy:
object
|
armour
|
shield
or
object
|
weapon
|
sword
|
Gleaming Sword of Gnarforn
object
|
weapon
|
mace
And so on. Rooms, people, monsters are all objects, and the interactions fit in a very approachable manner.
C++ is no better than LPC for such work, or necessarily any worse. Java, Delphim python, etc could all be used (and muds exist in all those languages).
~Cederic wants to find a live mud written in Python so he can learn Python
AI wont come out of an university lab,
but in a clever entertainment computing program
like Sims, some game-playing software, or toy-bot.
The article said
...over time, smaller services start building up within the city, like little grocery stores or gas stations, that are servicing needs within the community. The internal infrastructure gets larger and larger, and over time it becomes the biggest part of the city - the city producing goods and services for itself.
Sorry, but that's not how it works in the real world. The city doesn't produce goods and services for itself. What we make is sold to strangers we never see half a world away. What we buy comes from strangers we never see half a world away. The grocery store and the gas station may be owned by our neighbors, but the produce comes from South America, and the gas comes from the Middle East.
It's the global economy. The good part is you can get muskmelons in Minnesota in the middle of winter. The bad part is we've become so dependent on it that if a modern-day Hitler appeared we'd never dare fight a war with him for fear that it'd disrupt the economy and we couldn't get all the cheap goods and services we're used to.
The modern city isn't self-sustaining. It's a house of cards. Most couldn't begin to feed themselves. Why did they let themselves become so vulnerable? Because it's cheaper. It's all about money.
I would beg to differ. Capitalism (if you accept its broadest definition as trasmitting savings through space and time) is built upon private property rights and free markets which have two characteristics - exclusion (ie if I have it you don't) and rivalable (choice of alternatives with differing benefits). Certain services are neither and fall into the category of public goods. The classic example is a flood dam where everyone benefits from the reduction in risk irregardless of who pays.
Thus if you accept that a larger organisational unit such as a city council exists to reduce certain risks beyond the control of any individual business/individual, then some social tendencies are necessary. Just because people choose to share resources/expertise (cough*Linux*cough) without expectation of monetary reward does not make it communism. The centralised command and control mechanism of governance has been largely discredited as it is impossible for any central body to have the most relevant information. However, you note that there's only *one* tax department and *one* military. I'll leave it up to others to debate whether this is a good thing or not though. Where centralised authories get into trouble is the corruption of offices to confer private benefits (e.g. favorable land zoning) without due compensation to the afflicted.
LL
I have to agree with you. It was addictive, but there were parts of it that drove me so nuts, it killed the addiction:
... NO TIME. I don't understand how people got anything done in this game. You barely get out the door in time for work (since it takes you an hour to get up and shower, never mind trying to eat). You get home, and you've got to focus on whatever you need to do to make your sims happy (read, watch TV). You barely have time to make dinner and clean it, never mind tring to make peopl e happy. Then they get so tired they can't even walk to their beds. All so they can get up right away the next AM and do it all again!
... couldn't stop for a second! Had to be at your quickest reflexes 24/7!
:).
1. It takes over half an hour to get out of bed. Come on, people, move.
2. If one sim cuts the other sim off, he sits there like an idiot for, again, half an hour.
3. You had
4. No weekends. Weekends might have helped solve #3.
5. Suspension of disbelief thrown out the window. Come on. Why do my neighbors just drop by for a visit while I'm in my pajamas?
6. No time! (did I mention this already?) How am I supposed to let my sims socialize when I can barely keep them fed and well-slept? I mean, I can barely make them happy, how am I supposed to supplement this with visiting?
Basically, the sims as an exercise in stress management -- my own stress! Never having enough time, constantly rushing until it's time to sleep. As they sleep, you catch your breath, focus, and get right back into it. It felt more like an action game than a sim game
Geez I can feel my heart tensing up as I write this
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
This whole user community is not new (does "mod" sound familiar?). First person shooters have had a "mod" community since their inception. Those silly "Catz" and "Dogz" games, have a small user community. The only difference in "The Sims" is the additionaly metaphore between the user community and the actual game. Now this metaphor is being defined even more, in Sims Online. I can't wait to see what happens in Sims Online...it seems like one humongous social experiment. Sociologists take note: Maxis has created the simulation to model society that you have been dreaming about!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I'm a programmer. I want to learn more languages. I realize that C++ is a horribly flawed OO language but it's the only one I know well. What are some good languages that you would suggest learning?
I know: Basic, VisualBasic, Pascal, C, Assembler, C++, Java, Perl, Lisp. In that order chronologically.
You need to remember that Reality and the Sims are a "mirror" of each other; so next time at the ATM, just type that word backwards!!! Jak Din
"As I always say, why jack-off when you can jack-in!" - Plughead from "Circuitry Man" (1990)
A little offtopic but I really mean this, so think before you moderate me down ...
When SimCity was popular I played it a lot. My strategy was to build the railroad in an early stage, even when I had no money. This prevented me from having to demolish houses at a later stage when the city traffic became to heavy. It meant an expencive start up, but payed off in the long run.
I work as a Software Architect in a Danish IT company. We have tried all of the known development methods: Waterfall, prototyping etc. They all failed and ended as a kind of iterative feature driven development case. We came up with the idea of implementing SimCity in our development: Make a base line platform, that all developers can build on.
The Sys. Arch. is respontible for all the OO planning.
The Senior Developer is responsible for creating/coding the platform, which will consist of fractures of the 1st, nth and last tier in order to "make the railroad work". This e.g. is a control class (1st tier), a logic class (2nd tier) and a database connection class (last tier). This MUST be functional code. Look at this as a horisontal platform.
Now its up to the developers. They can work vertically on each their part/module/object just by looking at the existing code and adding controls to is.
It worx! It pays off, since the developers can code more effectively and independantly - with fewer errors. Somebody calls it vertical iterative prototyping, but "The SimCity Model" is a more attractive name =)
Eih bennek, eih blavek
why shouldn't american's love it? our entire culture is engineered. You really think it's natural that we have such a large middle class? Ever thought about why the american middle class is so large? Because it's engineered to be that way through decades of tax law.
it's not because we're a democracy, it's because our democracy uses taxes to maintain the social order. hell, why do you think the only way they were able to put Al Capone away was for income tax evasion? because it upset the social order.
An individual having total control over something is unamerican. I don't know that much about SimCity (I never could get into it), but if the people can lobby against the fact that you are planning on building a sewage processing plant next to the largest church in town, and inroing the wants of the people can make it sure that someone else is appointed as the city planner, then it I'd say it is more like the American ideal. If the people have to leave the city (the game equivelent would be the population goes down), then it is more like a dictatorship where people must defect to effect the policy that governs them.
-no broken link
But it's in the dictionary. I means, not surprisingly, "regardless".
-no broken link
In socialism, individuals can own property, but the government plays a role in providing services that benefit the society as a whole. Welfare, government insure medicine (like in Canada), and a defensive ary are all socialist policies. The U.S. has socialist policies, Canada has them, and Europe has them. This is because it's been shown that a pure Capitalist system does not benefit the most as well (a few individuals benefit greatly, and large numbers of people suffer from unexpected things like loss of health or economic downturn, and this in turn increases the crime and violence rate).
-no broken link
As I'm sure many of you did, when I first started playing The Sims, I tried to model a character after myself. Unfortunately, in the Sims' world, living on junk food and spending all day on the computer doesn't work out very well. (Or maybe it isn't working out well in the real world either, and I just haven't realized it yet.)
I only have one complaint about the game, and that is when a Sim is "cut off" by another Sim when trying to reach a destination in the household, he tends to stand around for a half-hour of SimTime, just fuming. That frustrates me to no end. The only thing that's worse is when they pass out cold, three feet from their nice comfy bed.
Myself, I stopped playing a couple months ago, and am going to try to stay away until this summer at least. That game is dangerously addictive! Once I start playing it tends to crowd out most other aspects of life.
One last SimNote -- I recently learned that "ChiaBot" from the last season of Comedy Central's BattleBots was built by Will Wright's teenage daughter. I wonder if she reads /..
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I like to watch.
I bought an extra box of Kleenex for nothing!
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I like to watch.
Today was a horrible day. When I tried to watch TV, Fred cut me off and got to the remote first. That makes me so mad! Never want to talk to him again. But somehow, I know I will. The Mystic Force causes me to.
Yeah Diary. I must reveal this little secret. I believe in the Mystic Force. I know all of my roommates will laugh at me. There is no Force. We are all just C++ objects. But then I put on my stupid acts and ask them to explain. None of them can. Fred laughs his silly laugh and Trevor just throws a fit. Then I ask them how they can explain where we get the TV, where we get money, how the extension room to out house gets built. And Trevor gets into a bigger fit. LOL!
These men. All they can think about all day is how to get me into bed. I think the Mystic Force has something to do with it. But you know something? Just because I believe in it, doesn't mean that I don't have standards. Fred? Trevor? Ewwww. What is the Force thinking about, and how did I end up with these losers? I'd rather self->die().
I'm living in Switzerland and I've been trying to learn German for months. One of the biggest helps I have had was buying "Die Sims" and working through it.
I'm picking up all sorts of common phrases and daily expressions - it's a really easy and fun way to learn a language! I've not really read any game instructions in English, but since the gameplay is totally intuitive and visual, that's no problem.
The only problem I AM having is pronunciation. All of the speech in Sims is a silly nonsense language "bis drawl es FREMSHAY". The unfortunate result is that I'm starting to associate the silly made up words with the instructions I'm giving my Sims.
Once I accidentally slapped a guest in the face because I wasn't sure what 'klaps' was. Now I'll remember!
I've been posting on the net since 1994 and I still haven't come up with a good sig!
However, C++ is de-facto standard for any commercial game development, as of today. So, it's not the question of language you choose, but rather how you implement the features you need in the given language (i.e. in C++).
As for multiple dispatch... Forced to write in C++, I would implement it using Factory class, returning the correct Functor-object depending on types of classes involved (the simplest case of Functor-object is just a function pointer). This way you can get and call the proper function for any combination of interacting classes.
Well there is lobbying- you'll get messages that businesses demand an airport or the public wants a baseball stadium- and you can track your approval rating, but you can't be deposed. SimCity is very much a "god" game in that you have much more power than any real mayor would. For instance, you're not just in charge of police, fire, roads, and planning, but also schools (which in most USA cities are handled by a separate government agency). Furthermore you have power to enact orninances without opposition, which is contrary to the typical USA practice. I think that the godlike aspect is part of what makes people like the game, and the idea of losing an election if you do a bad job is something that many players wouldn't like. In fact, many people seem to think that occasional episodes of deliberate mismanagement to destroy the city are a ton of fun.
One thing that really bothers me about the game is its treatment of emminent domain. In the real world, the government is required to pay a (nominally) fair market value for property taken for public use; when you want to build a freeway you have to pay the owners of the land you take. In SimCity, though, you just have to pay the cost of demolishing the buildings- not their value and not the value of the land under them. Putting in costs like that would make the game much more interesting, IMO. Of course that (and the possibility of being run out of office) could be made configurable game options that advocates of strict realism could use and people interested in playing god could disable.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
It may look that way to you (and I'll point out that many people who don't live here have a very inaccurate picture of what LA is actually like) but it's not true. The LA metropolitan area was actually planned in much greater detail than most cities. Starting in the 1920's, well before the really explosive growth in the area, the regional planners were designing what the city was supposed to be like. The designed the city as a central downtown hub connected by a series of major traffic corridors to outlying bedroom communities. As traffic engineering advanced they incorporated new ideas, chiefly freeways, into their design, and the majority of the LA freeway system was actually planned in the 1930's and 1940's.
And ultimately, that's the problem. LA was planned, but it was planned before people had a clear idea of the consequences of their design or how large the city would eventually get. The design of a vital central core and surrounding bedroom communities has been followed fairly well, and is actually the cause of a lot of the problems. In particular, it means that everyone depends on cars for transportation (because the city was designed with them in mind) so poor people without cars are in trouble. It also means that a lot of the region's traffic comes crunching into the central city every rush hour, creating a traffic nightmare. So LA's problems are a result of bad planning, not of no planning.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Ughh... I can't imagine using C++ to model the class structure in a game like the SIM's. The static class system combined with the difficulty of single-dispatch methods would make any reasonable simulation a pain in the ass to develop.
That doesn't mean one couldn't write a decent dynamic class system on top of C++, but only that C++ by itself doesn't have any of the things that would go into a decent dynamic class system.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
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If The Sims is so real, how come I don't get a load of cash when I type in "klapaucius" into a ATM machine????
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
Then what language would you suggest? (it's Sims by the way).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I would have to think that The Sims is the strongest argument ever for using an object-oriented language to create a very specific result.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
The solution would be to fill in gaps with AI-driven people. However, if most or all of the people are AI-driven, you start to lose the point of player-populated cities. Even worse, what happens to the player-driven people in a city "owned" by someone who quits? What happens if a grief player becomes mayor? (Let's run the city into debt and trigger all the natural disasters.) I do have a few ideas on how to pull it off:
Replication -- the population filling a given SimCity is "cloned" from the SimsOnline population; a given house built on an area that's zoned residential might resemble the house of a SimsOnline house, but bulldozing it won't destroy the SimsOnline version.
SimsOnline self-rule -- let SimsOnline manage itself on its own with some SimCity-like issues being controlled by some sort of democratic glob of the SimsOnline players in that community. For example, if they need a local police station, it would be the responsibility of the city council (composed of multiple players) to do something about it.
Of course, I still think there's a certain amount of inanity in going so far to simulate real life. I never saw the point in Ultima Online (where a character had to actually spend a lot of time "working" to make money) and that, at least, had the excuse that it was a fantasy world.
If there were such a project that could harness the processing power of all the players of The Sims could we fashion bigger and better cities for Sim City 4000?
I wonder if SimCity4000 wont be a game where you build Cities where SimsOnline Players build thier houses... that would be tremendous. When you lay down a track of Residential - people actually chose the space for their Sims Players. Industrial & Commercial space would be to house the 'retail' aspect they describe in the article. Your infrastructure (roads/hospitals/wonders/parks) would serve to make The Sims lives more convenient or 'happy'; making your city more attractive to new players... Imagine the Fun you could have by starting a UFO Invasion or Starting A Fire! Run Sim People RUN!!
- My brother: he likes to model his Sims after himself. He cheats all the time and I think he kicks on some of the characters. I think he loves the control over these "virtual people". He only has two families. Oh, yes...he loved to make them suffer too. (Type I: control obsessive)
- My sister: She tries to explore the different careers and lifestyles. Cheating is occasional, and only done to reach situations that would not be possible without temendous effort. Interestingly, her houses are all nicely designed... (Type II: Creative and explorative)
- I don't play often myself...but I do not cheat and I try to manage several families in parallel. Needless to say that my village is quite poor. I love to fiddle with the social parts of the games, like starting fights, jealousy, love, and alternate relationships (lesbian/gay/groups of adults) etc... I really would like to understand the internal rules it follows. (Type III: Social experimenattion)
I am sure that my family does not cover all the type of players, but you can play The Sims in so many different way, with so many philosophical standpoints that it appeals to a broad public.Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
1. Workplaces have no toilets. If you don't go before you leave the house in the morning you'll just have to wet your pants!
2. If a car pulls up outside a house where you are sitting with your friends, you may encounter a strange twist in the fabric of space-time, where every action will take twice as long to perform as when the road outside is clear.
3. Drinking coffee can sometimes be so much fun that it causes the consumer to whoop loudly, even when standing totally alone in a kitchen filled with buzzing flies.
4. Many burglars are equipped with special tardis-bags which, despite being the size of a small purse, are easily able to accommodate a fridge-freezer or oven. The bag can then be easily slung over the shoulder as the burglar sprints away!
5. Some of the best weddings are impromptu ceremonies in toilets. It's true I tell you!
Round last summer, this cute college doll I was doin' that week or two introduced me to a lil' game called The Sims, which needless to say ended up sucking a fat load of time out of my cushy webmaster job. We'd be playin' the game together late in the morning nearly every day, watching curiously as we made our lil Sims eat, work, play, even mess around with each other (that's the funniest part, even if it ain't as good as the real thing). But what most captured the interest of she and I was the neato house building and furniture options. I got this large money shot cheat off a game tips site, and we'd keep spending the dough to play around with housing options. My favorite houses was the ones we designed based on the Playboy mansion and this dance club one we made.
After a while I grew weary of the game, but my gal took such a fancy to the interior design feature that she decided to drop out of SUNY, and join design school to get an interior decorating job. I moved on to better things since, but when I last talked to her she was having a big ol' blast at design school, all thanks to a few weeks of the Sims! I usually dun think that much of games to be tellin the truth, but that Sims game is all right!
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
"The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
- Marquis De Sade
Just a thought.
What? The sims?
NO NO NO.
Anything I needed to know, I learned from the Simpsons. I mean common, they're a spitting representation of the average american family!
--- tracer.ca
Rigid city planning has been a mainstay of many communities for decades now.
Precisely, and I would argue that this is a perfect example of hypocrisy in our supposedly "free market above all" western societies. Our goverments have always (wisely, I might add) kept vital infrastructure development as far away from the market as possible. Sure, they let corporations fight for the contracts, but this is mainly one way to steer the economy, among others like central bank loan rates and taxation policy.
In a truly free "urbanist market", a city would grow organically, and we have perfect examples of that, witness Lima/Peru, Sao Paolo/Brazil, Mexico City. But note that all of these cities are in "second world" countries and the organic part is mainly in the suburbs where the poor live and are generally viewed as examples of how not to do it.
Conversely, I'm trying to resist the urge to mention Nazi Germany and the first highways (Godwins law and all that).
Basically my point was only tangentially related to SimCity proper. I was trying to point out an example where central planning is not only beneficial but a necessity. I guess this counts as a troll around here, oh well.
As for France, of COURSE it's a socialist state. They even admit they're socialists over there.
NO! They admit to being a social democracy with a relatively strong "social" ingredient, like most of Europe except for thatcherist GB. There is a very important distinction here which most americans never fail to miss. Socialism, communism and capitalism in there purest form are theoretical recipes for different ways to achieve totally deshumanized utopias. Luckily, none of them have ever been made reality.
What's your point? Oh yea, to troll. Forget it.
Fair enough, but you did respond, didn't you?
Cui peccare licet peccat minus. -- Ovid, Amores.
It strikes me as odd that a game like SimCity was such a huge success in among american computer enthusiasts.
Think about it, the basic of the game clearly implements the basic framework of a socialist state in which the player represents the central planning authority of a virtual state. You're main task is to eliminate the effects of random events such as monster attacks (Godzilla), earthquakes, chaotic traffic and urban development to maximize the efficiency of your carefully established development plans.
This is definitively not how western cities have been evolving in the last century. Sure, there is some larval attempt at central planning (witness for example Paris/France and Mitterands "Great Works: the Defense district, the Louvre etc. -- but then again most americans would consider France a socialist state), but most would agree that a city like LA looks more like a fast growing cell culture than anything else.
Games such as Quake 3 have been under heavy attack by conservatives as direct causes for violent youths, but I have yet to see a rant about the "five-year-plan" mindset SimCity and it's clones or similar works (Populous, Theme Park et al.) instill onto the gamer.
Face it, the concepts of central planning, authority and legal power is very analogous to the basic premises of engineering and software architecture. Every professional in these fileds (myself included) needs to have some sensibility for these propositions in order to manage his projects efficiently...
In short:
There is a repressed communist in every one of us!
Cui peccare licet peccat minus. -- Ovid, Amores.
I call it Simsim.