Virtual Simerica

Disoriented writes "A Time article speculates on where the Sims Online is going. Interesting and scary to see what America would be like without our inhibitions." I've played a lot of the playtest, and can't wait for the final version to come out.

Comments

Scary

[lokki]

OK, who else is frightened by the woman in the article that describes creating Sims of herself and her recently-dead husband so she could work thru the grieving process?!? That's some major dysfunction IMO...

Re:Scary

[mark_lybarger]

and paying some shrink >150$ per hour to "cope" with the tradgey is any better? it might be a little different than the "norm", but i think she's doing a fairly good job of coping.

Virtual Warfare?

[AltImage]

I remember TV/movies promising that _eventually_ we'd carry out all our wars through virtual simulation. Maybe we could have a simIraq scenario here where nobody gets their hands dirty. Oh wait..I see that on TV every night already. It's called CNN.

I heard the playtest sucked...

[Bonker]

The things that made the original Sims game interesting for more than just a couple hours were all the various ways you could break the game. Installing user-created mods or families. It's one thing to have a textbook adulterous relationship in the context of the game. It's quite another (and significantly more entertaining) when Beavis and Butthead come over and start trashing your house and lighting fires.

The people I've spoken to have all said the same thing. All this has gone from the Sims online. It's all about fighting your meters and trying to keep your sims happy and not about testing the bounds of the electronic world.

Thanks, but when I die in a game, I like it to be from being whacked with a Firey Sword of Cleaving and not because I got a paper-cut reading the newspaper.

No it isn't

[doc_traig]

There is nothing scary about how someone deals with the loss of a loved one as long as it doesn't cause harm to the mourner or others. In reality, it seems The Sims could serve as another vehicle for (limited) role-playing, a tool sometimes used in therapy to treat emotional distress. There aren't too many hard and fast rules when it comes to effective ways to deal with death, so anything that brings relief and closure that doesn't hurt the mourner or others should be seen as a good thing.

- DDT

Re:No it isn't

[lokki]

There aren't too many hard and fast rules when it comes to effective ways to deal with death,
No, but AFAIK, dealing with the reality of the situation is kinda important. Reality being the key word here, and The Sims being the opposite of reality. Seems like a bit of a problem.

Re:No it isn't

[doc_traig]

...dealing with the reality of the situation is kinda important...

Absolutely. The positive experiences from the game need to be transferred in some way to "real-life."

My mother passed away when I was too young to have ever really experienced losing someone but old enough to be terrified and detroyed emotionally by it. My siblings and I all coped differently, but the death was sudden and unusual, giving us no time in advance for any kind of emotional preparation.

Without any mechanism to make the transition, something like The Sims might allow a mourner an opportunity to phase-out, to some minor degree, the daily interaction that, now absent, makes the process so awful. Would it have helped me? Probably not, my coping mechanism was in part to enforce the separation by not staring at photos, not watching old home movies, not reminiscing, etc... but we all deal with it differently.

- DDT

And this is different how??

[Iguanaphobic]

Interesting and scary to see what America would be like without our inhibitions.

Sort of like looking at today from the perpective of the fifties. Today's morality is nothing like it was fifty years ago. Try looking at American "culture" through the eyes of a Victorian era Englishman. He would be horrified at the "total lack of inhibitions".

Re:And this is different how??

[circletimessquare]

Interesting and scary to see what America would be like without our inhibitions.

Sort of like looking at today from the perpective of the fifties. Today's morality is nothing like it was fifty years ago. Try looking at American "culture" through the eyes of a Victorian era Englishman. He would be horrified at the "total lack of inhibitions".

this is a common misperception you have demonstrated, this myopic view of history. you see a frightening loosening of morals over time before you. it is a false perception, relax.

who said this:

"Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common."

give up?

it was written on an assyrian clay tablet dated at 2800 BC. we haven't gotten much worse. we haven't gotten much better, either. ;-P

i went to pompeii once and was surprised at this one house on whose walls inside were preserved dioramas covered with more examples of indecent sexual acts than you can find trolling the worst porn sites on the web today. i won't even describe the features of the fountain in the middle of the room. god knows what went on in there.

for every age of man, there is a constant amount of people who live lives of moral high holy purity and those who live lives of extreme moral terpitude, and everything in between.

of course it gets equally sticky when we include on our personal observations of the moral decay of society over time our personal views on standards of human sexuality (sorry for the use of the verb 'sticky' in this context).

in your stereotypical view of prudish victorian times, you would find on the streets of london amongst the middle and lower classes more prurience and indecency than you would find at any britany spears concert. and amongst those moral uptight upper class victorians, let us only guess at the hypocrisy that went on behind closed doors. the moral decay of society indeed. i'm certain you would find in the nunneries and priesthoods at the time, the lower class members of high moral standing who fled the horrors of impure london in their time, and pined for the good old days of 1750s london, when things were good and decent. and those in the 1750s... you get it now, repeat ad nauseum until you get to adam and eve. (and what did that story teach us again?)

there were farmers screwing sheep in 4000 BC and there will be farmers screwing clones of dolly the sheep in 4000 AD. not much really changes, really.

don't judge an era by who was in control of the media at the time, or the us supreme court. human nature is a constant across time and space.

Stability of online societies

[Animats]

I'm curious to hear how the multi-user version works out as a society. Most MMORPGs are either bad neighborhoods or have oppressive oversight. If the Sim designers can make something that's stable but not at either of those limits, they'll have accomplished something.

I don't want to play the thing, but I'm looking forward to the academic papers after it's been running for a year.

Re:Dolls

[Vagary]

Unlike dolls it requires less imagination and imposes more contraints. This is why adults like to play it: their imaginations are dead and they can't fathom living in a world without rules and regulations. Rather than being a game where you can live out your fantasies, as you might expect from something like this, you get to do chores (read: "micromanage") instead.

As another poster has pointed out: most of the replay value in The Sims, at least among real gamers, is from hacking it. Just think how much more they'd prefer a graphical MOO? Now that it's online, and therefore [hopefully?] hack-resistant, the most geeks will see in it is a means to pick up chicks. (As PC Accelerator did so long ago...)

sick sims

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anybody else find the entire concept of "The Sims" disturbing?

Here is a game which lays down predetermined "life rules", as if there is a "right" and a "wrong" way to live your life.

Live your life according to the "rules" of the game and you will become happy, what kind of message does this send?

Consume, be happy! Consume, be happy!

Re:What about bitter/loner Sims?

[StarFace]

Ah, another thing I didn't care for was the emphasis on consumerism. Too much of the game was spent Getting a Better Job so that you could Buy More Neat Stuff. I suppose an inclination towards that is indicative of the current state of affairs, but it woefully neglects the types who just don't get off on that. There should have been more of a role-playing element in on the production end of things, both with hobbies and with your job. It would have been so much more fun for me to choose a career that meant something to my character, and then directly influence the Sim World with the accomplishments made there. How neat would it be to walk into another person's home on the block and see that they had your books on a shelf; or were listening to one of your songs on their stereo; sitting in a futuristic chair you had research over and designed; or visited a child that you had saved via heart transplant at the hospital.

Yeah, the game starts getting really complex, but it would have had so much more appeal than the endless cycle of promotions and better furniture. These sorts of things would have helped to flesh out the non-social characters more.

Er. Double standards?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a minute. Here's a game that's popular with the mainstream public, and now it's a *good* thing to get lost in the fantasy?

Considering this has more correlation to real life than Quake, I'm more worried about what this will do to the country's adults than what obviously fanciful games do to the country's children.

Re:MetaVerse - For Real

[Strange Ranger]

So the next step is to be able to take my Sim down to the EverQuest Arena or enlist in the Galactic Space Infantry a la Unreal Tournament and the screen identities carry through.

E.g. - A badass in UT2003 can then "come home" and hire himself out as a bodyguard or assassin. Hopefully soon we'll see many games (chatrooms, web sites, etc) linked together and be even closer to realizing a Stephenson-esque MetaVerse.

Then we'll be arguing over open MetaVerse protocols and how evil company X is since they won't allow all the little MetaVerses to join their big MetaVerse.

What a load of crap

[revscat]

Unlike dolls it requires less imagination and imposes more contraints. This is why adults like to play it: their imaginations are dead and they can't fathom living in a world without rules and regulations.

What a load of self-congratulatory bullshit. This might be hard for you to comprehend, but sometimes things that contradict reason happen. One of those is that people sometimes are more creative when they are given boundaries to work within. The Sims is a perfect case. Sure you can get all sanctimonious when you give someone GCC and ImageMagick and they don't do their own Sims, but if you give them the ability to use preexisting components and a rich universe to boot, you'd be surprised.

Ass. And I don't even play the game.

Re:MetaVerse - For Real

[rmdyer]

I've played a good many video games involving a 3D first person perspective. From Doom, to Quake, to Tribes, to Ultima, to Exile, etc. I am an explorer. Much like Lewis and Clark, I like the experience of travel and discovery. What is over the next ridge? What might I discover in new lands? These days, reality is very limiting. Most of the world has been explored, and travel costs money or time, and extracts its own hardships. I have used video games as an outlet and escape so that I might explore worlds generated in peoples heads.

I have become somewhat disappointed lately. Most companies are churning out junk food video games that do nothing more than give you a headache when you play them. I remember back to when I first ran Doom and how really cool it was to explore all those places in the game. At first, game creators genuinely put there hearts into it. Even add on mods were cool in the old days. I remmember how long I was looking forward to the Wheel of Time. That was a lot of work.

What I've been looking for these days is not some stupid fantasy/magic like game, or Sims type world, but just a place to explore. What would be really cool would be a free universal "world" server engine that allowed each individual to create their own worlds. Each world could be linked together much like web pages are. What would be even more cool would be something like the windows into those other worlds, just like the Quake portal windows in Rocket Arena. You know, the ones you look through before you enter the areanas. You should be able to walk from server to server freely. None of this logging on stuff. A world admin would simply define a portal tag that pointed to another server, just like web pages. Each world would be the creators own expression. I could literally walk around for days through server after server discovering new pages (worlds).

To make things fast and efficient you could do lots of local caching, build the world up as you travelled through it, and have pre-defined objects like tables, chairs, etc. You could order your first DVDRom full of world 3D objects, or download them in real-time. Texture maps should all be local for speed. About the only thing that should travel over the comm channel would be 3D coordinate data, compressed if neccessary.

How about if I see a Mountain in the distance I just walk up to it and start climbing? Tribes was cool because you could walk around the terrain, but it was a bit limited as to what you could do. I have a love and hate relationship with Quake. I like the detail in Quake, but hate not being able to "go outside". For psychological reasons it is very important for th mind to wrap itself around a setting, a location via visual ques. This is what was so cool about Doom the first time I played it. Even though I couldn't "go outside", their were mountains in the background image that game me a comfortable locational feeling.

Ideally, anyone could run these world servers. They wouldn't be vendor specific. The protocol would be open and would become the defacto standard for 3D exploration, just like the web has for document browsing. I'd love to start this project myself and do a master's thesis on it, but I believe it would take someone of Carmack's level to do it right. And, most importantly, the service should be free. Only the client should cost money, a one-time-cost of around 20 bucks. Upgrades would just give you compatibility with the latest protocol extensions while giving you better graphics. This would be similar to a SMTP system.

That is what I'm looking for. I'm really looking forward to Myst Online, but I'm afraid it will cost too much money to be useful to me. I like the ID/Quake model of supply and demand...sell the client, and let the users play for free.

Anybody else know why the gaming industry keeps putting out junk?

Re:We already have an America without inhibitions.

[Phil Wilkins]

You're both wrong, it's Las Vegas.

Re:Dolls

[Caraig]

The only problem with it being a 'human interaction LEGO system' is that the rules are constant. They are determined by the programmer(s) and can be rightfully called arbitrary. The user has no control over these arbitrary variables.

For example, in the article it mentions that a sim *must* have extended social contact with others in order to be happy. Now, I will agree that social interaction is vital to human emotional health, however we all require and/or desire it in different degrees. These variables are beyond our control; they are amongst the arbitrary variables set down by the programmer.

Another factor is that of the most recent slam against TSOL, which is that McDonalds is going to have a corporate presence, and consuming McDonald's food increases a Sim's 'fun' and 'fed' levels. Personally, I don't have fun eating McDonald's food (and I avoid it at all costs, which is to say, always), and it doesn't do much more than make me feel unwell, albeit fed. In a less-specific sense, I can imagine vegetarians *really* do not like (most if not all) McDonald's food!

However... insofar as we are working with arbitrary variables *that are still valid for a nontrivial subset of the population* then TSOL can be pretty intriguing, even to non-sociologists. I'm not a Sims fan either, but I'm going to watch this, to see if we get things like online protests, boycotts, demonstrations, meetings, town halls, etc. We've already seen from MU*s that there are people who are amused by, and go out of their way, to ruin enjoyment for others, and out-and-out destroy what others have created. The MU* communities have adopted a number of measures to take against anti-social people such as that; it'll be interesting to see what measures the residents of TSOL take, and in addition what they'll be doing to address other issues. (At least they won't have to worry about PKing....)