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...

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...)