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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.
how is this any differnt from a little girl playing with dolls. As the article says it is a game mostly playe dby girls. I personally have never played nor know anyone who does. (WHY???WHY would you want to do mundaner chores? ) However, from the description, it no differnt from the fantasy world we live in wen we play with dolls and action figures. Except in this case you can play with millions of other people that you dont know and not just the girls from school or the neightborhood. .. If you do then it is no differnt than saying that FF teaches you magic and Doom teaches you to kill/shoot.
I cant understand why it is such a big hit but i see nothing special in the fact that it is. I also dont derive any meaning from that
just my $.02
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't this been a problem for a long while? I remember reading stories about people who play EverQuest 10 hours a day. Someone I knew was fired from his job because he used to sneak an hour out of every workday playing EQ.
I don't see any specific reason why the sudden advent of The Sims is going to create a big enough blip in the social landscape that we need to start worrying afresh.
The protagonist met an interesting woman at the nanotech conference. The next day, he met a woman who could almost be her twin, but not quite, at the VR conference.
He managed to figure out that the woman from the nanotech conference was there to kill the leading nanotech researcher, and the woman from the VR conference was there to kill the leading VR researcher.
It turns out that both women were from the future...but very different futures. In one, nanotech had been developed, but fell into the wrong hands. The world was under the power of a dictator, whose nanotech made him pretty much invincible. In the other, VR had been developed to the point that virtual worlds had become more interesting to many people than the real world. People were "living" in VR instead of reality. As a side effect of this, people had been able to experiment with different social structures, and they had figured out how to basically implement Utopia--but because so many people had slacked off from real life to do this, the infrastructure was collapsing, and so mankind was doomed.
The protagonist realized that VR-world went bad because nanotech had not been developed in that timeline--because someone had assisinated the lead nanotech researcher! In nanotech-world, the dictator had been able to take over because society had not been restructured along the lines discovered in VR-world, because VR had not been developed, because someone had killed the leading VR researcher. If both VR and nanotech were developed, things would have been great.
It was a pretty cool story.
Both of the top 2 weekly news mags covered the Sims Online this week, and Newsweek even gave it a cover story, where there is so much else real news going on in the world.
Maybe I'm just a conspiracy theorist, but does anyone want to speculate if there was some marketing money involved here to get the Sims featured so prominently?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
The Sims is pretty cool, but I've always been a bigger fan of Sim City (I think 2000 was the best so far). Now, if they could somehow combine that with the Sims online, I'd be hooked. Imagine designing and administrating a city populated by "real" people. So much fun..... and I promise I would restrain from causing disasters via the disaster button.... most of the time.
Hrm, we'd need a new drug-reference analogy to replace the likes of "Evercrack". What's more addictive than crack???
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
This is the start of it. Years have gone by while we worked our way to this point. Some visionaries have pointed that this is our future in film, book and popular media.
The foundation of that future is now being created though. Not by the government, doctors, priests or the military, but rather in the homes, offices and studios of today's premier geeks.
Programmers with the skill to creature an enduring world and the backing to bring that world to life are the creators of societies newest niche.
You may not think that mmorpg's and other online enduring games will be that big. But just wait until generations grow up with them instead of being introduced to them.
Will it be a good change? A bad change? Time will tell, but if you are going to be realistic, you have to know that this will create change.
You can choose to not believe me if you wish, but that means in 30 years, I get to say, "I told you so."
I'm a bit miffed that there is a game bias towards interactions with other Sims for rewards. What if you want your Sim to be a bitter loner, who sits around his darkened studio apartment all day, listening to mp3s of jazz 78s, working as an offsite computer consultant, and cooking ramen noodles on a hot plate? Shouldn't highly dysfunctional/self-destructive life-styles be considered valid too?
From what I've seen of it, TSOL is a far cry from what you might expect when a guy as creative as Wil Wright wields the resources of Maxis to create a virtual online nation. The economy, for example, can only be described as surreal. The concept of each server as a "city" is true only in the sense of its population; there are no definable neighborhoods or any true concept of location -- travel between individual buildings is accomplished through teleportation, making location and distance irrelevant. Obviously, this is a game of social interaction at a level slightly above that of a graphical chat room with avatars. It may be interesting to observe in that sense, but by no means is it a simulation of a nation or even a city. I'm sure it will attract legions of fans (my wife seems to like it), but it's certainly not of interest to me.
/.'er looking to while away some hours, I suspect you'll find it much more appealing than TSOL.
Maxis' other forthcoming product, on the other hand, does look very promising. SimCity 4 appears to be a genuine evolution of the SimCity line. If you're a
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
Yes, it's like a dollhouse. Yes, it has mundane tasks. But the mundane tasks(as in life) are the means to which you get better 'stuff'. It's fun to get neat stuff. I always liked my GI Joe, and I always wanted to get him better gear(like the real working submarine or the kite!). The Sims are easy to project yourself onto, and it's a lot easier to get yourself neat furniture, chicks, etc. It was a bit traumatic for my son when his dad-character got killed in a kitchen fire, though. (Well, for a couple of hours, anyway.)
And isn't it fun to play your computer with other people esp. when they're from far away? "Wow, I'm playing with a guy from Alaska!" Just like when those video-trivia-quiz machines first popped up in bars and places like Damon's, where you could compete nationwide.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to see real-world relationships spring up from this. Didn't some Everquest-ers get married recently?
I also read an article about how therapeutic 'The Sims' is for shut-ins and the elderly. Bringing them online would be a lifesaver in many cases. I think that there should be a discount for the elderly.
Tom Clancy wrote a book about a virtual nation that existed entirely on the Internet of the future and demanded diplomatic recognition. The book was pretty bad, but the idea is an interesting one.
I remember reading an article about Everquest a while ago that said that the amount of trading in real money that went on within the EQ system made it a larger economy than that of several real-life nations. I can't remember the source of the article, unfortunately, so I can't check its accuracy. However, I think it is entirely possible when you consider that the number of players is certainly greater than the populations of some members of the UN (for example, Tuvalu, population approximately 5000).
I am sure that one day Internet societies will be demanding diplomatic recognition as states. Right now, you can already see some examples. Google for "micronations" and see what you get. The ones I've been involved with were all political simulations that did not claim any sovereignty or try to have any relationship with the real states, but there are some that do.
A virtual environment like the Sims is even closer to a virtual state than a micronation or EQ, because the Sims is all about simulating life. The title SimNation is relatively appropriate; you can think of it as a gigantic distributed simulation of a society. If there was a governmental structure, that would make it a distributed simulation of a nation.
Anyway, another site to check out is Active Worlds, a 3D virtual environment. It's not as good a simulation of human characteristics as The Sims, but it still is a good enough representation of real life that simulated virtual nations have been founded within it.
More women than men play Sims?
Are we REALLY that surprised?
Males play "Quake III" and "Unreal Tournament" and such. This is the computerized equivalent of older generations' fascination with "Cops and Robbers" or "Cowboys and Indians."
Females play "Sims." In other words, this is the computerized equivalent of "Let's Play House."
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
I predict two emerging paradims in MMORPG game design will create interesting interactions and facilitate global play to a greater extent than is now.
1. Nintendo, et al. are doing some work with real-time language translation on the fly -- some early results can be seen in the GameCube title "Phantasy Star Online" where you can select from a menu of sentence patterns, subjects, objects, etc. We're trying to get it to the point where you can translate free text, without the awkward results that stuff like Babelfish, et al. yield.
2. Also, the ability to create objects on the fly, extending the game world, etc, much like the OO muds from the text based MUD era, would be very interesting to see (eg, being able to create a new item of furniture, etc. and make it available online to all players, rather than having a limited palette which inherently reflects the cultural milieu of the game's designers)
I am really looking forward to the time where international players freely interact -- it will be an interesting sociology experiement to see how national and cultural means, norms and paradigms manifest themselves in a virtual world.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
I never understood the obsession with "The Sims". I tried it out, but ultimately I just can't play a game populated with characters that are actually LESS motivated than I am.
The damn people won't get out of bed when the alarm goes off, and there's no way to get to work other than car pool. If the Sim has to be at work at 8, so you have the alarm set for 6, they'll STILL miss their ride because it apparently takes 3 hours to get showered and dressed in the morning.
I can only imagine what it would be like if they had pets in the game. A bunch of dead neglected dogs, cats, birds, hamsters, etc.
FWIW, I won't be into gaming until games become Matrix-like. Current games miss out in three major areas:
1) The experience isn't 1st person enough. FPS games are one thing, but the networked versions only allow interaction in an extremely narrow set of circumstances (like CounterStrike, with all the pre-defined missions, etc.) Multiplayer worlds use a 3rd person perspective, which obviously doesn't lend itself to a "realistic" seeming game.
2) The group interaction in games feels fake. It works better (for me) in FPS games simply because having that first-person perspective draws you into the game a little more. Still, there is a lot to be desired.
3) Current games simply aren't realistic enough. I want to feel like I'm actually inhabiting a fantasy world. Let's use Vampire, for instance. Not the computer game this time. LARP (Live-Action Role Playing for those of you who don't follow this junk). Now, exactly how much can you get into this game when a person using their "vampric" hearing sense is standing right next to you while you're supposed to ignore them? And certain actions are executed against other vampires on the basis of a rock-paper-scissors match!? Come ON! If I'm going to play a game, I want to feel like I really have those abilities, whether I'm playing something like Vampire, or Diablo, or CounterStrike. Simulating it with graphics doesn't help matters a bit.
Perhaps this is still why I like mudding. There are other people to talk to, and, while the game is only text, it has a first person perspective and a flexibility that no other kind of game can truly match. (ObPlug: If you think you'd be interested in the mud diversion [or used to be, but haven't mudded in ages], try it out! Just telnet to tera.teralink.com 4000.)
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
Is it just me, or does life increasingly seem to imitate a Philip K. Dick story?
For anyone who is not familiar with the reference, the subject refers to a short story which later evolved into a novel, "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch." In these hypothetical futures, people lived vicariously through simulations, often to the neglect of their actual lives. There's a lot more to it, but if you want to know the whole story, you should read it. Anyhow, once again, Dick's predictions bear a disturbing similarity to reality.
Peace and love, y'all
We can call it "My Acquaintance Family of Italian Ancestry"
This actually happens with a number of games and quite a few people. I have friends that identify completely with their Evercrack characters; one of my more socially inhibited friends actaully introduced himself as his character name at a bar one night. His web page has pictures labeled with his name; only problem is they are screenshots of his character.
Some other friends of mine had to stop playing Grand Theft Auto 3 when they noticed how agressively they were driving. They would be going to work or something and have thoughts about driving on sidewalks and through parks to cut some time off the trip, and started getting very dangerous to other drivers on the road.
I have never been one to fall into the trap of blaming video games for real-life problems, but when certain people or personality types identify so closely with a game, what does that mean for society? I can imagine people hurrying to get home after work so they don't miss sim-happyhour at the sim-pub on TSOL, instead of going with friends or co-workers for a real-life happyhour.
>"My Bladder meter is getting pretty low. Hygene Bar could use a refresher too, maybe I should jump in the shower. And it would be nice to up my social meter."
>
> Then I realized I was looking AT MY REAL LIFE through the metric of The Sims.
I tried The Sims on a whim and a friend's recommendation, and enjoyed it enough that it was morning by the time I decided I needed sleep. (But that's been true for me since the first DOS (R.I.P.) version of SimCity.)
But I found it frustrating to have to fight the energy/social/fun meters while advancing in my career. Fer chrissakes, this character's only worked for three days straight, and is already depressed/lonely? What's wrong with him/her? Needing a shower every 1-2 days, fine, but a party?! This is nuts!
So I created a Sim a little more suited to my own personality and called him Mini-Me.
Playing Mini-Me was more fun, but after a few sessions, Mini-Me still found it hard to advance his career, because he didn't have enough Friends ("Aaw, crap, I have to invite those idiots over?!"), and didn't have enough Energy ("I just wanna fsckin' sleep!") to throw the requisite parties after work.
So Mini-Me took a day or two off Sim-work ("Grumble, grumble") and wound up l33ching some other Sim's wife ("Ain't enough hours in the day to do it myself!"). She then stayed at home to organize the requisite friend-making parties (and click on "Hell, no!" whenever the adoption agency called) while Mini-Me worked his way up the career ladder ("Fuck yes, I come home, go to bed for an hour or two, wake up for the party, make a Friend, and rack up another career level! I 0wnz 411 j00r 51m5!").
The only reason Mini-Me got married was to make Friends - not because he wanted any Friends but for the sole purposes of advancing his career. (And Big-Me, as the player, still found it horribly boring to spend hours queueing up "Invite $SIM", "Greet", "Joke" "Talk" "Dance" and occasionally "Flirt" commands just to get to the top career level).
> Realizing how pathetic this was, I took said bathroom break and shower, went back to the room, and unistalled the Sims.
The day Mini-Me reached the top of his career ladder, Big-Me realized, with a sigh of great relief, that unlike Mini-Me, he had a good enough job that he doesn't have to put up with that kind of crap in real life. So why should he have to put up with it in a game?
At this point, Mini-Me (and his entire city!) were promptly transformed into several thousand sectors of free diskspace, and eagerly await the installation of DOOM III.
I did a quick search of the list and found not a single instance of the word 'teach' or 'useful'. I was hoping that somebody might point out that the Sims could in fact be a great training tool for the millions of disenfranchised, apathetic, socially maladjusted children filling our classrooms.
Can't you see it? A Sims kid, learning the rules of school success? The price of cause and effect? What it means to identify patterns not only in grammar or math but in social behaviors? You are in fact rewarded for being an intelligent, conscientious, care-giving individual. In the Sims world it's just points...but in the 'real world' the point system is stronger friends, families, and social positioning...
The kids 'today', sounds familiar doesn't it?, are so saturated with much better much more interesting subjects to study: Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, etc.. Why would they be at all interested in reading, writing, math or maybe even how to get along with another human being when the alternatives are so much more entertaining?
The Sims way of life might actually be a great way of bringing our kids 'back to life', i.e. understanding the basic rules of cause and effect in a socially and economically complex environment, what we call the real world.
dgd
The article gives several examples of people re-creating their lives in the Sim world. I never saw it that way... I saw the game as the most insidious form of social commentary ever to be distributed to the masses. There are two stages to sim actualization. Stage one is looking at your life through Sims progress meters. Stage two is realizing that the game is, for all its faults, a pretty good model of the human condition... you really have little choice than to follow the rules society places on you, no matter how much of a black sheep you think you are or try to be. Getting people to realize this blows their minds and makes them quite impressionable.
I wouldn't be suprised if Wil Wright were going to start the next revolution via the next sims upgrade pack "The glorious new Sim order". I gotta go scrub my bathtub.
I also would like to ponder the possibility of some really large scale cooperation / non-cooperation type activities going on here...yeh that's right baby, I'm talking capitalism versus socialism.
People could join large groups that let them do particular things because every pitches in something...y'know, like they carry around a card which signifies them as a member of a large club (some of whom in the club, they don't even know)...and they can flash it around to others, getting into certain private clubs and stuff. I don't know if I'm making sense, but I'll have to keep an eye on this one.
I am amazed no one has mentioned the issues of addiction and the strong negative aspects of bringing the mud/mush/moo/whatever paradigm to an easily accessible graphical game targeted at women, apparently. Perhaps I should explain.
My background - I spent 9 months as a player and the last five years coding for muds, particularly MudOS LP-like muds. Object oriented, as the previous poster referred to. You can whip up a new object anytime you feel like it. Written in a nice language called LPC which is kinda like Objective-C. P-code compilation and execution, with inheritance and polymorphism. But i'm digressing.
Our usage numbers were always in the high 100s on an average weeknight, 240 I believe was the max simultaneous usage. Not inconsequential considering the cpu load of interpreting all that pcode every time someone walked from one room to another. There were about 10k user accounts at any one time (we did/do regular idle purges)
The primary usage was male, college age. The average user would be freshman college, about 18-19. Things were not evenly spread out however. A very tiny minority of the users were above the age of 40, less than 1%. Males over 30 were the rarest. The numbers of late 20's aged male and female players were trending downward from the college peak. But there were a huge load of 30's women. The bulk of the females were in the 30-40 bracket, very rarely above it.
I thought this a very strange thing and didn't really believe it till I met a few of the online acquaintances to know for sure that they were really middle aged women. Universally they are married but near divorce, or single without much hope of hooking up with someone. A lot of them do a lot of sex talk with the younger college age boys online.
(we call it 'mudnasty', doing a 'what' command and seeing what these people say to each other would make you retch)
Some of these misguided people actually hook up in real life with ~20 year age separations - they never work out, but they persist in this fantasy until proven that it won't work.
As an administrator I feel some kind of responsibility to counsel people who are obviously lost or addicted - "mud addiction" is a huge issue, people spending every waking hour on these things - if you went to college in the last 10 years you will know what I mean. People lose sight of life when immersed in these worlds and just let everything fall apart around them. So I counsel someone who is badly astray and try to help. Sometimes I ban them if the situation is bad enough.
I remember one particular case out of dozens over the years - this was a 38 yr old woman from Sacramento CA who was in love with some 20 yr old guy from around Norfolk, VA. She persisted doing the 'mudnasty' thing repeatedly with this guy, resorting to phone sex to get him off, all while she was married and living in the same house with (and sleeping in the same bed with) her husband of 19 years. The boy from VA was virile and talked nicely to her. He was irresistible to her.
I had a talk with her, and went to visit her on a trip to CA and met her husband too. They were nice enough people but the house was a pig sty, cobwebs on the ceiling, dirty dishes stacked to the ceiling, and an obese woman who would otherwise be pretty sharp looking sitting in front of a computer console banging out love (sex) messages to some guy who was young enough to be her son - easily. All the classic signs of depression were obvious in her.I tried to get her to do something about her marriage - turns out that she was unhappy with her husband, he made her feel devalued, not pretty, not like a woman 'should' according to her. He also yelled at her a lot. Given her behaviors, I can hardly blame the guy for being upset though. While their marriage didn't work out, she got her ass off the mud, terminated her relationship with the guy from VA and started the divorce proceedings after I spent about 6 months off and on working on her to 'take positive steps to clean up your life'. One small victory, sort of, though I suspect that if she'd not been so jaded by her online existence, her husband might not have needed to be replaced. They had had a good relationship at one time, I believe.
She wasn't an isolated case. You will find a lot of women like her across America, they are the consumers of the Xanax and the Prozac, the depressed masses, with a bit too much weight and too little self-esteem. I was married to a woman like that myself.
One of the nice things about text muds is that they have a high barrier to entry - you have to use telnet, and the commands are kind of arcane - you won't find most women interested in it.
What about "The Sims Online Edition"? Seems like that is the target audience, middle aged women with a lot of time on their hands, and issues with the relative worth of their real lives. It's an addictive escape. Will we be generating hundreds of thousands of divorces, as depicted by the woman above? How many will sink ever deeper into depression as a result of the total lack of real social interaction as a result of spending multudinous hours pursuing the Sim life?
I think the simple accessibility of this kind of addictive 'crack' is an inherently bad thing. I wouldn't ban it, but I would wish that people were more conscious of the life-destroying dangers they face by total immersion in such games.
Mind you, I refer to women in this case almost exclusively because that is the target audience for "The Sims". However, if you want to discuss the failings of men in a multiplayer game environment, i'll be glad to oblige. They have easily as many flaws. Also note that the women who play text muds are a specific group that does not reflect the population at large. So women out there, don't take offense. This isn't necessarily you. It's just a type of person that finds it easy to immerse in online games.
My apologies if I offended anyone, this was no troll.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Although ancient greek may be a perfect language, easily translated, the rest of the languages in the world are not. The problem is that almost all human language has as many exceptions to rules as it has rules. And even if you know the rules, often a sentence taken literally cannot possibly be translated without all the understood background or explanation behind it. For example, if I were to say, "Government officials report there will be more 9-11's." that doesn't mean much literally. But when I associate with what I know happened on 9-11-2002 and I put it into the context of the rest of an article, I can pull out a lot more information. Such as the Government means the American Government. Officials mean people in the executive branch of the federal government.
So the problem is that languag just isn't defined by it's rules and exceptions buy also on an understanding of the world around us and the history of that world and the ability to think like a human. For example, teaching a computer to pick out when a human is telling a joke or using sarcasm is such a difficult task.
In the 70's AI scientests assumed that translating language was just a matter of symantics... translating "is" to "est" and "cat" to "gatto". But in fact it involves a computer 'knowing' and entire culture and history of a people. It requires a computer to have common sense.
This isn't the sig you are looking for... Carry on...