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

Dolls

[minus_273]

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.
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 .. If you do then it is no differnt than saying that FF teaches you magic and Doom teaches you to kill/shoot.
just my $.02

SIMs as experiment

[harlows_monkeys]

There was a very interesting story in Analog about a year or two ago. The story started out with the protaganist attending two conferences that were taking place in the same city. One was a conference on virtual reality. The other was a conference on nanotechnology.

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.

The Sims Online + some form of Sim CIty

[mike3411]

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???

What about bitter/loner Sims?

[burgburgburg]

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?

Re:What about bitter/loner Sims?

[StarFace]

That is what annoyed me most about the original and its add-ons. It didn't consider the fact that not everyone is extremely outgoing, and neglected the types of people that would prefer to stay home working on their projects. As it was, there were projects to be had, but they were all somewhat dull. Each painting looked the same (it would have been vastly better if you could "upload" your own art into the engine so that what the character paints is what you've created, or even the reverse -- upload all of your artwork and then use a simple pattern code to "create" new paintings that you can "download" in 640x480 format or something, trade online, ect. At least hang it on the wall in your Sim home and increase the "Fun" level of the room.) Instead, the game just got really dull unless you were running around all of the time with eighteen friends.

Another flaw is their overall outgoing meter, which when cranked to the bottom allowed your character to at least go a few days before "needing contact." The only problem is that it regenerated just as slowly. As any true introvert knows -- when you finally do need a little contact you can usually refresh that extremely quickly. You don't need to constantly socialize for three days to feel good about yourself again. In truly extreme cases, you get all of the social contact you need while at work, and your private life can remain just that -- private -- with no long term degeneration in the quality of life. Additionally, a little computer time reading emails, BBS, and perhaps IM chat would serve as well, but this option did not exist. The fact that full loners need to be alone to function properly is something that extraverts will never fully fathom, just as an introvert cannot fathom always needing somebody around to feel good about themselves.

So, while the option existed to make a loner, the game didn't handle it well at all, and really only worked with a narrow scope of individual. It looks like the online version is gonig to be even worse.

SC4 > TSOL

[Mannerism]

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.

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 /.'er looking to while away some hours, I suspect you'll find it much more appealing than TSOL.

CyberNation

[drunkrussian]

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.

Re:American way

[Samir Gupta]

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.