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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.
What happens with they pass the Sim Homeland Security Bill?
As if (we) geeks didn't have enough reason to have no appreciable social life to begin with, now they're programming a 24/7 online version of life that will keep us from every having to socialize outside of our screens.
Then again, maybe the bar scene will be a little less diluted with brave geeks, now that they have another place to hang...
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
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 won't dance in a club like this...All the girls are slags, and the beer tastes just like piss! -The Specials
--
Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others! - Kodos
Sounds just like the MetaVerse from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. A lot of the ideas in the book must have sounded far fetched when he wrote it, but sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Who knows where this will all go.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
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
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.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Gee -- all we need now is a Sims sword-fighting routine and we have the Metaverse...
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.
No falme taken.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
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!
Back in 2000 (when I was a Business Admin major, and had plenty of time. I'm now a Mech-E student, and I don't sleep.) I picked up the Sims and installed it on my computer, and I quickly got addicted.
I'd play 3-5 hours most nights, getting my character better jobs, improving the house, wooing neighborhood women and having my character make friends. Did pretty well, too.
Then one day, I got up from a session, and started walking down the hall to the bathroom.
I started thinking things like:
"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. Realizing how pathetic this was, I took said bathroom break and shower, went back to the room, and unistalled the Sims.
I now hang out with real people. When I'm not posting on slashdot anyway.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
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
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
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?
I played the beta for about a week... this was a few weeks ago, like three I think. The experience of the Sims Online is going downhill fast. I realize it's still beta but Maxis seems to enjoy making the game harder and harder.
For those that aren't hip to the Sims, you have to build your Sim's skills up by doing a multitude of different things that increase one of 5 or 6 skills. Now, this idea isn't bad. But in the week that I played it, they made skills build slower and do I mean sloooower.
Now to get one point of a skill (say creativity by playing a guitar) I have to sit and watch my Sim play.. for an hour. AN HOUR. You can't do anything else with your Sim obviously while you're doing it so during that time, the Sims Online becomes pretty much a glorified chat room with annoying text bubbles and no scrollback.
Yes, you can get up and leave your computer while you're doing that but.. after 10-15 minutes of inactivity, you're kicked from the service. Great stuff.
And if that wasn't bad enough, skills ratings decay while you're offline, pretty severely too. Factor in that they keep up'ing the prices for all the items and the fact that once it goes live, you can expect to pay at least $9.95/mo to waste your life in their virtual world and have zero to show for it.
Rave on, raver. I think I'll stick to RCT2 if I really have to play a Sim game.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
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".
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
The article mentions that people can set up businesses such as a coffee shop or bakery, etc.
I want to join some find sim-Italians in setting up a business that deals in "protection", something that those other businesses clearly need.
Uncle Vito
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Let's call it EverSlashdot
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Home invasion robberies. I join a home in the game, and all it is is a box with 7 weight sets while my housemates just sit and pump iron all day. I ask them why, and the answer is "if we build up our muscles we can raid other peoples houses and beat them up and rob them". Give the game a month, and you'll just have roving gangs of thugs. I can't wait.
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.
"To many of us, it is more than just a game. We don't just play The Sims; we express ourselves and our lives with real emotions, situations and interactions."
This woman is not the exception, she is the rule. When a user would download a bad object/skin/what have you, that would crash the game, there were three steps.
#1:Sim File Cop (a prog to find bad skins, etc...
#2:delete the house and the family within
uninstall the game completely and start from scratch
Suffice to say, 35% of the time, callers forced with #2 or #3 turned into supe calls. This prog really has turned into a replacement for life for a number of users.
Curse you Will Wright!
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
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.
It's called Los Angeles.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
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.
Come down South on a Saturday night after a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. You'll see what we're like!
I don't have a sig...Do you??
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
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.
Better yet, open a simBestBuy and sell simSims. This way, you could control your Sim playing his simSims, for even more thrills!
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
"Is there an acceptable level of role-playing?"
I wanna cast a spell!
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.
What is the point? As one poster said, testing the boundaries of the local version = somewhat entertaining. But SIMS online? I can just imagine trying to explain this to my father:
"Well Dad, you can talk and interact with others, buy and sell fake stuff, live in a fake house, soon they'll even have virtual pets you can own."
[Looking at me like I have 2 heads]"So son, you're saying I go can online and play a simulated version of real life?"
"Yep, you got it."
"Son, wasn't that the really bad thing in that Matrix movie you made us watch?"
Operator, give me the number for 911!
I heard there are some cheating users who hack the Sim client to write bots to ... er ... watch TV and, um, get snacks? ... with superhuman efficiency...
Oh never mind.
The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, to be exact.
Stephenson, Bah! Have you no sense of history, Man?!
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.
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...