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

If this is Virtual America...

[neostorm]

What happens with they pass the Sim Homeland Security Bill?

Oh great...

[Cali Thalen]

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...

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

[lokki]

What happens when her virtual husband dumps the virtual her and shacks up with the virtual cheerleader?
Her sims kills his sim, then creates a sim to help deal with the grief of losing her virutal husband...

The possibilites are endless.

[helix400]

I wonder if we can form vigilante or militia groups with our other buddies online, and raid other people's neighborhoods?

--
Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others! - Kodos

Re:The possibilites are endless.

[mofu]

Maybe a nice Italian Family organization . . . .

Re:The possibilites are endless.

[tomzyk]

I wonder if we can form vigilante or militia groups with our other buddies online, and raid other people's neighborhoods?

Been done already on UltimaOnline. Unfortunately, those people having some fun and doing this deliberately against administrator's planned excursions for the masses [frequently called "quests"] often got penalized by banning and deletion of characters.

MetaVerse - For Real

[Flamesplash]

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.

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

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...)

Re:Dolls

[Xzzy]

> 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.

oh come on now. I'm as big a cynic as anyone, and I still wouldn't come out saying something like this.

I think the real lure to the "computerized dollhouse" is purely caused by entertaining our eyes. A real dollhouse that could boast the number of building options that the Sims has could cost a thousand dollars by itself, and that's not even getting into all the goodies the expansions offer. The sims also requires far less real estate; one or two gigs on a hard drive as opposed to half your bedroom.

A little more subtly, the sims feeds an innate human urge to tinker around with stuff they otherwise couldn't. Want to see what happens when you put a slob and a neat freak into a house together? The sims lets you see what it's like. Want to see what happens when you pick fights with everyone you meet? The sims lets you watch it happen.

Think of the sims as more of an human interaction LEGO system. They give you hundreds of pieces to do with as you will, tinkering for as long as it suits your fancy.

I'm not a sims fan myself, but at least I can see it offers more than a cynical photograph of what goes on in the average adult's mind.

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.

Re:American way

[M.C. Hampster]

Perhaps the sims should aslo have a more European way of live instead of the glories american way, no falme intended.

No falme taken.

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???

Why I stopped playing the Sims...

[dfenstrate]

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.

Re:Why I stopped playing the Sims...

[Tackhead]

> 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.

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.

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

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.

Sim Crap!

[MrPerfekt]

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.

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.

Business possibilities

[Andy Dodd]

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

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.

I like the Sims

[jhampson]

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.

I used to work Maxis Tech Support

[Syncdata]

"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!

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.

Inhibitions?

[Vaulter]

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

Come down South on a Saturday night after a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. You'll see what we're like!

Sims?

[bytesmythe]

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.)

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.

The Days of Perky Pat

[whig]

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.

Life Imitates Art

[wizard992]

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.

Someone PLEASE tell me

[Strange Ranger]

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?"

Watch out for hacked clients

[duck_prime]

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.

Or where it really came from - Philip K Dick

[Xerxes]

The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, to be exact.

Stephenson, Bah! Have you no sense of history, Man?!

Re:What's more addictive than crack???

[mhesseltine]

Let's call it EverSlashdot

How about SimSlash. Features include:

1. Being a Karma Whore when IRL, you're a page-widening troll
2. Posting as a registered user, even though you're an AC
3. Getting to be Jon Katz and piss everyone off
4. Getting to be Cliff and post worthless Ask /. questions
5. Posting duplicate, misspelled stories
6. ...
7. Profit!! (sorry, had to be done)

Since slashcode is open source, we should be able to start working on a Sims plugin right now.