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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!
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 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!
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?
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
"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.
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 don't want to play the thing, but I'm looking forward to the academic papers after it's been running for a year.
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.
How about SimSlash. Features include:
Since slashcode is open source, we should be able to start working on a Sims plugin right now.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
Interesting and scary to see what America would be like without our inhibitions.
;-P
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.
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.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it