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Playing God in The Sims 2
pgptag writes "From Daily News Tribune: 'If you could play God, would you be kind, cruel or just careless? The answer can reveal itself by the way you play "The Sims 2," the highly anticipated follow-up to the "real life" personal computer game "The Sims," which placed omnipotent players in control of the fates of digital people... What's funny is that we have a genetics feature now (which allows characters who mate to have children who share their looks and aspirations). So you can download some of the celebrities that the players have made, put them in the game and have them have kids.'"
http://www.livejournal.com/users/nematoddity/13371 1.html
How long can a neighborhood of sims go without urinating?
Help! I'm being repressed!
kind, cruel, or just careless
You forgot 'horny'.
My Brad Pitt/Jennifer Anniston family slowly evolved into higher primates.
this is a family i'd like to create and play god with. how funny would it be to see an army helicopter pick up bush and have him wear a suit, just like he did last year. "the war in iraq was a success!" ....
let me try and get the reaper to knock on his door. at least itll be real in the sims2.
If you could play God, would you be kind, cruel or just careless?
Let me think about this...
Kind: Here you go my Sim children. Play and enjoy life. Be fruitful and multiply. Please don't eat the fruit from that tree of knowledge because I'm saving it for a pie.
Cruel: How dare you eat my apples! {Godly voice} Locust Storm!!!! Aieeeeeeee!!!! (billions of puppy-dog sized locusts ravage village)
Careless: *sigh* I'm a n00b. What does this button with a pointy letter S do? Only one way to find out! {click} (lightning bolts fly from Heaven destroying entire village)
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
...I want to play The Sims 2 I am still missing the year and a half I lost to the the Sims and the Sims Online. I can't get that time back. :)
If you always trap your Sim-ling in a pool w/o a ladder out, what does that make you?
If you're a god (or God) who allows people to play god/God on a computer, what does that say?
If you're a Sim-ling and you resent your Slashdotting overlord, do you have the right, nay responsibility, to destory his Quicken files?
this is the sort of artical that you read like 10 years later and sorta feel pity for how quaint it is. go find old videogame magazines, there are occationaly storys like this. find some from the apple IIGS era, you'll laugh and kinda feel sad reading stoies about how realistic and how close to simulateing reality and this and that, and you look at the game and its like three boxes with 2 numbers governing everything.
-You're wasting your time. Alfador only likes me.
What I'd do when I played the original was to make a family of nothing but kids. I'd make a small room, get them all to go in, delete the door, and sit there laughing maniacally as they pissed themselves and started beating each other up. If I ever become a god, Earth is probably screwed... :P
TS2 is more addictive then crack. Yes, I play it. Lovely game, can do wonderful things and build wonderful stuff. You can recreate your family and make you brother a flamboyant gay or set your annoying little sister on fire. You can recreate your house with a 5 acre swimming pool behind it and a hot tub at 10m intervals. Did I mention it's addictive yet?
The only bad thing is the game's installer, which demands you hand over your balls to EA/Maxis and be known for all eternity as a faux-femme pansy for playing this game. I suck... :(
Hate me!
I should find a girl and have a child. I wonder if the alien abduction messed with his DNA.
Somethingawful recently featured an article which makes a pretty interesting read =)
I honestly hope that Will Wright makes good on his statement that there will be more free time in Sims 2. That's the reason most of us quit playing the first game...after a while, it just got too depressing. It was like watching yourself go through life: wake up, eat, shower, job, eat, sleep. No ones want to play a video game to remind them of how monotonous and repetitive their own life is.
This game has been out for a few weeks... and this is just a summary of the game... since when has slashdot done free advertising?
I've noticed something. I live in Oklahoma, land of "christians" and serious godly folk everywhere.
Oklahoma experiences quite a few natural events that can kill, like F5 tornadoes, baseball-sized hail, 100mph straight line winds from thunderstorm outflows, and heat and humidity.
Well anyway, I've noticed that actually when bad things happen (like the aformentioned natural weather events listed above), it seems to increase the attraction towards god here in the red land state.
So honestly, be a mean god in the game. Smite people. This doesn't matter, they will still flock back to you anyway.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
Does this game run on GNU/Linux?
To really accelrate this, The Sims should allow people to enter virtual reality show contests, take Survivor and the Apprentice out with the same shot that kills Days of Our Lives.
I can't seem to find the "smite with righteous vengeance" option in my girlfriend's copy...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
My friend made his "family" after the iraqi dictator. Sims2 does a remarkable job of letting you create likelesses that really do look like their RL counterparts to some extent.
As for me, I spent a day playing the game the way it was meant to be played, then got bored and started the mass slaughter of my entire neighborhood, playing some sort of sims2 offshoot game where your success was measured by the number of graves.
needless to say, it quickly got boring.
But seriously, has anyone said that the Sims is blasphemous? .. I'm sure with some though an irrational argument such as that can be sold by some whackos to certain people for financial reward .. "It's evil, satanic to pretend to be God cause it builds up an urge to be Him or think you're just as good/better etc"
I would definitely more real than the real stuff...
Achille Talon
Hop!
Now I have to get this game, download Kerry and Bush, put them into the same house, and see what happens...
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
Or else the FBI just might end up liberating Maxis.
If you could play God, would you be kind, cruel or just careless? The answer can reveal itself by the way you play "The Sims 2,"
No, no it can't. What a fucking moronic thing to say. The little guys inside the game are just collections of pixels. If you mistreat them, it doesn't matter. Actually being a god over real people is an entirely different thing.
Yours,
God
In Sims 2, you can have your Sims play Sims 1. Pictures here. Now, the true question of what lies hidden in your soul can be answered not by how you treat your creation, but how your creation treats its creations. Have you been able to teach your creature to be a good god, just as you have been a good god, or have you left it secretly vengeful and full of malice. Only through this sort of recursive investigation will you find out how clean your god slate is.
--
RumorsDaily
> If you could play God, would you be kind, cruel or just careless? The answer can reveal itself by the way you play...
Is it just me, or does this kind of talk just make you want to punch Peter Molenueux in the face?
(And yes I know Peter Molenueuex != Will Wright, though when the devil's not looking...)
ummm....my tinfoil hat says that this wasn't free
Now, the true question of what lies hidden in your soul can be answered not by how you treat your creation, but how your creation treats its creations.
Is that actually an accepted philosophy, or are you simply referring to Black & White?
Realise that man tends to create gods in his own image, and Randy Newman expressed the issue best: ...
The Christians and the Jews were having a jamboree
The Buddhists and the Hindus joined on satellite TV
They picked their four greatest priests
And they began to speak
They said "Lord the plague is on the world
Lord no man is free
The temples that we built to you
Have tumbled into the sea
Lord, if you won't take care of us
Won't you please please let us be?"
And the Lord said
And the Lord said
"I burn down your cities--how blind you must be
I take from you your children and you say how blessed are we
You must all be crazy to put your faith in me
That's why i love mankind
You really need me
That's why i love mankind
..what someone describes as 'blasphemous' reveals more about their own insecurities or psychology, than it says about the $Deity potentially offended.
God vs. Bush
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
"Bring it closer" "You didn't answer my question: what does god need with a starhip?"
"If you could play God, would you be kind, cruel or just careless? The answer can reveal itself by the way you play "The Sims 2,"
The answer can also, and more accurately be revealed through playing Black and White.
I'd do what a "god" does in real life: nothing as it doesnt exist. (im not trolling, Im an atheist) Just let the game play out and watch various people concoct creation myths, start oppressive theocracies, use scripture as an excuse for bigotry, religious wars, attacking new ideas, etc.
This kind of game might be a lot of fun if it was made from the perspective of, say, aliens watching the earth from space. "Hey, look at this, they stopped worshipping animals and nature and now they are all crazy about some carpenter who lived 2000 years ago."
Something tells me this wouldnt sell too well in the US and would probably be banned in some fashion (not carried by walmart, etc).
You're new here, aren't you? ;-)
Well, at least in the Sims you can Cntl F5 tornadoes.
There is a great study screaming to be done on morality is video games. Violence in video games (for me) is associated with pushing buttons to achieve an arbitrary objective as opposed to, say, beating up a real random person with a baseball bat. However, morality in entertainment of the type seen in The Sims, or in role playing games such as Star Wars KOTOR, involves making conscious, deliberate decisions about whether or not representations of humanity should suffer.
Are certain demographics more prone to a "good" moral path than others? Would a country's mix of cultures and values make its populations more likely to inflict pain and destruction than fruitfulness and joy? Does a person's upbringing have a significant effect on the way they treat digital people?
Given the depth of the human psyche, I wouldn't be surprised if morality in video games could serve as an outlet for some not so trivial underlying issues. Some would probably say that this is far too heady of a look to take at a video game, but I'd be willing to bet my next paycheck that there are some really interesting results waiting to be discovered.
Final Fantasy fans (FFF's!) unite against slashdot in using the spoony bard and the crazy wizard as an icon for something as .... different as The Sims. ;)
I even submitted how there was trouble with copying software and The Sims 2 6 days ago.
Ok whine over, it's a great game. Love it. Maxis have certainly paid a LOT of attention to getting things much better than S1. It still has some flaws, particularly in the sims AI but it is a lot better, a lot engrossing and draws you in much more. I got bored of S1 a long time ago and S2 is getting quite addictive.
Get paid to search..It's geniune and
or did everybody else use the sims bodyshop to make nude skins and outfits before you even started playing the game?
You insensitive clod!
I found Black & White had a crude good/evil setup myself. As an introspective window into the player's own morality, it was suck. Being good basically amounted to spending hours micromanaging your villages, even feeding the little guys because they were too stupid to go get themselves food. You could finally start looking outside your own starting cluster of villages after about a good three hours of gameplay. So, The Sims 2 will probably be less frustrating, er, because you signed on to do that micromanagement in the first place. I don't get you Sims people. The only way to get the game to move along at any speed was to get on with the tasks of godliness and let the poor idiots back in your village starve to death. This naturally made you evil. That said, I liked the creature AI and innovative control setup, especially using gestures for miracles. I hope BW2 will give players who want to be good some options other than painful hours of micromanagement.
-sig removed for tax purposes-
Maybe Sims 53 will be released for linux.
Then why is it trying to suck my soul out by making me never want to leave my computer? My day 1 review is here: The Sims 2: The Sims Reloaded. I think I'll follow it up soon. Oh, and you can play "Sim City Classic" on SimCity.com. Yes, online in your web browser. It's an active-x thingy, so... IE only. In another 20 years Sims 2 will probably be given away trivially as "play online" ware too. Kinda scary.
First, this is my first-ever post on Slashdot. i have been reading it for years, now, and enjoy it very much. Finally, a topic came along that inspired me enough to create a user account and join. Here are my thoughts. I hope they make sense.
:(
I went to that link, "nematoddy" something- and read through all of the posts in that forum.
Very sad, indeed. My heart broke as I read comment after comment delighting in their depictions of "torturing" the "Sims".
Sure, they are nothing more than pixels on a screen, I KNOW that... but what bothers me is seeing how many of America's young people are actually ENJOYING those simulations of something so twisted and evil.
Do you know how Hitler was able to accomplish what he did? He got children and put them into special "programs" where they were given things (insects, small animals, etc.) to torture. They grew up in an environment where they were taught to take delight in the suffering of another.
Those children grew up, and became his infamous "SS" troops... the ones who would round up dozens of Jewish people into a house, surround it with guns trained on every window or door, then set it on fire with all of those families inside. If anyone tried to escape, they shot them. Woman or child, they didn't care. They did MANY other unmentionably evil things. VERY evil, very cruel, very inhuman. And they laughed.
How do I know? My mother is a survivor of the Russian occupation of (then) East Germany. She and her family were forced to run for their lives. They heard about (and even witnessed) a number of horrific things as they sought (and thank God found) freedom in the West.
Why am I saying this? Well, I really want everyone to THINK about what is being discussed! Just because these "Sims" are nothing more than computer-generated cartoons, doesn't make the THOUGHT PROCESS inside those young people's heads any different than what went through those Nazi SS children, as they tortured small animals, and eventually, grew up to torture fellow human beings with no remorse or mercy.
How did those terrorists deliberately fly those airplanes into buildings? How do these suicide bombers strap explosives to themselves, then explode in the middle of crowds of women and children? Because they undergo training as kids... they are taught that their own life is meaningless, and that they must kill as many others as possible in order to have any meaning in the "next life".
Believe me, if Hitler had technology like "The Sims" in his day, he would have certainly used it with his SS Youth training... only they would have made the graphics and "gameplay" a whole lot more bloody. (Games like "Grand Theft Auto" come to mind, but with much more "reward" for especially cruel methods of torture.)
Simulation or not, it is WRONG to delight in the torture and maiming of innocents.
So, there are my thoughts, and my first-ever post on Slashdot. (Flame suit on!)
Willie...
I played the Sims for one week. I tried to play it correctly for a while, but I got bored.
The last thing I did was build a house with everything necessary for a Sim to enjoy a full and rewarding life. Then I placed a moat around the entire house, and moved the sim outside. I wanted to see if the Sim could learn to swim.
He couldn't.
He died in a pool of his own urine.
I felt I could never get that level of satisfaction again with that game, and never played again.
The end.
This article seems to just be a plug for the Sims 2.
Interesting :-)
So the "sim"s can now mate and have children. And we also have "auto"-mode when they have their own will (It was in the first version of the game too).
So... Someome up to just leaving the game up for some time and see where the mankind is going?
Artificial (un?)intelligence meets evolution?
...as far as I understand things. If there's someone you want to please, and nothing you do can please them, then you end up hating them and/or continually trying to please them---but usually a lot more of one than another.
Going back over and over seemes to be linked to an inward emotional conviction that you're just plain not good enough, that the fault must be within.
That is to say, with a lot of people, it pays to play "hard to get" emotionally.
(Informed by emotionally abusive parent, emotionally and physically abusive peers---love the former too much, hated my peers, had a brother who did exactly the opposite.)
...the results of the Milgram Authority experiments.
Ernest Borgnine knew him well, sent Will Shatner straight to Hell
(It could be worse, she could have asked me to make them marry each other;)
I am working on a new family called the Mexicano's and if I can stick about 50 of 'em into a 1 room house with no toilet. Then I'll take the front door off and watch 'em kill each other.
:)
Too much fun
Is this news or advertising?
My friend was obsessed with The Sims, and had a family into which she poured her hopes and dreams... then her brother, using his family, invited them over, trapped them in a room, and set them on fire.
Love the Third Amendment?
Dont moderate your opinions, people. That's what the reply button is for.
One of my favourite pastimes in The Sims was to create an incredibly lazy character with high charisma, "outgoing" and "fun".
I would then create a bunch of other characters of the opposite sex.
My main character would then seduce the other characters one by one until they were married.
In The Sims, when your character marries, it gets all of the money from its newly found spouse.
At that point, the unfortunate spouse could be locked into a small room until it passed away, and then the predator could move on to the next victim.
So, how cruel is that?
I'd swear ea is trying to take over the world by creating an army of kids. They teach us how to fight wars in Battlefield games, they teach us how to lead troops into battle in the Command and Conquer games, they teach us how to torture people by taking away their toilets and making them walk around until they piss themselves, they even teach us how to drive cars really fast and get killed in the NFS:Underground series... Sounds like they're training a bunch of spies, soldiers, commanders, and secret police.
I'm one of those "gifted" kids that can "change the world" if I'd get off my ass and stop reading slashdot.
Kyle: That's the most horrible story I've ever heard. Why would God do such a horrible thing to a good person just to prove a point to Satan?
Gerald: Oh. Uhhh, I don't know.
Kyle: Then I was right. Job has all his children killed, and Michael Bay gets to keep making movies. There isn't a God.
About the same time I'm sure you decided to start pimping your FREEIPOD omMFG!!111five
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
I'd be just like the real God. I'd create a couple of people and make them happy. Then I'd curse them for eating an apple, and shun all their descendents from heaven for thousands of years. Many generations later, I'd make a bet with Satan as to whether or not we can make a good man named "Job" turn bad by royally fucking up his life, just like the Dukes did to Dan Ackroyd in "Trading Places". And then when I got fed up with mankind, I'd pull a handful of them aside, along with a pair of each kind of animal, and put them on a big boat while I drowned the rest. And then I'd find another one of my faithful servants and I'd play games with his head too. I'd tell him that if he wants my love, he has to slit his son's throat to prove his love to me. And just before he does it, I'd stop him. And instead of bitch-slapping him for believing I could be so cruel, I'd praise him for his devotion. After a while, I'd decide it was lonely up here all one in heaven, so I'd have to start letting people in. But I won't make it easy. They're all sinners, and vengeance is mine. So, I'd send someone to "save" them all by allowing himself to pay for everyone's sins by being nailed to a cross and die a slow asphyxiating death. And I'd play more head games with all mankind, by ambiguously "revealing" myself in differet ways to different groups of people, so that they can kill each other over who knows me best. And because I'm such a nut for irony, I'd let a bunch of them colonize a New World (except that it's only new to them and not to the indiginous people they drove onto "reservations") and start a country based on the belief that all men are created equal, and that I endowed them with the inalienable right of liberty, and then I'd sit back and laugh at their hypocrisy as they hauled a bunch of people out of their homes in Africa to come and work for them for free. And I'd keep them guessing with "miracles" in places like Lourdes and Fatima that might or might not have a natural explanation, just to stir up more controversy. And I'd sit by and let six million of my people get slaughtered by a fucking nut. and then I'd let the survivors get all cocky and kick followers of one of my other Prophets out of their homes on the grounds that it's My will that the land is really theirs and that they should form a state there. And just to bring the religious hatred full circle, I'll sit back while followers of this other prophet fly planes into buildings on one side of the world and kill 150 hostage school-children on the other side of the world.
Then I'd look at my little creation and call it good.
Or, you could just disregard all guilt and pass the blame back up the stack. :)
It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.
According to a screenshot, you can have your sims play the old version of The Sims. Doesn't this really mean that someone is playing The Sims 3, with us as sims?
In Sims 2, you can have your Sims play Sims 1.
This reminds me of Space Quest III where you could make Roger Wilco go to an arcade machine and play the complete Space Quest I game.I don't much play God in The Sims 2, but more like playing Jesus. Thanks to a bug that somehow crossed over from the first game, as a master carpenter I can make houses that float over the ground. In fact, it's even easier now; for one thing, you have five stories to work with instead of three.
In the first one, the trick was to place a crapload of support columns on the first level, then build a floor above it on the second level, then remove the columns. Now all you need to do is build walls on the first floor, then the second, then remove the walls from underneath. Now that you can have up to four floors + roof, you can actually have a house floating above a house floating above the ground.
I forsee lots of magic floating Jesus houses being built soon.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
What?
The only arcade machine was Astro Chicken in the Monolith Burger. There was no way to play SQ1 in it. Which makes sense, considering Sierra was still selling SQ1 and SQ2 when SQ3 came out.
SQ4 actually had a full arcade in it, but, IIRC, the only playable game was Ms. Astro Chicken. (Although the bargain bin in the software shop at the Galaxy Galleria had lots of funny parody game boxes.)
But you could play the original Maniac Mansion in The Day of the Tentacle.