The Little People In Your Games

1up.com's Crucial Classics series has a feature up discussing the little people inside your games. From the article: "...someone realize[d] that it was a niche to be exploited by computers, which up to that point weren't particularly cuddly. To be fair, neither were Little Computer People, confined as they were behind the fourth wall of a monitor. Which was probably for their own safety, as they were just the sort of creatures that might die a horrible smothery death in the arms of a little girl."

Comments

Why the Apple II version?

[newrisejohn]

I think the Commodore 64 version looked a hell of a lot better. Those were the days, man.

I played this when I was five. The original disk still resides somewhere at my parents, along with a dead C64.

Abuse of Little Computer Lifeforms

[MiceHead]

I think it's interesting that people abuse the systems; and that the systems possess the capacity to be abused. The article points to a now-defunct website created by someone who enjoyed torturing their simulated being in Creatures. An excerpt:

Her name is Slave. After I created her I started by hitting her constantly for about 5 minutes. Then I taught her all the words(using the SST) so it would be easier to make her scared of her surroundings. After she knew all the words, I placed her in a small area, surrounded by the FF Cob, with 5 Grendels. I left her there for about 20 minutes, beating her when she attempted to defend herself from the Grendels. After she was sufficiently traumatized, I put her back in the garden. In the Garden I forced her to Get, Look, Push and Pull everything around her, all the time, constantly beating her. I made her fear running so I wouldn't have to deal with that little problem(you fellow torturers out there know how annoying it is to chase them down once they get away). I also forced her to eat weeds, rewarding her when she did so. At the time I exported her, she's a quivering mass of fear. She might eat, if you're lucky, but she probably won't survive long enough for food to do any good.

Also worth noting is some of the feedback this fellow received, including various death threats. The most well-known cases of abusive behavior towards simulated lifeforms probably occur in The Sims. From a Wired article on same:

To Wright, one of the most memorable albums told the story of a woman's abusive relationship and how she eventually got out of it. But a search on the Sims Exchange of the word "abuse" reveals that Sims albums have become a common therapeutic tool. All told, 63 albums deal with abuse issues.

Many of us have probably stomped anthills in our youth, (or worse?), and bullied/been bullied. Does this power dynamic fall along the same lines? The example from Creatures, above, surprises me. But I will admit to building a Sims household with a swimming pool and no ladder.
_______
Epidemic Groove - An indie-developed casual RTS/Action hybrid for Windows.

Re:Abuse of Little Computer Lifeforms

[Babbster]

Choosing evil over good in a videogame like this always bothers me for some reason. For example, Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic obviously had the option to go to the dark side, and I played through it once like that. Halfway through, I was disgusted enough with my character that I wanted to quit - it took me three days to play through the game on the side of good, and two months to bring myself to finishing the game evil. I recently bought Jade Empire and played through it "open hand" (good), started playing "closed fist" (evil) and haven't touched it again since. I can't even kill a bloody Sim...

What makes it odd is that I have no problem playing a game like Dungeon Keeper or GTA and being VERY evil.

I'm rambling, but it does make me wonder if perhaps a game that gives the choice between being good and evil (with unique rewards for either) would be worse for small children than something like GTA. Of course, it's possible that I'm just over-sensitive. :)

Re:Abuse of Little Computer Lifeforms

[Ford Prefect]

It's a big grey area, and I would never do what he did personally, but it's not at all inconceivable that the person is very sane and has an understandable motivation for doing it--shock value, for instance.

I haven't actually looked at the site in question, but it's a pretty fun moral question regardless - can a collection of bits and bytes really be considered 'alive', and can it really 'suffer'?

I think one of the aspects which will make it seem like 'torture' is the apparent response of the computer program, both visual and aural. If all it had was just a plain set of numbers on the screen to indicate the current weightings in its neural network or whatever, I'm sure people would have few objections - I imagine it's more the apparent realistic responses to suffering that the human brain responds to...

There's a really cool game I played recently, Darwinia, which has some characters which really affected me.

*SPOILERS AHOY!*

Visually, they're identical, non-animated green stick men, but the sounds they make are absolutely perfect. Happy chirruping if they're 'happy', mewlings, wails and screams if they're injured or killed - and given there's some utterly fearsome battles in the game against some hundreds of Virus-infected Darwinian clones, it kind of gets to you after a bit. Seeing the clouds of red and green souls rising above a battlefield is bad enough - but the utterly dead, destroyed, no-chance-of-resurrection ghosts of Darwinians killed by a Soul Destroyer are just awful. It's probably the closest a game has ever got to making me cry...

But they're all just aspects of a computer program, with incredibly simplistic AI. Probably even simpler than the Little Computer People of The Fabled Article. But still... ;-)

Re:Abuse of Little Computer Lifeforms

[JoeD]

The thing is that after awhile, there's nothing left to do BUT abuse the guy.

I had a copy of LCP for the Amiga. At first, I played it straight, keeping him fed, playing games, etc. It was kinda neat.

But that got boring, especially since it really wasn't all that complicated a program. So I decided to see how far I could push it. You deliver food and water to him, and you also deliver food to his dog.

I decided to see if I could get him to eat dog food. After all, if you're REALLY hungry, and that was all that was available...

So that's all I gave him - dog food. He turned green and got really sick and spent all his time in bed. I'd do the pat-on-the-head thing, and he'd smile his sickly green smile. I'd deliver more and more dog food, but all he'd do is put it in the cabinet.

He never did eat the dog food.