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Sims the New Dolls?
philgross writes "According to the New York Times, lots of girls and younger teens are abandoning their dolls for the Sims. Says one professor, "We leave most of the social work in our society to women and The Sims lets young girls, in particular, work out their desires and conflicts about those relationships." Says another, "Children generally want to create characters, but with girls we see them wanting to create a friend." Meanwhile, says Will Wright, boys will "do the same stupid thing over and over again and be happy," (and I wince looking at my vast collection of first-person shooters).
The article does quote one 10-year-old boy who plays with Sims, and has learned valuable life lessons. "I learned don't leave your baby crying or people will come take your baby away."" And I learned that if you lock Sims in your upstairs torture chamber, with no tiles to sit, they eventually cry themselves to death.
I used to work at Maxis back when SimCity 2000 was first released and I remember seeing this new game they were working on called "Doll House" and it was aimed at girls. Over the years it slowly morphed into The Sims.
I think the opposite. To have something explained to a child is fine, but surely it is much better for the child's development if he/she can discover these things for himself/herself, using (and developing) his/her own intellect.
From what I've seen in life, kids who have over-protective pearents telling them exactly how they should live their life, grow up to be very dull people.
As kids get older, though, their doll play moves on from simply reenacting life and becomes more imaginative. The dolls will begin to live out the kind of fantasy life the child thinks s/he will have as an adult, or wishes s/he will have. They'll give the dolls the kind of lives they learned about in books or tv shows or movies.
You have to be a bit older still to realize that dolls and/or Sims can be treated in ways you'd never treat real people, but it's still reenactment, even if you're just reenacting "Silence of the Lambs" torture cells or action movies where the villain catches on fire and falls off the roof. Anyone who reaches that point has generally concluded that Barbie is just plastic, Sims are just software code, and there's nothing anthropomorphic about them in his/her mind anymore.
Sims are noteworthy, though, because they react in ways Barbie won't and will actually teach some social behaviors, like babies who aren't cared for will be taken away from you. In the past, this sort of educational value was limited to "If I torture my Barbies, my friends won't play with me anymore" or "If I rip Barbie's arm off, it doesn't go back on." Not that those aren't valuable lessons, mind you, they're just much more limited.
Sims should never be used as a replacement for real socialization, of course, and if a child is losing friends in favor of Sims that's videogame addiction and a problem to be a addressed. (If the child never had friends to begin with, I reserve judgment.) But as "the new Barbie", I don't think there's any problems to be found.
I don't know. The Sims, especially Sims 2, can throw some pretty inventive situations at the child. They get taught about death and relationships in what is, for a game, a damn accurate representation of reality.
Sims 2 even includes things like buying groceries. If you don't go buy groceries, or order them online, you don't eat. There's a lot of depth in the complete social interaction model of The Sims you won't get with dolls, or playing Mummies and Daddies "Then you go to work, then you come home and kiss me, and then I give you your tea".
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
I tried this game. Once upon a time.
It took so long to get ready in the morning (shower, piss, etc) that I'd routinely miss my ride to work and then lose my job. And then, when I wanted my character to learn, I'd have him read. And I'd sit there... watching him... reading. Then I stepped out of the matrix and said, why am I watching an avatar read when I could read actual stuff myself?? And so I did...
The big question is if the simulation has a certain ethical framework that the player is rewarded for following, will it positively reinforce a child's social development? If it will, one might also ask what effects games that reward anti-social behaviour have on children.
I worked on the original team that developed The Sims, and yes it was called "Dollhouse", but no it wasn't "aimed at girls". The name "Dollhouse" wasn't used because that turned off boys, but it wasn't designed to appeal to one sex or the other. The point was that it did not have any particular gender "color" or "aim". Of course there were some great women working on the design and implementation, and that came through, but not in a way that you could describe as "aiming at girls". The secret is not to aim at girls, but not to unconsciously aim only at boys, the way most other video games do.
The Sims is a gender neutral game. It only seems like a girl game to some naive observers who haven't actually played it themselves, because of the contrast with all the other games which are extremely gender specific, aimed at boys, designed by boys, and written by boys. That's one of the biggest problems with the game industry: they are so insulated from reality that they can't see the obvious problem of how fucking dominated the industry is by clueless straight white boys who think everybody else is just like them.
Thanks a lot to the all-hat, no-cattle assholes from Texas who think "John Romero is About to Make You His Bitch" is a brilliant marketing slogan, but never get around to designing any good game play, because they're too busy talking about what great designers they are who understand their audience, and have the audacity to hire their trophy girl-friends to work as booth bunnies.
Before going to Maxis to work on The Sims, I worked at Interval Research, where Brenda Laurel was developing her "Games for Girls" project, which spun off into Purple Moon. I didn't subscribe to her theory of making games "aimed at girls" that were "pink" and "girlish" so boys don't like them and girls do. It seemed like a cop-out that pandered to the built in prejudices and problems of society, instead of trying to transcend them. I don't think there's anything fundamental about the color pink that's genetically hard-wired into girl's brains, and I don't think it's respectful to girls or boys to treat them or colorize them differently than each other. Should "Photoshop for Girls" only allow you to select bright shades of pink, but not blue? Seriously, pink is just a metaphore, and it goes a lot deeper than the color, but I don't think it's a such good idea to artificially limit the appeal of a game to one sex or another.
That's just my opinion -- but it's best to let the market decide. Purple Moon got steamrolled over and bought out by Barbie, who owns the color pink and has an enormous marketing machine behind her (behind every successful doll is a giant corporation run by clueless straight white males). The other problem they had was that they were trying to do a CDROM game in the age of the internet. So it's hard to draw any definite conclusions about the effect of the color pink from Purple Moon's experience. But the market decided to make The Sims the most successful game of all time, and it definitely wasn't "aimed at girls" the way Purple Moon's products were, or "aimed at boys" the way all the other games are.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
While this is true, they usually do live successful lives. Just because someone is dull is not such a bad thing. The only downside I have seen is if something bad happens in there life they don't know how to deal with it because everything should go as they planed.
It all comes down to perspective then, doesn't it?
For me, being dull would be ever so much more horrible than being unsuccessful..
I'd rather die having lived a crazy, full life, than knowing that I made lots of money and got married and had kids and lived in suburbia mowing my lawn. Woo!
Lolzers, Taco.
Vast Collection?
I got to Medal of Honor, discovered online play, and haven't bought a FPS since.
See you in Brest, meat.
My kids play a lot of Sims, but they play even more Neopets. It has a more complex economy, I think it is better on the whole.
The girls play dolls too, but not as much as Neopets/Sims.
I am sure it is good for them. Most everybody I know who has a good job spends a large portion of it wrestling with uncooperative software suites. Sims and Neopets do a good job of preparing you for that. And dealing with money (somewhat). And unstructured problem solving. And much more.
Just my 0.02 Euros.
But, to address your question, I do have an awful lot of FPSs also. I would say that as with most genres, as you get deeper into them and play more of them, the differences and subtleties become obvious, and they (at least the good ones) don't feel that similar. Playing Unreal Tournament with friends on a LAN is totally different than playing DOOM III alone in a dark room which is totally different from the adventure story that is Half-Life 2. No One Lives Forever 2 feels utterly different from F.E.A.R., despite being from the same studio; the former is bright and hilarious, the other is a visceral and scary combination of a John Woo movie and The Ring.
I had a roommate who mostly played console fighting games. He had played them all, and could play them for hours on end. Each was completely different to him, some great, some lame, while to me they all looked like a pair of cartoon characters endlessly punching and kicking each other.
I guess when you play a particular genre a lot, your brain just factors out the common stuff (shooting the groups of enemies/punching your opponent) and focuses on the distinguishing characteristics.
At the social level, though, all the FPSs are either interactive movies (first person mode) or collections of short team or individual games with good replay value (multiplayer mode). Even the 4X games like Civ4 or GalCiv2 have actors that represent entire nations/planets. I never really had an urge to play a world sim where the actors represented individual people, but maybe that's because I never tried one, or maybe just because I'm a guy.
You're right, clearly that isn't the _only_ reason someone would play with action figures or The Sims. Hell, it might not even be the main reason. But I think it's an interesting hypothesis to consider. On average, certainly the "desire" to simulate situations with action figures has dies down with age.
Whenever I find myself pulling out my old action-figures from my childhood (every few years) it's more about experiencing the nostalgia than doing something semi "productive". I really have no "desire" to sit around and play with my barbie^Waction figure, except as an excuse to procrastinate doing work.
Perhaps another observation: as we age, we are more interested in seeing others play out scenarios, as a method of aggregating experiences to our repository of life lessons. This desire also seems to deteriorate as we reach an elderly age (about which I am not qualified to speak about as a personal experience).
- shazow
As a side note, the article says, "When adults or older adolescents play The Sims, it is often with the slightly perverse goal of seeing just how dysfunctional or outlandish a household they can create." I think this is still very similar to what kids are doing. Kids create realistic situations because they want to explore what happens in those situations. Adults already know what happens in realistic situations, but they want to know what happens in situations that they can't try in the real world. For example, my wife is maintaining a household that has a pair of lesbians with a child, and the adults don't have Sim jobs. They have a large garden in the backyard, and they sell the produce (along with some paintings and other crafts) to pay the bills. She has another household (in the Sims 2) that has a boyfriend and a girlfriend, but she is actively trying to get the guy to get as much action as possible without losing his steady girlfriend.
Note: Before anyone goes for the obvious jokes, my wife has no interest in leaving me for a lesbian (there are certain things that only a man can provide, and she enjoys those things very much), and I have never cheated on her.
(begin serious reply)
While thinking about this idea once, I decided that the closest description of a "proper" parenting style would be "no unnatural way."
For instance, want to teach your kid that a pan on the stove is hot? Heat one up (not as hot as it would be if you were cooking, but hot enough) while he's in the room. As usual, he'll trundle over and try to "help" with what you're doing. Advise him that that's not a good idea, but don't stop him - when he grabs it be ready with the ointment.
It's not cruel - he simultaneously learns that "no" isn't an arbitrary imposition of your will, but "doing this will hurt you" and he learns that pans on the stove are very hot.
As humans, we recognize arbitrary rules quite well. One of the reasons why very intelligent children are difficult to raise is that they will reason for themselves as to why you've said "no."
We say "no" for two reasons: harm and "doing something we don't want you to."
The problem with the former is that often times the harm is random. Sometimes the pan is hot, sometimes it is not. 99% of the time running across the street without looking will not be a problem.
You have to teach the child that the reason you say "no" is that there is harm there, and expect him to check for himself every so often.
As for disobedience (the "doing something we don't want you to") - first examine why you don't want them to. Is it because you like to maintain a nice, ordered house where all is in its place? Well, why did you have a kid, then?
If it's something like tossing all the pots out of the cabinet and onto the floor...yeah, probably best to put a stop to that. Tell them why you don't want to do that - in terms their development age can understand. Outside of fits of beastly pique, most kids want to please you. They want to make you happy.
I get a little upset when people attempt to subvert that into turning their kids into little automatons.