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.

Comments

Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's a little sad

[malsdavis]

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.

A better quote from the article:

[mblase]

Among psychologists and education experts, it is widely accepted that playing with dolls is a safe and perhaps even essential part of self-discovery and growing up for many children, especially girls. Now, some of those experts are catching on to how quickly video games are moving into the territory formerly dominated by a slim blonde named Barbie.

Anyone who has preschool-age children and a few baby dolls in the house will notice that, eventually, the kids (both boys and girls) will pick up the dolls and start role-playing out the very same relationship they perceive between their parent(s) and themselves. If you rock them and tell them stories, they'll rock their dolls and tell them stories. If you yell at them and put them in time out, their dolls will experience similar punishments. And psychologists have long used doll play to determine whether small children have been sexually molested by family members by watching to see if they do the same thing, without any encouragement, to the dolls.

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.

The extent of my Sims playing...

[5n3ak3rp1mp]

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...

Purple Moon, John Romero, and sexist games

[SimHacker]

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

Re:Purple Moon, John Romero, and sexist games

[SimHacker]

You're entitled to your own opinion about Will Wright's sanity, but I was there at the time and participated in the endless discussions about what to name the game, over three years. At first, it was called "Project X", because it was started before "Project Y" (which was SimCopter), but everybody has a "Project X" and we weren't going for an adult rating, so that name had to go. "Dollhouse" was the most obvious working title, but we knew it wasn't going to ship with that name. It was also called "Tactical Domestic Simulator (TDS)", but of course you could never ship a product with that title either. But that didn't mean it was originally designed to be a game about about nuclear warfare. For a while it was called "Jefferson" for "the persuit of happyness", but everybody thought that it was based on "The Jefferson's" sitcom instead of the president who was into freedom. Along the same theme, I suggested "We the People" (an omage to little computer people), but that was a dumb name. Will proposed some weird Japanese inspired name, something like "Happy Fun House", but that didn't stick.

As obvious as "The Sims" sounds for the title of a Maxis game, that name didn't come around until the last minute. And then there was the other name that Will Wright and Jim Mackraz came up with early on which was totally perfect and extremely hillarious, but thanks to whatever they were smoking, they completely forgot what it was and can't remember the lost name to this day. Since nobody could remember the lost name, we went with The Sims. I always liked the German translation of that name: "Die Sims".

-Don

Re:Purple Moon, John Romero, and sexist games

[heresyoftruth]

As a woman who games, I have to agree with your assessment. I am completely insulted by games that are genderized to any extreme. Whether it be towards males or females. Anything that obviously is reaching for a gender stereotype ends up being less than satisfactory in my experience. Nowadays I play the oddball games that don't fit the formulas out there. Katamari Damaci, Pikman, The Sims, Insaniquarium, etc. The game I am really really waiting for with anticipation this year is Spore.

Why don't I play the more violent FPS? You could say it's because I am female, or you could listen to me say I have done that, and it all seems a rehash of the same freaking game with different skins, and slight variations. I am a female minority in my circle of friends, but I am not the only one that feels this way about games. I actually got interested in The Sims because of my male friends spending so much time on it.

Neopets is better

[mark99]

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.

Re:The elephant in the room

[philgross]

I'm the submitter. I actually have a vast collection of all different kinds of games, and recently had about a week of my life sucked away by Oblivion, which is an interesting hybrid of Sims-like life-simulation in a fully realized world, and standard FPS-like dungeon-crawler, and before that my biggest time suckers were the 4X games Civ4 and GalCiv2.

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.

It's a good way for adults to learn too

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife loves the Sims. I can get sucked into it in about half an hour (I never save the game, which keeps me from developing a long-term addiction to it). One night I was controlling a household with a husband and wife. The husband had just gotten home from work and was very tired, but not at the point where he was in danger of falling asleep where he was standing. The wife had had a reasonably hard day and a very low social meter (or whatever the social-interactions measurement is), so I told the husband to go give her a kiss and a compliment and then go to bed. The husband threw a little tantrum because he wanted to go to bed now. I remember staring at him and thinking, "Just give her the kiss and compliment--you will get to bed only a few seconds later, your wife will be immensely happier, and you will probably be at least slightly happier too!" And then I mentally stepped back from the game and had one of those "woah" moments... it was very surreal.

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.