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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.
It's a little sad that kids would have to learn something like that from a game, rather than having parents that think enough of their children to explain stuff like that to them. Better yet, they should lead by example.
Right before the first Christmas after the Sims came out, I was having my haircut and discussing the holiday. My hairstylist said she still need another gift for her pre-teen daughter, and I suggested The Sims. Well, she loved it, and apparently she loved it too much, as the next time I visited for a haircut, I learned grounding now involved loss of The Sims.
So what you're trying to say, young man, is that The Sims helped your family line from becoming a victim of natural selection?
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that taking a piss takes about an hour. Seriously, the timescale on that action is ridiculous.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
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.
They're action figures!!!
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."
Subjecting one's offspring to unspeakable torture is every American's GOD GIVEN RIGHT.
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.
Memo to Myself: If I ever need a babysitter, do not call CmdrTaco.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
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...
I think the major difference between a doll and any video game where its primarily a character simulation is that the doll is an object through which the child has nearly unlimited freedom of expression where as the video game is an exploration of a character that reacts a set way in a virtual environment. I consider this to be more of a virtual pet rather than a doll. This will show them interactions & their effects, but they do not explore the interactions on their own, they happen regardless since thats how the system works.
Action figures or dolls, I know I put mine in all sorts of roles, ranging from simply good-guy vs bad guy to space exploration, you name it. With friends, you'd extend to roles further to each other, involve more characters, and so on. My roommate was even more into it than I ever was and he'd have his entire toy collection, involved in vast, decently complex plots for a child. The fun was in the fact that you could do anything with the objects at hand and project roles upon them regardless of their origin (Cobra Commander could just be Cobra Commander or he could also be the member of the crowd that gets saved by Voltron, who is actually a robot-alien from a distant planet sent to stop Strawberry-Shortcake from... its limited by your imagination).
Dolls are about role exploration and archetype analysis by children. We read them stories (or they watch TV) which sets up these various character archetypes in their consciousness, which they use the dolls to act out. It is both a learning experience but also a reaffirmation of their character beliefs. The Sims cannot provide this, imo, simply since it is about a very static (compared to what you can do with your dolls) character that has set reactions to all stimuli in the game. Its not like your sim is going to take some new initiative, or as if you can really act out a complex story idea, since the game is too sandboxish & opened-ended for that to happen. One does not so much control as heavily influence their sim. On the other hand, if the child is fascinated by things like antfarms and such, perhaps they may enjoy it. But regardless, I do not see simulations replacing dolls; no, I see emergent game systems with easily creatable content as a place where dolls may get replaced. A game where you can define the world and the objects in it (think Spore meets Gmod meets the user definable gameplay-engine-system we've never seen). The closest we've seen to this is Spore, but while its amazing, its pretty obvious that this is not something that would even meet 1% of those requirements for a child.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
It's the scientific method applied to life - in a game environment so it encourages exploration while having fun. It encourages trial and error. I often learn best from what goes wrong - not just from what succeeds. This reminds me of a couple quotations which have helped me greatly through the years:
and:(I wish I had attribution for these... does anyone know who wrote them?)
The other thing I see is that the game is safe. The player can try things *objectively* without the risk of an *emotional* reaction that a parent might produce. "What the *&#@(% were you THINKING?" I am NOT suggesting parents abdicate their responsibilities to a game! For example: hitting my little brother got a swift reaction from my parents. I learned that I didn't want to get punished, so I stopped doing it. Playing it out in a game, I would get to see the emotional, long-term damage that it would cause -- I would better understand why it was a bad idea.
So if Sims are the new dolls, what are the new ponies?
Barbie Horse Adventures, it should be pointed out, doesn't have any ponies.
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
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Everyone seems to be leaving that comment alone. Personally I've never really understood the appeal of first-person shooters, because they all do seem to be the same thing. You run around killing things with different forms of projectile weapons. However, I know I'm definitely in the minority on this one, at least in Slashdot.
If you enjoy first-person shooters, do you think of the games as actually very different from each other, or is there something enjoyable about the repetition of them? Or is it something completely different that makes them so appealing?
File this one under: "Clueless person looking for insight," rather than "FPS hater baits Slashdotters."
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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.
Hmmmm.... I learned some of those lessons from Little Computer People on my Commodore 64. If you don't feed the LCP he gets sad and turns green. If you leave the machine on overnight to watch him starve, your mother will decide that you probably shouldn't have a pet just yet, even though it turns out that you can't kill an LCP. Seriously, my mother was so moved by the suffering of my LCP that she made me give him food and water while she watched :)
Make cheese not war 8:)
I learned that if I type "ctrl+shift+c" and "motherlode", I get loads of money for free. Only it didn't seem to work when I tried it at First National Bank.
Also, pizza costs $40
On the contrary, I believe that the digitial medium of video games allows for MORE creativity. I don't know a single child who plays the sims/TS2 by the rules - they're always building creative mansions with indoor graveyards or giant party rooms, and giving their sims crazy tasks to do or missions to complete.
These realizations of creativity and imagination are simply impossible in real life. You might be able to build a house out of legos or blocks, but can you paint it? Wallpaper it? Chose Carpet/tile designs or build pools? Not at all. Similarly, dolls can't be programed or ordered to complete tasks like sims can.
Simply put, the limits placed upon the gamer by the game are much less restrictive than the inherent limits of reality.
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What... Are... You... Smoking...?
If this was intended to be a joke, it fell sort of flat.
So more than a decade after buying/destroying Origin they've recreated characters buying food and getting hungry.
Moderated: Troll
Interesting perspective considering that the game has more romantic interactions than anything else. It has very little educational value, if any.
Hypothetical "What I learned from the sims" (from a child's perspective):
* Garden gnomes will always be stolen.
* Chinese food takes hours to eat.
* If I go across the street or next door, I need to take a car.
* All female Housemaids wear sexy clothing.
* I can dedicate my life to having as many lovers as possible.
* Mom and Dad do woohoo.
* Nannies are unreliable and rarely show up on time.
* I don't have to wash my hands after I use the bathroom.
(and the list goes on)
Seriously, the game plays by Sim rules not "real life" rules. What is there to actually learn?
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.
And I learned that if you lock Sims in your upstairs torture chamber, with no tiles to sit, they eventually cry themselves to death.
Ah, if only most employers would play the Sims before designing cube farms and bull-pens.
I wince when I read anyone (especially a professor, researcher, or "expert") saying "girls do this" or "boys do that," not because what they're saying isn't correct, but because the question is never asked "Why is this?" It is just assumed that this is part of their "essence" or "nature" and that's really all they think need to be said about it.
You sure 'bout dat?
boys will "do the same stupid thing over and over again and be happy,"
It's true. The first thing any new Sim does under my control is get a girlfriend, and I never tire of it.
This sig is false.
Sometimes I wonder how much of human behaviour isn't as much "growing up" as groupthink. Trying to act as they think the group expects a grown up to act. My guess is that most of it is just that: groupthink.
And dolls are just a particular case of it all. Other examples include:
- girls moving from childhood dreams of becoming a scientist or a teacher to... pretending to be a completely retarded airhead, because that's what's popular in nowadays' broken culture. (Showing any interest for science would make one, like, a nerd. And that's sooo unfashionable.)
And here's what makes me wonder about that: in the Soviet block, for whatever other faults they had, they promoted a culture where being smart and educated, being a part of the "inteligentsia", was _good_. And what do you know? Girls could show interest in maths, physics, chemistry, etc, too, and that system produced almost equal quantities of male and female scientists or programmers. Some pretty damn good ones too. (Again, I'm not saying it was a good system or necessarily a good culture. Just that it was proof that, when trying to fit in a different kind of group, girls _can_ use a computer or do maths.)
- guys learning that they have to act all macho and aggressive and be obsessive about Real Man stuff, like football or cars.
And here's the thing that makes me think it's not as much "testosterone" as learning to behave like what the group expects a testosterone-soaked macho man to behave: the bushmen. Funny little culture, that, in that they don't seem to have discovered fighting each other, dominating each other and generally being more macho than thou. Or maybe it's just that life in that area is hard enough even without that kind of thing. At any rate, their culture is about _cooperating_ with the Joneses, rather than trying to humble them. So all their conflicts are sold peacefully, or if two just can't stand each other, one will move to another tribe.
Or here's another funny example: there was a documentary at some point (take it with a grain of salt, as with any media documentary, but still...) featuring a town in Italy where the culture was such, that a macho and potent man was pretty much expected to have a mistress. So they interviewed among others one guy who was obviously smart enough to realize it, and admitted that he's happily married and loves his wife, but... he just had to get a mistress or the other men would think he's impotent or something.
- for that matter, guys learning that they must be obsessive about thin women with huge breasts. (A biological improbability. Within the normal parameter of a human, someone with extremely few body fat will also have less fat in that area, i.e., small breasts.)
It may seem like there must be some biological reason, since it's _the_ norm in our culture. But the funny thing is that other cultures had _massively_ different ideals of beauty. E.g., the Greeks and Romans liked _small_ breasts. Look at the greek statues, they're A cup or so. The Romans went one step further. They are sometimes credited with inventing the bra, but what they really invented was a strip of cloth tied over the breasts to _hide_ them. They really liked their women as flat as an ironing board.
Other cultures, in fact _most_ cultures, liked their women fat. In some parts of the world the introduction of the western thin woman ideal is actually very recent, as in, the last decades of the 20'th century. There have been articles about women and young girls in those parts ending up with severe nutrition problems as they attempted to switch from one image to another fast.
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically that's that funny thing: pretty much any behaviour you take for granted looking around in your culture -- and even has its apologists proclaiming it biological or god-given -- other cultures can have something else, or the exact opposite. "Growing up" to do them is just enculturation (learning to act and think as your culture expects you to), rather than anything having to do with brain or body evolutiont.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What are your thoughts about the concept of children challenging authority because of a need to find their boundaries?
Boundries are one of the things that kids need to learn. There are, however, better ways to impose them than yelling at them. Sticking an animal with a cattle prod in conjunction with some other stimulus simply creates an aversion to that other stimulus. Parents canna change the laws of physics, or patterning and conditioning.
If they ignore these laws and go against them, they fail as parents. Learn your Pavlov and Piaget.
Now think about just what a boundry is. A boundry is something you must not cross. It is proscriptive. Don't go in the liquor cabinet is a boundry. Do your homework is not. Boundries are imposed by negative reenforcemnt. Desired behaviors are created by postitive reenforcment. How about instead of yelling at your kids for not having done their homework you give them a hug and a cookie for having done it?
My problem with typical parental behavior is not in the imposition of boundries or the promotion of desired behaviors, but rather in the way they go about it.
To wit, they adopt strategies that cannot achieve the desired result, and in most cases actually drive the kid in the opposite direction of the desired result. They want what they want, not what is possible. They act like two year olds with regards to their own two year olds, stamping their feet and holding their breath until they turn blue and such.
Because the parents are seeking to be "authority," to control, not teach. You cannot control people. You can induce them, or you can force them, but you cannot control people. They will ultimately do as they wish.
If you wish people to adopt certain behaviors you must induce them to wish to.
Using a real, proscriptive boundry as an example, think about the difference between someone who does not rob a liquor store because he is afraid of being punished and someone who does not rob a liquor store because he does not want to.
It is very, very important to remember that kids are people, not "things." Before birth even they begin simply living their own lives. They will persist in this "undersirable" behavior after birth. Like it or not. They are incomplete people, they are people in need of care, protection, teaching and; most importantly, simple experience, but they are people.
They are your charge. They are your responsibility, but they are not yours. They "own" themselves.
Get off your psuedo-intellectual high horse and go read your Kahlil Gibran. The man knew what the fuck he was talking about.
Kids are also acutely aware of the difference between boundries that are real (such as those imposed by fire) and those that are artificial (like those that are imposed by "authority" with no natural consequences). They know when they are being told to do/not do something because essentially arbitrary reasons for the purpose of imposing will.
And, as a corralary to your point, it is very, very important for kids to also learn to oppose authority, and to do so with success, as well as failure. To push and expand the boundries to their natural limits.
Because authority itself has boundries; and it is the job of the kid to teach the parents just what the limits of their authority is, in order to come into their own authority as adults.
Parents who do not recognize that their authority has limits are going act like dumbasses. Especially since some of those limits on authority are proscribed by law. i.e., a higher authority.
An obvious example of this is that you can't beat your kids. If the higher authority learns about this their will be consequences to the parents.
There are less obvious examples, however, and they are very, very important. Contrary to popular opinion legal ad