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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.
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.
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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...
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.
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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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 :)
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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.
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
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.
"A few notes about your post. You sound as if you are likely female."
I am, in fact, male. I do however try to compare various human cultures, instead of rationalizing "why my culture is right (biologically predetermined, god-given, bla, bla, bla), and yours is wrong". It's just anthropology, one of the social sciences, and the purpose is to find out what humans do, not to make little girls feel better.
And if you look at what hundreds of cultures do, world-wide, instead of idealizing your own, you start to find pretty much no common denominator. The ways humans behave, organize themselves, what they idealize, what they pose as, etc, vary _massively_ across time and space, and in some cases you can find complete opposites taken for granted by different people at different times.
The problem with most such rationalizing one's own culture is that they're a bit of a tunnel view. Everyone looks just at people from the same country, maybe even just the same town, and sees them all doing the same thing. And draws the false conclusion that that's what _all_ humans do, and obviously that's the biological/god-given/whatever way.
It's like a Japanese guy looking around him and deciding that all humans world-wide are 5.5 ft tall and have slanted eyes and black hair. That's how god or the evolution intended humans to be. There are obviously no blacks, no red-heads, no 6 ft tall swedish blonde girls, because he personally hasn't seen any in his home town. Or if he eventually sees one, he'll decree that it must be some disease ("hormonal imbalance" maybe?) that caused that poor man to be black or have red hair. Surely there can be no country or continent where that's "normal".
To get back to the point, yes, the greek culture was very different from hours, in more than one way, but that's actually the whole point: humans can be educated to view radically different things as normal. They were educated to view the females with _small_ breasts as beautiful, and, no, if you gave them the same choices, they wouldn't have chosen the same one you'd choose.
Yes, they had a bit different views on homosexuality too. That's just the point: people raised in a different culture can view different things as "normal", "repulsive", or whatever. They didn't need to find "they must have some hormone imbalance" euphemisms for "well, I find that abnormal". They just weren't educated to find that abnormal.
In fact, I'll up the ante there. Forget the greeks. IIRC, there was (is?) at least one tribe, I think in Oceania, where homosexuality and paedophilia were considered the _right_ way. The local myths was that a young man can't produce his own sperm until he's basically acquired it orally from a grown up man. Tribal customs also pretty much dictated, presumably to keep population low, that most sex happened between men.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not defending those cultures or anything. I'm just saying they exist. Nothing more. The whole point is just that it's learned behaviour. Educate a bunch of people that homosexuality is the right way, and you get 100% of a tribe's males having mostly homosexual sex.
The fact is, humans are a very programmable animal. Yes, we all have biological signals, like getting hungry or horny, but we're all very able to control them. (You don't see people humping in the streets whenever they get horny, nor shitting on the sidewalk like dogs when they felt a need to shit.) That's biology, but it doesn't really control humans that much.
What comes on top of that is a set of learned behaviours. There are thousands of little rituals in everyone's day that have nothing to do with biology. There was nothing of evolution importance that said, for example, to bring your girlfriend flowers or to wear a suit and tie to a job interview. (If anything, most animals would try to get rid of a rope around their neck, not make it a thing of pride and fashion.) You learn what clothes to wear to be fashionable, what kind of girlfriend to look for, again to be fashionable
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