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

It's a little sad

[deanj]

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.

Re:It's a little sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Better yet, they should lead by example.

That's backwards. If they lead by example then they DON'T leave the baby crying and the child never finds out what would have happened. The Sims showed the kid what would have happened if the his parents' example wasn't followed.

Re:It's a little sad

[kfg]

Children do not learn social skills from explanation. They learn from . . .games.

Witness kittens playing. Games are the imperical mode of trying out behaviors in a noncritical manner, like, with a real baby.

And where do they find behaviors to try out?

Better yet, they should lead by example.

Ok, ya got me there. Monkey see. Monkey do. Don't like it when your kids do things you'd rather they didn't do? Well, don't do it yourself for starters. Kids learn adult behavior by observing adult behavior and trying it out.

Kids are supposed to engage in adult behavior. They're designed for it. It's how they learn to do it. Most parents are dumbasses when it comes to this issue; and we've created a dumbass society with regards to the maturation process as a result.

Ever notice that when most parents say "Act your age" they really mean, at heart, stop acting more mature than I'm comfortable with, i.e. act younger than your age. (The dumbass parents, of course, think they're telling their kids to act older than their age. That's because most parents are dumbasses)

If you don't want your kids trying to sneak into the liquor cabinet, don't have one. They do it because they wish to grow up and see grown ups drinking liquor and defining it as grownup behavior.

If you don't want to get rid of the liquor cabinet, at least give the poor kids a game that allows them to drink, but also necessitates they are responsible for the consequences.

That way they'll learn.

It's all about games.

KFG

Re:It's a little sad

[kfg]

I was waiting for you to show up. That was the weakest part of my post, written in a hurry while drinking my first cup of coffee of the day. What parents mean when they say "act your age" is actually very complex, but what it almost never means is "act your age." It would take at least a small monograph to explore it.

. . .mean "grow up and take responsibility for your actions".

This, however, is sort of what I said when I said that parents think they are telling their kids to act older than their age.

It isn't what the parents are actually saying though. What they are actually saying is "be a kid, i.e., shut up and do as I tell you."

Adult maturity can be defined as doing as you wish, but taking responsiblity for the consequences. This is how the kids are often actually behaving when told to "act their age" (at least with older kids, the sort that might be playing The Sims. A two year old having a hissy fit is acting his/her age. Two is the age to learn how to throw hissy fits. Throwing hissy fits and saying "No" is part of learning to make your own decisions and be responsible for the consequences. Some people just never manage to mature beyond this behavior perfectly appropriate for a two year old).

They really are asking the child to behave more like an adult (e.g. do homework without being hounded about it, etc).

Well, first off, you'll have to demonstrate to me that adults "do their homework" without being hounded about it. I've seen little concrete evidence of such behavior.

However, let's set that aside for the sake of argument and posit your example.

Mature adult behavior is not doing your homework. Mature adult behavior is making the decision on your own, for your own reasons, whether or not to do your homework, and taking responsbility for the consequences.

Hounding a kid to do their homework is exactly the sort of dumbass parental behavior I'm talking about when I say that "act your age" means "do as I tell you to," i.e., be a kid, when they think they are saying "act more mature," i.e., behave as you wish.

The dumbass part of this is that the parent is focused on entirely the wrong thing, having the homework get done, when the correct thing to focus is the behavior of the kid. Hounding a kid to do their homework has only one possible affect on the kid's behavior, to create a greater resistence to doing homework, "requiring" more and more hounding as time goes by.

It's not uncommon for first graders to love going to school. By about third grade they hate it, because they have been taught to hate it by various people hounding them about schoolwork. Kids want to learn. In fact, they crave it with an often fatal passion. They will put their finger in the pretty flame. . .once.

Kids hating to go to school and/or do their homework isn't a problem with the kid. It's a problem with the teachers and parents. They're being dumbasses, adopting behaviors of their own that necessarily drive the kids away from the behaviors they wish the kids to adopt.

Because they do not want the kids to mature. They want them to shut up and do as they're told; and right now we have a society that tells them this is the way they should behave until their eighteenth birthday, when they are then supposed to automagically transform into responsible adults, without ever having taught, or evern offered the opportunity to learn on their own, just how to do that.

And, of course, as per above, too many adults define mature adult behavior as shutting up and doing what you are told, even for adults, i.e. "do your homework" just because we said so, and without resistence.

I'm afraid I'm in the corner with just about any "kid" who looks at their parents/teachers/bosses and says, "Fuck that shit."

If you want me to behave in a particular manner, make it

Natural Selection

[Donniedarkness]

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."

So what you're trying to say, young man, is that The Sims helped your family line from becoming a victim of natural selection?

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.

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.

An Important Lesson

[Crash Culligan]

And I learned that if you lock Sims in your upstairs torture chamber, with no tiles to sit, they eventually cry themselves to death.

Memo to Myself: If I ever need a babysitter, do not call CmdrTaco.

Re:An Important Lesson

[Jeremi]

I had enormous fun building a 7-bed one room house inhabited by 8 men & a huge bigscreen TV. It's amazing & hilarious how often they get in fights when their lives are so completely horrible.

Too bad you didn't have a copy of the Sims handy at the time... you could have found out the same things without going to all that expense!

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

Uh, sure.

[bansai665]

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?