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Sexuality And The Sims
Jim Rossignol writes "An article on a new blog I'm contributing to discusses how The Sims (mostly the original, but also the sequel) gets used for sexual purposes, and also examines how this kind of response is essential to the appeal of the game. Here's an extract: 'On sites like Simulated, Eight Deadly Sims, Pandora's Sims and Strange Sims we see increasingly bizarre uses of the modding tools. While mainstream sites are for all ages, these have reached such a level of risqué or alternative content that the majority hide behind pay-for-access barriers to ensure that the users at least have a credit card (i.e. aren't minors), and to earn a little cash. Of all the mod cultures online — and virtually every PC game has users making their own additional content either in publisher-supported or unofficial ways — it's only The Sims which has such an obvious number of sites which demand money for access. This is particularly unusual: there's a clause in EA's tool license that they can only be used 'on your personal non-commercial website'. That Electronic Arts hasn't gone after such a sizeable community is interesting in and of itself.'" Jim Rossignol is a well-respected games journalist in the industry, and his new blog (Rock, Paper, Shotgun) is well worth checking out.
Obligatory? maybe
God spoke to me.
It sounds like they expect EA to sue these users using it commercially, frankly, a good company that knows what its doing puts in that clause to cover itself, but wouldn't even consider suing its users. Unfortunately more recently its become the norm to be scared of being sued by the people you buy your software from. EA understands how to build a community, and lets face it, the sms has a pretty obvious appeal as a community game, EA starting to sue the odd site that makes a profit on these things would more damage than good because there's always trouble drawing the line at who you should sue.
The Sims is one of the few non-pornographic games that let you have sex and/or relationships of complexity with any other characters. Why? Because it's a life simulation game. If it were missing sex/relationships then it would be missing a huge part of life. That's not to say it's the only 'fun' thing in the game, or that it's even particularly fun in the game.
He takes the fact that you can have sex, to mean, "The purpose of this game is to score by, well scoring". It's not the purpose of the game any more than it is in GTA. At the same time, everyone's got to try it at least once in game right? Who hasn't slept with a hooker in GTA, then ran her over and took the cash? I know several people who have played The Sims just as a home decoration program to make fun looking houses, and forget all about the people.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
I remember when those pay sights went up. I had not yet become bored with the original game (anything after Hot Date is lost on me). They're not there to protect the children, they exist solely to make money. The Sims community is pathetic. What you usually get is a simple recolor and a terrible read-me; "hi, i made this. i hope u like it!". The fact that people are trying to sell this shit, and are succeeding, is merely a side effect of how Maxis and EA already run the game. You buy an expansion pack every six months, and the three month periods in-between see the release of a cheaper, completely mediocre "Stuff Pack". Capitalism and pretending to have friends isn't just the goal of the game, it's the goal of the surrounding community. Compare this to a Quake mod, which is made up of a team of motivated hobbyists who sometimes create an entirely different game within the confines of the system and then release it for free!
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I can't believe that I sat and read through that entire post...
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
shame on you. as soon as you saw "11 year old" you shoulda gagged and left.
I know what you mean. I dropped trou and started jacking off before I made it to the end. And I'm at work!!!
For the alt/punk/goth Sims.
Breathless prose:
Yes, I'd say he was writing about himself.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Not everyone thinks the same way as you. Some would take mention of an eleven-year-old as further incentive for reading the rest.
I mean, we've already seen that Sims-type games are disproportionately more popular with women than are other games, and women are the people who tend to write fanfics, read trashy romance novels and the like. Guys don't tend to do much with sexual game mods beyond "Surprise buttsecks!" and other such attempts to humiliate other guys with homophobia, while women, being women, are more interested in actual pleasurable sex.
Right now the Sims is perceived by the public as a great family friendly game. The last thing they want to do is put the Sims in the headlines next to "adult content" or "bizarre sex acts" or anything that is going to cause an outswell of ill-founded but inevitable comparisons to the 'hot coffee' mod and general backlash against their game.
Surprise buttsecks!
as soon as you saw "11 year old" you shoulda gagged and left.
But "15 year old" was ok?
people use Poser to make all sorts of porno scenarios and even create and sell "fetish" items, clothing, lingerie, sex toys for use in Poser.
pandering isn't the same as knowing how to build a community. Much like knowing how to grab your ankles doesn't make your prison stay that much more pleasant.
Suing people would go a long way towards giving the sims fans a long needed kick in the teeth.
They're the whiniest bunch of crybabies I've ever seen assembled in a single place. You might say "Well that's because there are so many kids there", while true the adults aren't any better. They are the only community I know of where there is such rampant commercialism among the fans. Which has led every 12 year old and stay at home mom who joins the community to think they can retire next week off the crap they just whipped up in paint. And then behave like the RIAA the moment someone else uses it, or thinks about using it, or makes something that remotely looks like if you apply half a dozen photoshop filters and squint.
Places like the sims resource require artists to sign exclusivity contracts and make various legal threats. in fact they really are the *AA of the sims world.
But hey if that's what you're looking for in a community, yeah, EA does a fantastic job.
I can't believe this one is only a 2. Come on, people, laugh for crying out loud. :(
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Sex is actually completely absent from the game. Even the "Hot Date" add-on never featured sex of any kind, simulated or otherwise. Babies were produced in the game by alternating between giving someone a back-rub and kissing. The
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Jim is a well-respected games journalist who apparently knows little about the games industry. The Sims is one of the best selling PC games of all time, and I wouldn't be shocked if it was the single best selling PC title of all time. What he is discussing is a small series of modders who added adult content to a title extremely popular with adults.
The original game is extremely family-friendly, features no sex and in that regard is somewhat lacking as a life simulator. The game is mundane enough that I don't think it ever really caught on with the kids, and despite having a predominant adult audience, the game is in no way adult in nature. The game doesn't cater to adult mods, nor were there any official mod tools that I know of.
The reason adult mods exist for the Sims, is that any major PC game often receives adult mods. If he had spent 5 minutes of a Google search he would have found several sites (won't Google for them at work personally) that cater to providing adult mods for any game out there. His supposition is completely flawed, disturbingly so for a journalist who supposedly specializes in the games industry.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I guess I have a hard drive full of porn. Who knew?
XD
Nope. In The Sims 1 there was no such thing, until Hot Date introduced the "love bed". And then it would work only with the love bed, normal beds were still only for sleeping.
So given that you're describing the animation for the love bed, I'm really curious _how_ you got that before Hot Date.
I'm not discounting that maybe later, much later, someone copied the scripts to the regular bed or made a new skin (ok, new sprite) for the love bed. (Most objects for The Sims 1 were actually this latter category: they just took an existing object and changed what it looked like.) But before Hot Date? Nope, people hadn't figured the scripting yet.
So it's a bit bizarre to hear that Sex was essential to The Sims 1's success, when it took two expansion packs for that to happen at all. The game was already a great hit when, yes, like the GP correctly mentioned, babies were produced by kissing and hugging. (And I don't mean some removing-tonsils-with-the-tongue two-hands-up-her-blouse kinda kiss, either. It was all really really tame at that point.) Then a popup would come up asking if you want a baby.
I'm sorry, but that was as non-erotic as you can possibly get. If anyone considered it "scoring" that their sim gave a backrub and had a friendly kiss, or worse yet as some pornographic material to choke the chicken to, I'd seriously worry about their mental health. Then they'd probably be as turned on by a bowl of rice.
Yes, later more was introduced, but The Sims 1 was already a huge success long before that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
That seems a bit harsh. Let me point out that:
For all their "we love modders" hot air, EA and Maxis never released any tools, specs or support, other than (very late) for clothes and wallpapers. (And recently even took to giving you scary warnings that bad things might happen to your game if you enable third party mods.) But for making new objects? Nope. EA makes a good living selling those "Stuff Packs" (Livin' Large and wossname party were just stuff packs for the original The Sims 1 too) which give you a couple of objects and no new interactions or anything. So it's not actually in their interest to support modders.
So it took years of reverse engineering to get any kind of a grip on scripting it, and even then it involved essentially editing bytecode FFS, because EA never released a compiler. It's like scripting in assembly.
So, yes, at first there were only recoloured objects. But even for those, someone had to reverse engineer the file format and find out where the images are, and how they can be replaced without crashing the game.
If you compare it to the Quake community, those got all the tools and specs they needed from ID, so _of_ _course_ those had a headstart.
So calling The Sims community pathetic just because it took a while, is... surrealistic. There were thousands of people doing voluntary unpaid work, in their free time, for years. Just to figure out how to mod a game that EA never really wanted modded. WTH did you expect? That someone has a stroke of enlightenment, and gets the file and scripting specs from an archangel the next night after the game is released? It's been hard work and _of_ _course_ it took time.
That said, once scripting and stuff did get figured out -- by now The Sims 2 was already out -- some _amazing_ mods came out. E.g., Christianlov's all-in-one-NPCs on Mod The Sims 2 are all that the butler was in EA's The Sims Superstar, and a hell of a lot more. And it's for free too.
Heck, his nanny NPC alone made me grateful. Maxis's nanny was so idiotic, it made me want to brain her each time I watched her do exactly the wrong things while the toddler is bawling his little lungs out. A toddler which can already speak FFS, so you'd imagine there wouldn't be as much guessing, realistically. How stupid can one be to keep trying to stuff an already full toddler, until he shits himself and falls asleep in the chair, because he never had a chance or way to get out and take care of those needs? Dunno, maybe others found it funny, but for me watching that kind of a tortured childhood just made me _angry_.
Christianlov's actually feeds the toddler when he's hungry, puts him in the crib when he's sleepy, on the potty when he... umm... needs to go potty, and gives some social interaction when the kid wants attention. And mostly stays out of the way the rest of the time. How hard a concept can that be? Watching Christianlov's nanny do it right just made me realize how much Maxis's nanny sucked all along.
It may seem like a small detail, and not as glorious as editing 10 maps for a Quake mod, but it's such quality-of-life things that make me happy I can get TS2 mods.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
To some extent they do.
As you progress up any career path, for example, you start needing more friends, and more time keeping them friends, while at the same time needing more time to improve your skills for a promotion. Higher job levels also routinely involve longer hours, or more bizarre hours, and usually tax your needs more. While the entry job got your sim back home at 3 PM and as fresh as when they left, the highest job level would often get your sim back in the evening and almost ready to cry.
Worse yet, all that army of friends has wildly different personalities and interests, and often just getting them all in one room for a all-in-one socializing evening is a recipe for disaster. (Unless you created/edited a small army of identical sims.) Some will get to be enemies by just boring each other to death, some insecure guy will go ballistic because his wife danced with someone else (for bonus points: with another woman), etc.
You start needing more time, and having less time, basically. You start upgrading your objects just to get more out of them in less time (e.g., a more confortable sofa instead of a park bench in front of your TV, so you get some comfort points faster) or to combine effects (e.g., lying in a bathtub gets you some comfort too, while a shower doesn't.)
It may seem like "yeah, but you take care of the same needs in the end", but then the same thing can be said about SimCity too. There too, essentially you need water, electricity, employment, education, and a couple of other things. They stay the same throughout the game. There is no entirely new challenge that springs up as your city grows, it's just a matter of quantities and interdependencies: raising one factor (e.g., employment) causes another to lower (e.g., air quality.) So now you build something else to raise this one (e.g., parks) but that just impacts you in another way (e.g., longer drive times and more congestions from home to work, through all that forest you planted to keep pollution away.) And so on. All while managing a budget.
By and large, The Sims isn't any different. It's just managing some variables and interdependencies, and it does subtly change over time.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You're sorta right that he doesn't seem to "get" what made The Sims popular, but I wouldn't necessarily say you have to know little about the game industry to be stumped there.
The fact is, a lot of _members_ of the industry are just as stumped trying to understand it. I can think of at least three games which tried to bolt-on some kind of "at home" mode to their game, apparently for no other reason than to try to get a bit of that market too, and got it _all_ wrong. Not just a little wrong, but they "streamlined" out everything that was fun to anyone, and left only the mundane parts in... and even managed to get those wrong. Considering that Will Wright gave interviews and speeches all over the place as to what worked and why, just makes it even more surprising to see someone "streamline" out exactly those.
As a short detour, that seems to be a more general illness of the industry. Someone who doesn't even understand or like a genre, sets out to make a clone of last year's bestseller... and gets it all wrong. Whether it's The Sims, or RPGs, or car racing games or whatever.
Thing is, it's hard to explain _why_ people like The Sims, to someone who doesn't. Explanations like "because it's simulated life" or "because you can watch someone do chores around the house" are too superficial and somewhat mis-leading. Listening to Will Wright talk about fluid dynamics and such in an interview is actually a lot closer to describing it, but conversely leaves most people wondering something like "so WTF does that have to do with games?" or "so how the heck would one make a game like The Sims based on that?"
So a lot come out with half-baked, and occasionally pejorative, explanations like "maybe it's for the sex" or "maybe it's to pretend they live someone else's life".
People like The Sims for a variety of disconnected reasons, like using it to experiment with home layouts, or as props to film a story, or actually playing with the constraints and interdependencies to some goal they set for themselves. For some that goal will be creating love triangles and dodecahedrons, for some it will be something else.
And some will just get bored and start doing stuff like downloading stuff that turns it into a porn game or killing sims left and right, because that's the kind of event that's more like what they want to play.
The problem, and source of such articles, IMHO is that surprisingly few people seem to realize that there's more than one personality and more than one gamer type. Almost everyone seems to assume that he's the yardstick of gamer tastes, everyone else should like exactly the same things, and if they don't, there must be something hideously wrong with them. It's the stuff that fanboy flamewars are made of, and, sadly, more than one serious article.
It is. It outsold all Quake games _combined_, for example.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
More specifically, TFS mentioned that the credit card checks (and even charges) are supposedly to ensure that minors (Who don't have the guts to borrow their dad's VISA) don't get their hands on the dirty dirty content they "create".
Surely, the grandparent post couldn't have been trying to counter that claim?
The point, if I may take a wild guess, was probably something like this:
These sites don't really have any good reason to charge money for their content, since it's mostly just crap.
The idea of having credit card requirements for the sake of age verification is bullshit
For a male? Are you one? If yes, you already know that every boy from 12 onwards thinks about sex for the whole of his waking time. Else, now you do.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
The article clearly states that Kieron Gillen wrote it.
/. that are critisising the article without bothering to read it. They criticise Jim.
We can see all the people on
Jim is a well-respected games journalist who apparently knows little about the games industry.
That's your opinion. My opinion is that Jim is spot on, and comprehends why huge numbers of games have a sexual element possibly even better than the games designers do themselves. It's you who seems to be rather blind to how the world really works. Games are no exception.
What Jim describes applies to almost all games that feature male and female characters with recognizably attractive physical attributes, because "attraction" is inherently associated with gender-related appeal.
This applies to pretty much all current MMOGs (do you think female elves appear so sexy to male eyes for no reason at all?), and to non-MMOG worlds like Second Life as well. Gender-related attraction (which is the basis of sexuality) drives games and virtual worlds just as much as it drives the real world. No player is unaffected by it, except (possibly) if they have a medical condition that has switched off that normal human machinery.
This is all part of being human. We may one day have control over it, but all the signs point to interest in massive enhancement instead of removal of these primitive urges. Jim sees gaming in this and related genres very accurately indeed.
Will Wright has said in an interview that The Sims was originally conceived as a Doll-house style game. The sims and the whole game surrounding them were added later, at the suggestion of others. And no, I dont' know what interview that is. I probably read it on gamasutra.
And don't you presume to answer that question for me
:)
Unless, of course, the long chain of physical and chemical processes has produced the kind of person emminently suited for answering questions of choice for other people.
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