"With more than 18 million units sold, The Sims' ethnomethodology-in-action is a financially lucrative and sociologically instructive game-cum-commentary. When read critically, The Sims' representations of social significance illuminate the conventions of Western cultural valuation via the accumulation of personal property. Demonstrative of the Culture Industry's ability to market Americans their own day-to-day lives as new and exciting, The Sims also reinforces certain gender, racial, class, and body image stereotypes.
"We come to an appreciation of The Sims as less a videogame -- which are effectively seen alternately as puerile bloodbaths and degrading, prurient peep shows by the general public -- and more as a widespread way in which millions of mature Americans are enthralled by Simulations of their own mundane lives. A perfect, seemingly innocuous way to sell consumers what they already know; an enormously profitable, explicitly manufactured, overtly normative 'game.'
*Taken from a short-ish essay I wrote last semester to get into the Media Studies major at my University.
"Some folks might consider Amazon's shopper-tracking software an invasion of privacy, but they forget that users opt-in to the Amazon system; they log in with their personal account when they purchase and send to another personal account, an address which is tied to another, gift-receiving user's account. In accord with Amazon's A9 personalized search history, which tracks users' retail browsing, Amazon has synthesized data tracking window shopping and purchase behaviors. Now, users are encouraged to log into Amazon with their personal user account, not just for shopping, but for browsing.
"In reality, however, users no longer have to log into their personal user accounts --their account is always-on, tied to their Internet Protocol address. It has come to the point where users have to exert effort to sign-out. This is a fundamental paradigmatic shift in retail, and it has begun to manifest itself in the non-retail sector. For example, Google's Gmail allows users to go 2 weeks without confirming their personal user account password. In short, nowadays, users are never not logged into their personal user accounts."
*This is taken from a term paper I wrote in the spring semester. I'll post the full text of "Personal User Accounts are the Future of the Internet" to my website later this week.
Slashdot Mirror
"We come to an appreciation of The Sims as less a videogame -- which are effectively seen alternately as puerile bloodbaths and degrading, prurient peep shows by the general public -- and more as a widespread way in which millions of mature Americans are enthralled by Simulations of their own mundane lives. A perfect, seemingly innocuous way to sell consumers what they already know; an enormously profitable, explicitly manufactured, overtly normative 'game.'
*Taken from a short-ish essay I wrote last semester to get into the Media Studies major at my University.
"In reality, however, users no longer have to log into their personal user accounts --their account is always-on, tied to their Internet Protocol address. It has come to the point where users have to exert effort to sign-out. This is a fundamental paradigmatic shift in retail, and it has begun to manifest itself in the non-retail sector. For example, Google's Gmail allows users to go 2 weeks without confirming their personal user account password. In short, nowadays, users are never not logged into their personal user accounts."
*This is taken from a term paper I wrote in the spring semester. I'll post the full text of "Personal User Accounts are the Future of the Internet" to my website later this week.