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Sims the New Dolls?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun May 07, 2006 09:24 AM
from the i-love-my-dollies dept.
from the i-love-my-dollies dept.
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.
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It's a little sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's a little sad (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:It's a little sad (Score:3, Insightful)
I strongly suspect the emphasis should not be on the "don't leave your baby crying" part (because that's more or less common sense, even for a 10-year old -- you cry when something's bad)
In reality, the issue is moot. Have you ever actually *tried* to ignore a crying baby? Our brains are hard-wired to respond to those particular patterns in those particular frequencies. In practice, bad parents abandon their babies or shake them hard enough to injure or kill them, rather than simply leave them crying.
Re:It's a little sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:It's a little sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it has something to do with visualization. I also recall when I was younger, I used to play out all sorts of social sequences and situations with action figures, lego characters, etc. Now that I'm older, I still play out similar situations but they all happen in my head.
Maybe it's just that when we're younger, we have more trouble visualizing things in our mind so we need the help of dolls (or Sims). Later on, when our brains are more developed (and we gathered more experience), we can handle running such simulations in our heads.
Too bad none of my psych classes covered this.
- shazow
Parent
Re:It's a little sad (Score:3, Funny)
Damn, your lucky. My girlfriend woul be pissed if she caught me playing with one of these [realdoll.com].
Re:I've been wondering about that too (Score:4, Informative)
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
Parent
Re:It's a little sad (Score:3, Interesting)
Sims 2 even includes things like buying groceries. If you don't go buy groceries, or order them online, you don't eat. There's a lot of depth in the complete social interaction model of The Sims you won't get with dolls, or playing Mummies and Daddies "Then you go to work, then you come home and kis
EA finally... (Score:3, Funny)
So more than a decade after buying/destroying Origin they've recreated characters buying food and getting hungry.
Moderated: Troll
Re:It's a little sad (Score:3, Informative)
Here [wired.com] is an article containing lots of similar pessimistic quotations by various people, proclaiming that the downfall of youth had arrived in the form of (Novels/Movies/Telephones/Rock&Roll/Waltzing/Comic Books). I think children are a little more resilient and creative than people give them credit for.
Physical limits hinder creativity - (Score:3, Insightful)
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 de
Re:It's a little sad (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I've seen in life, kids who have over-protective pearents telling them exactly how they should live their life, grow up to be very dull people.
Parent
Re:It's a little sad (Score:3, Insightful)
Neither can be truly deemed more successful than the other, it's just down to individual choice (although ironically in the vast majority of cases it is not the individual who actually makes that choice but rather their peers an
Re:It's a little sad (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Parent
Re:It's a little sad (Score:3, Insightful)
While I agree with most of your post, I think you are wrong here: usually when parents say "act your age", they mean "grow up and take responsibility for your actions". They really are asking the child to beha
Re:It's a little sad (Score:5, Insightful)
. .
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. .
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
Parent
Re:It's a little sad (Score:3, Funny)
Sigh...I might as well finally admit it: MourningBlade <3 KFG. KFG <3 Mourningblade?
|__| Yes |__| No
Re:It's a little sad (Score:3, Interesting)
(begin serious reply)
While thinking about this idea once, I decided that the closest description of a "proper" parenting style would be "no unnatural way."
For instance, want to teach your kid that a pan on the stove is hot? Heat one up (not as hot as it would be if you were cooking, but hot enough) while he's in the room. As usual, he'll trundle over and try to "help" with what you're doing. Advise him that that's not a good idea, but don't stop him - when he grabs it be ready with the ointment.
It's n
Re:It's a little sad (Score:3, Insightful)
How many ten-year-old boys are sat down and taught how to take care of a baby? The implication that this kid's parents aren't present for his emotional upbringing because they haven't given him "Parenting 101" at ten years old is a little over the top. Perhaps he just doesn't have any youn
Re:It's a little sad (Score:4, Insightful)
If the parents did a good job, s/he would know that killing is "wrong" even if a video game says it's OK.
The parents should be and are a bigger influance on their children than video games. Although some parents wish that weren't true.
Parent
Natural Selection (Score:5, Funny)
So what you're trying to say, young man, is that The Sims helped your family line from becoming a victim of natural selection?
Re:Natural Selection (Score:5, Funny)
Well, they are more than meets the eye.
Parent
The Sims taught me... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The Sims taught me... (Score:3, Funny)
The extent of my Sims playing... (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Parent
Re:The extent of my Sims playing... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Purple Moon, John Romero, and sexist games (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Parent
Re:Purple Moon, John Romero, and sexist games (Score:3, Interesting)
Why don't I play t
Re:Purple Moon, John Romero, and sexist games (Score:3, Funny)
With Sims 2 I tried to get 3 girls to all simultaneously be in love with each other, but it was too tricky.
Re:Purple Moon, John Romero, and sexist games (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Parent
They're not dolls! (Score:5, Funny)
This is an outrage (Score:3, Funny)
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.
A better quote from the article: (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Memo to Myself: If I ever need a babysitter, do not call CmdrTaco.
Re:An Important Lesson (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:An Important Lesson (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Parent
Simply, No (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Learn By Doing (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Learn By Doing (Score:3, Insightful)
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?"
When I was young I screwed up quite a bit. As a result, I got yelled at and given the "I'm very disappointed" speech quite often. I'm 25 now, and to this day if anything rough is going on in my life I will not tell my mother. Even if it's the only real news about what's going on - just thinking about tellin
The elephant in the room (Score:3, Insightful)
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."
Re:The elephant in the room (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:The elephant in the room (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that most guys want to do the "same stupid thing" BETTER each time and not worse or just the same as before.
And maybe that's partly why there are more guys at the top of most fields than girls.
F1 racing, tennis, golf, dictatorships, brokers, lawyers etc.
I suppose the more "female" behaviour of wanting more friends is probably saner/less foolish. I mean so what if you can drive 70 times round a track faster than anyone else in the world.
BUT somehow this sort of stuff
Vast Collection of First-Person Shooters (Score:3, Interesting)
Vast Collection?
I got to Medal of Honor, discovered online play, and haven't bought a FPS since.
See you in Brest, meat.
Neopets is better (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Torturing Sims....and Little Computer People (Score:4, Funny)
What I learned from The Sims (Score:3, Funny)
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
Uh, sure. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
It's a good way for adults to learn too (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
If only... (Score:3)
Ah, if only most employers would play the Sims before designing cube farms and bull-pens.