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

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

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

Actually children learn a lot of things through play. Dolls are a classic example, where the child will use various dolls (and stuffed toys etc.) and play act them interacting in a social manner. The parents can give good examples and explain important aspect of being a well adjusted social indivdual, but then these lessons are acted out during play and are thus reinforced (unfortunatly the same will be true of bad parenting to). The sims just happens to be a more interactive version of this type of play, where the social interaction is already built into the program.

Re:It's a little sad

Dolls are a classic example, where the child will use various dolls (and stuffed toys etc.) and play act them interacting in a social manner.

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

Re:I've been wondering about that too

"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

Re:It's a little sad

I think the opposite. To have something explained to a child is fine, but surely it is much better for the child's development if he/she can discover these things for himself/herself, using (and developing) his/her own intellect.

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.

Re:It's a little sad

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

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

Re:It's a little sad

It's up to the person "learning" to tell the difference between "right" and "wrong"

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.

I think I helped start this

Right before the first Christmas after the Sims came out, I was having my haircut and discussing the holiday. My hairstylist said she still need another gift for her pre-teen daughter, and I suggested The Sims. Well, she loved it, and apparently she loved it too much, as the next time I visited for a haircut, I learned grounding now involved loss of The Sims.

Natural Selection

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?

Re:Natural Selection

When I was ten, I could barely take care of my Transformers.

Well, they are more than meets the eye.

The Sims taught me...

that taking a piss takes about an hour. Seriously, the timescale on that action is ridiculous.

The extent of my Sims playing...

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...

Re:The extent of my Sims playing...

This game is still obviously addicting. One night my girlfriend went to bed a 9pm because she was tired. I had the sims running on my machine in my room. I came in there about midnight, 3 hours later, and she's laying awake in bed watching them. I'm like "what are you doing?" She says "I can't stop watching them, they just do things randomly, turn it off!"

Makes sense

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.

Purple Moon, John Romero, and sexist games

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

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

They're not dolls!

They're action figures!!!

This is an outrage

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:

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

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

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.

Re:An Important Lesson

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!

Simply, No

I think the major difference between a doll and any video game where its primarily a character simulation is that the doll is an object through which the child has nearly unlimited freedom of expression where as the video game is an exploration of a character that reacts a set way in a virtual environment. I consider this to be more of a virtual pet rather than a doll. This will show them interactions & their effects, but they do not explore the interactions on their own, they happen regardless since thats how the system works.

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

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:

Life is a harsh teacher - it gives the test first and the lesson later.

and:

Tell me and I'll forget;
Show me and I may remember;
Involve me and I will understand.

(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.

Forget dolls, what about ponies?

So if Sims are the new dolls, what are the new ponies?

Barbie Horse Adventures, it should be pointed out, doesn't have any ponies.

See Alice announcement

EA recently agreed to fund the development of the next major version of Alice, a programming environment produced by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

http://www.alice.org/simsAnnouncement.html [alice.org]

Included in this agreement is the use of Sims characters within Alice. Developers create worlds and place objects and characters within these settings; the actions and reactions of the characters and objects are based on methods. This new funding will allow users to choose Sims characters and use Sims animations.

Alice has been shown to be effective in allowing students to tell stories. AIR, some recent doctoral work in this area indicates that while game playing appeals primarily to male students, storytelling appeals to both female and male students and increases student retention (one of the goals of the study).

jbgreer

The elephant in the room

... 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).

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

I'm the submitter. I actually have a vast collection of all different kinds of games, and recently had about a week of my life sucked away by Oblivion, which is an interesting hybrid of Sims-like life-simulation in a fully realized world, and standard FPS-like dungeon-crawler, and before that my biggest time suckers were the 4X games Civ4 and GalCiv2.

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.

Vast Collection of First-Person Shooters

Lolzers, Taco.

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

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.

Torturing Sims....and Little Computer People

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 :)

What I learned from The Sims

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.

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?

It's a good way for adults to learn too

My wife loves the Sims. I can get sucked into it in about half an hour (I never save the game, which keeps me from developing a long-term addiction to it). One night I was controlling a household with a husband and wife. The husband had just gotten home from work and was very tired, but not at the point where he was in danger of falling asleep where he was standing. The wife had had a reasonably hard day and a very low social meter (or whatever the social-interactions measurement is), so I told the husband to go give her a kiss and a compliment and then go to bed. The husband threw a little tantrum because he wanted to go to bed now. I remember staring at him and thinking, "Just give her the kiss and compliment--you will get to bed only a few seconds later, your wife will be immensely happier, and you will probably be at least slightly happier too!" And then I mentally stepped back from the game and had one of those "woah" moments... it was very surreal.

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...

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

Ah, if only most employers would play the Sims before designing cube farms and bull-pens.

wincing mode: on

I wince when I read anyone (especially a professor, researcher, or "expert") saying "girls do this" or "boys do that," not because what they're saying isn't correct, but because the question is never asked "Why is this?" It is just assumed that this is part of their "essence" or "nature" and that's really all they think need to be said about it.

boys will do...

boys will "do the same stupid thing over and over again and be happy,"

It's true. The first thing any new Sim does under my control is get a girlfriend, and I never tire of it.

Sims = dollhouse

I remember one time years ago when I was playing The Sims and my mom walked in. She watched for a while, and commented that it looked like a computerized dollhouse game.

But despite that I'm still hooked all these many years later. :)

Tamagotchi

This makes complete sense. Look at the previous crazes with electronic things you could play with or "feed" or create your own world.

Heck, I learned life skills from Unix "Konquest"

--That is, launching your campaign to change the universe until you have invested sufficient time, energy and planning to make the effort worthwhile results in failure.

I'm willing to bet that this would hold true for almost any game.

When you strip away all the other bells and whistles, a computer is just another element of the Universe and will behave accordingly. You can learn kung-fu from watching water move, or how to build bridges from watching leaves fall, so why not learn from computers as well?

However. . .

Other than that, I'd say that trying to learn directly how to be human from watching the behavior of a bunch of little pretend computer humans might not be such a great idea. All you're really learning is the behaviors some programming staff think are appropriate and real. There's the medium and there's the message, right? The medium itself is what it is, and as such the things you learn from watching its behavior are going to result in 'real' knowledge. The deliberate messages sent over the medium, however, can lie. This is what, (IMHO), Marshall Mcluhan was getting at when he said, "The Medium IS the Message". (Or maybe not. He didn't write very clearly.)

Anyway, the thing which consistently annoys me when I play computer games is that computers limit possible actions by players to rule sets created by people with biases. The number of times I've cried out, "#@*! Pick up that object right in front of you and pry the lock with THAT, you stupid piece of junk computer! I don't need no steenkin key!"

After a few years of playing computer games, I basically accepted that I would have to conform myself to arbitrary rule sets, and thus my brain was trained. Those synaptic pathways become grooved with repeated use, and so society trains people to be good little slaves, and people go through life not breaking with dumb conventions.

How charming.

Even D&D will stream-lines a kid's imagination, whereas playing 'Pretend' with dolls or what have you, offers no such limitations beyond those already present in the kid's head.

Turn that thing off and go play outside!

-FL

Learning

It's great to learn what to do right in a given situation.

However, a more valuable lesson is often what not to do. I can remember most vividly the things I did wrong in life where I got a spanking or yelled at...I most likely did not do them again. The same goes for most children and grown-ups alike. That's why school is a great place, you get to meet and interact with new people all the time and learn how to deal with new things. A computer program that immerses someone in a semi-realistic fashion can be, potentially, equally good.

Mistakes are an excellent teacher. I plan on letting my kids make plenty of them and learn well. I just hope that I don't have any children I don't know about (mistakes...lol).

A MMORPG Game

A real Fun mmorpg game a must try if you like RTS http://www.kingsofchaos.com/recruit.php?uniqid=9dq 95m96 [kingsofchaos.com]

Kids these days...

...are just too used to spammers. Sometimes leaving people to die in a sealed room doesn't go far enough.

Re:You can practically hear them.

Wouldn't that be a good thing? (Going from a social website to a single-player game.)

is that available

as a mod?