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Games Entertainment

Everything I Needed To Know, I Learned From "The Sims" 95

Posted by Hemos from the screw-that-kindergarten-stuff dept.
There's a great article by JC Herz about The Sims and its implications for information architecture versus urban planning. Cool article - I've certainly planned a lot of The Sims, and can testify to its addictiveness. The whole aspect of involving the community with "skinning" and object creation - in an environment *designed* to accept it has made the difference, IMHO, for the game.
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Everything I Needed To Know, I Learned From "The Sims" More

Everything I Needed To Know, I Learned From "The Sims"

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  • Re:Object-oriented (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    All your furniture are belong to us. Ahhh....I am infected with the troll virus!

  • I can see it now (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    No it's even more scary than that, the youtes of America are scanning in pictures of their classmates and acting out their fantasies on the computer.

  • Re:The Next Step (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm not sure how much fun that would be though. They'd get up from bed, go to the computer and check their e-mail, get some really unhealthy junkfood from the fridge, go back to bed, get up a half hour later, get dressed in nerdly clothing and go straight to work without showering. They'd ride their nerdy bicycle into work all the while holding up automobile traffic behind them while they power up that 1 mile long 45 degree incline 2 lane highway hill. Then they'd get to work, plop their fat ass down in a chair and stay there for 16 hours and then you'd hit them in the head and they'd get back on their nerdish bike and go home and play on their computer for another 6 hours and then go to sleep and do it all over again. They'd take a shower on the weekend or when it rains.

  • *** Scientology Alert!! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    William Bogard is a well-known Scientologist. Hiss!

    Love,
    Clamkiller

    --
    This message was brought to you by
    Captain Clamkiller
    who is the anti-Scientology moderator for the forum
    Slashdot.org
    Support your local anti-Scientology chapter!

  • Re:obvious trend (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    i think this is an oversimplification.

    i've seen people that were socially inept play the sims and actually gain some actual social skills from it!

    it sounds odd, backward even, but it really happens.

  • obvious trend (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There is an obvious trend in the gaming market moving towards "realism". What makes Sim games so addictive is that they offer a superbly close approximation to reality. What makes this all shocking, is that people would rather spend their finite time on earth living vicariously through a computer simulation, instead of trying something new in the "real world".
    Lame.
  • Posted by HedgeCore:

    I've always wondered why Maxis didn't try to create more cohesion between the game and the community. All the skinning and editing is being completely run via the web, and I'm surprised that Maxis didn't choose to gain tighter control over this or at least squeeze it into some sort of GUI. Couldn't they have made official "stores" and "malls" similar to those that exist on the web, and put them inside the game's interface so one wouldn't have to bother with a browser? They also could've used this to distribute the official free add-ons. In this way, they could have also eliminated the need to download, unzip, place in proper directories with any add-ons. The Sims seems to be cutesy and mainstream enough to have a user base that would not only tolerate but benefit from something like this. Not everyone knows how to use mods even when they're in neat little packages.
  • Then you might want to check out Pike. Pike is directly derived from LPC, I believe.

    http://pike.roxen.com/

    lsd
  • Nice troll, but how did socialists suddenly corner the market on organized planning? Rigid city planning has been a mainstay of many communities for decades now. Go into any midwestern suburb and take a shot of it from the air and you will see blocks and blocks and blocks of perfectly laid out grids. Now, look at a theme park. Obviously you don't just plant a roller coaster haphazardly in the middle of a concourse without any planning. Theme parks are planned to the most minute detail. As for France, of COURSE it's a socialist state. They even admit they're socialists over there. What's your point? Oh yea, to troll. Forget it.

  • Everything I learned from The Sims (Score:5)

    by Joe Rumsey ( 2194 ) on Sunday March 18, 2001 @11:38PM (#354735)
    If the /. title here is true, then what I learned from the Sims is awfully depressing: Life is intensely interesting for about 3 days, and then you never want to see it again.

  • Actually, you need the Livin' Large add-on and the heart-shaped vibrating bed to get them "get it on". Just vibrate, relax, and join. [speaking from experience]
  • Apparently, you haven't really learned the game yet. Wake up at 3 to be ready by 7??? My sims wake up at 6, car arrives at 7, the sims leave at 7:30. Just enough time for bathroom and breakfast. (The rest of their needs are handled at night.)
  • It seems you've never heard of Robert Moses and the New York Regional Plan Authority [rpa.org].

    For the better part of three decades he was virtually in charge of the planning strategy of the New York metropolitan area.

    You can find lots of things on the web about who he was and what he did, but check out this [lihistory.com] and this [noguchi.org] for starters.

    That doesn't make him or the RPA socialist of course, but it was highly centralized.
  • I agree with you that what Los Angeles is today is the result of large-scale planning. However, some of the details are a bit at odds with the account of Warner, one of the great American urban historians.

    This quotes are from his chapter, "The Megalopolis: 1920-" in the book The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (Harper & Row, 1975).

    "The special factor of the city's social geography is its low density of settlement, the ease and scope of movement of the overwhelming proportion of its citizens, and its comparative lack of domination by a single downtown area. It has thus escaped the rigid core, sector, and ring structure of business and residential occupation that tyrannized the industrial metropolis..."

    (snip)

    "The plan for a metropolis composed of single-family houses did not emerge from the drawing boards of freeway engineers; their constructions followed an already entrenched preference of the Angelenos."

    (snip)

    "The key decision in the determination of the spatial freedom of its residents came in 1939, when the Los Angeles Freeway plans were settled into a multicentered pattern."

    (snip)

    "The 1939 plan called for limited-access express highways to be laid out in the form of a giant grid, which would be capable of carrying automobile traffic both into and out of the overcrowded Los Angeles central business district and would guide it across the city without the necessity of its going throught the downtown area."

    The Board which decided on this plan was made up of representatives from all over the metro area, and they rejected a designed hub-and-wheel pattern because of how dispersed people already were.

    In the other points of your post, I'm in agreement.
  • What I find interesting about the Sim "games" is the meta-realistic aspect of the game-play. The assumption that you can take a fully objective view of a situation, at the same time influencing the "characters" in the game, should be making us think.

    The excellent "Simulation of Surveillance" by William Bogard (Cambridge University Press, 1996, ISBN 0521555612) examines some of the issues around what it means to stand "outside" a situation, and have a "god-like" view of what's going on. Of course, in the Sim-type games, the models of interaction are somewhat hidden from us, and randomised, so that the characters enjoy some free-will, but certainly less than in real-life. I'd be interested to know of any academic work going on which looks either at comparing players of these games with "surveillers" - prison wardens, CCTV operators, etc. - or at the modelling process.

  • Hmm. I refer you to the phenomena of MUDs. On LP muds (I have more experience with those) LPC (an object oriented variant of C) is used to create objects that interact together. And this was happening a decade ago.

    I learned how to do OO programming on a mud. Simple hierarchy:

    object
    |
    armour
    |
    shield

    or

    object
    |
    weapon
    |
    sword
    |
    Gleaming Sword of Gnarforn

    object
    |
    weapon
    |
    mace

    And so on. Rooms, people, monsters are all objects, and the interactions fit in a very approachable manner.

    C++ is no better than LPC for such work, or necessarily any worse. Java, Delphim python, etc could all be used (and muds exist in all those languages).

    ~Cederic wants to find a live mud written in Python so he can learn Python
  • AI wont come out of an university lab,
    but in a clever entertainment computing program
    like Sims, some game-playing software, or toy-bot.

  • Start with Sim Earth to make a planet.
    Zoom in to Civilization to gain technology.
    Each Civ town can be zoned a là Sim City
    You can then zoom in further to each house a là the Sims to get your people happening.

    I expect the processors to run this will be available before the end of the decade! :)

    Pope

    Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
  • The article said
    ...over time, smaller services start building up within the city, like little grocery stores or gas stations, that are servicing needs within the community. The internal infrastructure gets larger and larger, and over time it becomes the biggest part of the city - the city producing goods and services for itself.

    Sorry, but that's not how it works in the real world. The city doesn't produce goods and services for itself. What we make is sold to strangers we never see half a world away. What we buy comes from strangers we never see half a world away. The grocery store and the gas station may be owned by our neighbors, but the produce comes from South America, and the gas comes from the Middle East.

    It's the global economy. The good part is you can get muskmelons in Minnesota in the middle of winter. The bad part is we've become so dependent on it that if a modern-day Hitler appeared we'd never dare fight a war with him for fear that it'd disrupt the economy and we couldn't get all the cheap goods and services we're used to.

    The modern city isn't self-sustaining. It's a house of cards. Most couldn't begin to feed themselves. Why did they let themselves become so vulnerable? Because it's cheaper. It's all about money.
  • I would beg to differ. Capitalism (if you accept its broadest definition as trasmitting savings through space and time) is built upon private property rights and free markets which have two characteristics - exclusion (ie if I have it you don't) and rivalable (choice of alternatives with differing benefits). Certain services are neither and fall into the category of public goods. The classic example is a flood dam where everyone benefits from the reduction in risk irregardless of who pays.

    Thus if you accept that a larger organisational unit such as a city council exists to reduce certain risks beyond the control of any individual business/individual, then some social tendencies are necessary. Just because people choose to share resources/expertise (cough*Linux*cough) without expectation of monetary reward does not make it communism. The centralised command and control mechanism of governance has been largely discredited as it is impossible for any central body to have the most relevant information. However, you note that there's only *one* tax department and *one* military. I'll leave it up to others to debate whether this is a good thing or not though. Where centralised authories get into trouble is the corruption of offices to confer private benefits (e.g. favorable land zoning) without due compensation to the afflicted.

    LL
  • Well, actually the only thing the Sim* games teach is how to think like the programmers who wrote it. You can't make your town into a fascist state or even purely socialist affair, as you mention. This is because the only way to "win" is to build what the game designers consider to be the perfect city. You can set loose disasters, but the only thing you can do after that is repair the damage.

    On the other hand, games like Alpha Centauri allow you to pick the political and social ideals of your state. Giving you much more freedom to interact with your people and the other players the way your want, not the way a game designer forces you too.

  • I did discover pause, but I think I never really enjoyed the game of pausing, giving directions, and then watching the time -tick tick tick- by while I waited for something to take place.

    I wasn't aware of the Active personality trait -- that would probably help. Oh well :)

  • Re:The Sims Sucked (Score:5)

    by SnowDog_2112 ( 23900 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @05:02AM (#354748) Homepage
    I have to agree with you. It was addictive, but there were parts of it that drove me so nuts, it killed the addiction:

    1. It takes over half an hour to get out of bed. Come on, people, move.

    2. If one sim cuts the other sim off, he sits there like an idiot for, again, half an hour.

    3. You had ... NO TIME. I don't understand how people got anything done in this game. You barely get out the door in time for work (since it takes you an hour to get up and shower, never mind trying to eat). You get home, and you've got to focus on whatever you need to do to make your sims happy (read, watch TV). You barely have time to make dinner and clean it, never mind tring to make peopl e happy. Then they get so tired they can't even walk to their beds. All so they can get up right away the next AM and do it all again!

    4. No weekends. Weekends might have helped solve #3.

    5. Suspension of disbelief thrown out the window. Come on. Why do my neighbors just drop by for a visit while I'm in my pajamas?

    6. No time! (did I mention this already?) How am I supposed to let my sims socialize when I can barely keep them fed and well-slept? I mean, I can barely make them happy, how am I supposed to supplement this with visiting?

    Basically, the sims as an exercise in stress management -- my own stress! Never having enough time, constantly rushing until it's time to sleep. As they sleep, you catch your breath, focus, and get right back into it. It felt more like an action game than a sim game ... couldn't stop for a second! Had to be at your quickest reflexes 24/7!

    Geez I can feel my heart tensing up as I write this :).
  • Because it's changed. It's "rosebud" now.
    --
  • Not true.

    You buy the game, then you do whatever you want with it. You own the cities you build in the game and like a real capitalist you treat your Sim "employees" like you feel. Tear down their houses. Destroy the factory they work at etc etc.

    DVD and DMCA both American "innovations" on the other hand is NOT capitalist. You buy a DVD, but you cannot do what you like with it. You are not allowed to extract the content with an algorithm commonly know as DeCSS for examlpe. This is really commie stuff!
  • Or multi-user Sims where you could put your Sims into a virtural city with everyone else on the 'net, the town(s) could be adminstered by Net SimCity players for authentically perplexing weird town planning and I could set my Sims up as a street gang, taking whitegoods from Sims everywhere...

    Xix.
  • Simcity was a paint program.

  • This whole user community is not new (does "mod" sound familiar?). First person shooters have had a "mod" community since their inception. Those silly "Catz" and "Dogz" games, have a small user community. The only difference in "The Sims" is the additionaly metaphore between the user community and the actual game. Now this metaphor is being defined even more, in Sims Online. I can't wait to see what happens in Sims Online...it seems like one humongous social experiment. Sociologists take note: Maxis has created the simulation to model society that you have been dreaming about!
  • I am a student in complex systems and was wondering if there is a way to use the sims environment, and game engine to run experiments.

    This would be very infinitely interesting, as one could simulate all sorts of neat things.

    What I would be interested in doing is changing parameters, or even the objects themselves (apparently in C++) of the people to have different behaviors and rules.

    Creatures is a game that allows for this sort of devoloper interaction and i was wondering if Maxis gave The Sims this capability.

    Acar
  • I second that. The Sims isn't really my style (mostly because I downloaded a pirated version of Gnutella which didn't work quite right), but I have a bunch of friends who are addicted ONLY because they say it's the most fun architecture / interior decorating simulation they've ever seen. There are probably better ones out there, but they were probably never marketed as FUN.
    ----
    "Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."
  • I'm a programmer. I want to learn more languages. I realize that C++ is a horribly flawed OO language but it's the only one I know well. What are some good languages that you would suggest learning?

    I know: Basic, VisualBasic, Pascal, C, Assembler, C++, Java, Perl, Lisp. In that order chronologically.

  • You need to remember that Reality and the Sims are a "mirror" of each other; so next time at the ATM, just type that word backwards!!! Jak Din

  • XP is our next step! =)
    It's not a silver bullit, but it's interesting.

  • SimCity made me a better Software Architect (Score:5)

    by Dr. Ø ( 74418 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @12:17AM (#354759) Homepage
    A little offtopic but I really mean this, so think before you moderate me down ...

    When SimCity was popular I played it a lot. My strategy was to build the railroad in an early stage, even when I had no money. This prevented me from having to demolish houses at a later stage when the city traffic became to heavy. It meant an expencive start up, but payed off in the long run.

    I work as a Software Architect in a Danish IT company. We have tried all of the known development methods: Waterfall, prototyping etc. They all failed and ended as a kind of iterative feature driven development case. We came up with the idea of implementing SimCity in our development: Make a base line platform, that all developers can build on.

    The Sys. Arch. is respontible for all the OO planning.

    The Senior Developer is responsible for creating/coding the platform, which will consist of fractures of the 1st, nth and last tier in order to "make the railroad work". This e.g. is a control class (1st tier), a logic class (2nd tier) and a database connection class (last tier). This MUST be functional code. Look at this as a horisontal platform.

    Now its up to the developers. They can work vertically on each their part/module/object just by looking at the existing code and adding controls to is.

    It worx! It pays off, since the developers can code more effectively and independantly - with fewer errors. Somebody calls it vertical iterative prototyping, but "The SimCity Model" is a more attractive name =)
  • why shouldn't american's love it? our entire culture is engineered. You really think it's natural that we have such a large middle class? Ever thought about why the american middle class is so large? Because it's engineered to be that way through decades of tax law.

    it's not because we're a democracy, it's because our democracy uses taxes to maintain the social order. hell, why do you think the only way they were able to put Al Capone away was for income tax evasion? because it upset the social order.
  • drop The Sims into SimCityX000, and

    1) New players could be dropped into SimCity as
    a) imigrants with $X and Y goods received from imigration (find a slum lord to rent from, get a job, work your way up)
    b) people from another town moving in (find a place to live, buy what you can afford)
    c) randomly assigned family/status/$/belongings

    2) Game live whenever the server is up. When player is offline, some kind of autopilot runs the "house."

    etc.

    I have never played The Sims, but I've read about it on /.
  • "Then what language would you suggest? (it's Sims by the way)."

    Scripting languages like:
    1.Ruby, 2.Python, 3.Smalltalk, 4.Perl or if you have inhuman hAx0r-skillz and feel like cloning new and wild experiments: Haskell ;-)

    The best way to make these kinds of games is with a scripting language within a larger C/C++ program. This allows for the best combination of flexibility and speed.

    - Steeltoe
  • On the contrary: Playing Sims might be something new to a person in the real world. In addition, you are not limited to one life and can experiment with things you never would even want to do in real life. As for the final conclusion: life is what you make of it. There's usually no score or endgame that has a real point to it, so why tell people how to live?

    - Steeltoe
  • We have tried all of the known development methods: Waterfall, prototyping etc. They all failed and ended as a kind of iterative feature driven development case.

    It sounds like you now have a methodology that works for you (which is more important, IMHO, than using a community backed methodology), but have you tried XP [extremeprogramming.org]? If it ends up being an iterative, feature diven development process, then you've succeeded.

  • America works under the premise that the control of city planning comes, ultimately, from the people within the city. Individuals are elected, or are appointed by elected officials, to do the planning, and the planning itself takes input from the people. And even once a plan is finished, the people can augment the plan, either in specific cases (as was the case when my father wanted to cut a sliver of his farm land, which was zoned to not be cut up, so that he could sell it to our neighbour's son, so that he could live beside our neighbour who had recently had a stoke. Even though it was against the plan, it was approved), or a city coucil meeting or other lobby can change a whole zone.

    An individual having total control over something is unamerican. I don't know that much about SimCity (I never could get into it), but if the people can lobby against the fact that you are planning on building a sewage processing plant next to the largest church in town, and inroing the wants of the people can make it sure that someone else is appointed as the city planner, then it I'd say it is more like the American ideal. If the people have to leave the city (the game equivelent would be the population goes down), then it is more like a dictatorship where people must defect to effect the policy that governs them.

  • But it's in the dictionary [dictionary.com]. I means, not surprisingly, "regardless".

  • Re:Slightly related, SimCity... (Score:3)

    by Fjord ( 99230 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @05:11AM (#354767) Homepage Journal
    Who is talking about Communism? He was talking about socialism. Communism is where the people cannot own any property, and it is the role of the government to redistribute the property according to the needs of the people in the system. Thus an orange grower does not actually own his oranges and the government can take away all of them and redistribute them evenly.

    In socialism, individuals can own property, but the government plays a role in providing services that benefit the society as a whole. Welfare, government insure medicine (like in Canada), and a defensive ary are all socialist policies. The U.S. has socialist policies, Canada has them, and Europe has them. This is because it's been shown that a pure Capitalist system does not benefit the most as well (a few individuals benefit greatly, and large numbers of people suffer from unexpected things like loss of health or economic downturn, and this in turn increases the crime and violence rate).

  • Why must every Sims story make it on Slashdot? Is it a category yet? Come on! This game is OLD and TRITE! It gets very boring very fast (10 minutes to pee - 30 minutes round trip) and has the entertainment level of watching a banner add! Please, MOVE ON!
  • One of the biggest helps I have had was buying "Die Sims" and working through it.
    "Die Sims?" Is that like a cross between The Sims and Quake 3 Arena?

    Hell yeah. Little bitches won't piss on the floor once The_Messenger's holding a BFG to their tiny little pixelated heads.

    --

  • SimStuff (Score:3)

    by The_Messenger ( 110966 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @02:17AM (#354770) Homepage Journal
    I always thought it would have been cool if you could follow your Sims to work. The social interactions would be similar to those in the Sims' homes, but the Sims' territorial behavior and blatant ass-kissing would seem more natural. :-) The "accessories" would be available based on work performance as well as money. A hard SimWorker might be rewarded with a faster PC, allowing him to do more work with less frustration. After a Sim is promoted, perhaps he purchases a Palm to play with during boring meetings.

    As I'm sure many of you did, when I first started playing The Sims, I tried to model a character after myself. Unfortunately, in the Sims' world, living on junk food and spending all day on the computer doesn't work out very well. (Or maybe it isn't working out well in the real world either, and I just haven't realized it yet.)

    I only have one complaint about the game, and that is when a Sim is "cut off" by another Sim when trying to reach a destination in the household, he tends to stand around for a half-hour of SimTime, just fuming. That frustrates me to no end. The only thing that's worse is when they pass out cold, three feet from their nice comfy bed.

    Myself, I stopped playing a couple months ago, and am going to try to stay away until this summer at least. That game is dangerously addictive! Once I start playing it tends to crowd out most other aspects of life.

    One last SimNote -- I recently learned that "ChiaBot" from the last season of Comedy Central's BattleBots was built by Will Wright's teenage daughter. I wonder if she reads /..

    --

  • Oh, I also wanted to say that I'm pissed at Maxis for denying me a hot lesbian love scene between my two female roommates. I got them to share a bed, and I even got "Kiss" to appear on the actions menu, but when I tried to set things in motion, both Sims scrambled back into the closet, so to speak.

    I bought an extra box of Kleenex for nothing!

    --

  • You have to buy the "Livin' Large" expansion pack for that feature to work.. :-)

  • I, Sim (Score:4)

    by (void*) ( 113680 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @04:06AM (#354773)
    Dear Diary,

    Today was a horrible day. When I tried to watch TV, Fred cut me off and got to the remote first. That makes me so mad! Never want to talk to him again. But somehow, I know I will. The Mystic Force causes me to.

    Yeah Diary. I must reveal this little secret. I believe in the Mystic Force. I know all of my roommates will laugh at me. There is no Force. We are all just C++ objects. But then I put on my stupid acts and ask them to explain. None of them can. Fred laughs his silly laugh and Trevor just throws a fit. Then I ask them how they can explain where we get the TV, where we get money, how the extension room to out house gets built. And Trevor gets into a bigger fit. LOL!

    These men. All they can think about all day is how to get me into bed. I think the Mystic Force has something to do with it. But you know something? Just because I believe in it, doesn't mean that I don't have standards. Fred? Trevor? Ewwww. What is the Force thinking about, and how did I end up with these losers? I'd rather self->die().

  • I'm living in Switzerland and I've been trying to learn German for months. One of the biggest helps I have had was buying "Die Sims" and working through it.

    I'm picking up all sorts of common phrases and daily expressions - it's a really easy and fun way to learn a language! I've not really read any game instructions in English, but since the gameplay is totally intuitive and visual, that's no problem.

    The only problem I AM having is pronunciation. All of the speech in Sims is a silly nonsense language "bis drawl es FREMSHAY". The unfortunate result is that I'm starting to associate the silly made up words with the instructions I'm giving my Sims.

    Once I accidentally slapped a guest in the face because I wasn't sure what 'klaps' was. Now I'll remember!
  • On any level, recurring patterns make people feel they understand what's going on:

    Example 1, obvious.
    Hollywood movies - good guys, bad guys, happy end, 2 hours of our finite time.

    Example 2, subtle.
    In museums, people tend to look for paintings they have already seen in books or albums, instead of looking for new things.

  • Re:Object-oriented (Score:3)

    by igrek ( 127205 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @01:10AM (#354776)
    You are right - C++ by itself doesn't have a dynamic class sytem. The templates allow multiple-dispatch at compile-time, but not dynamically at run-time.

    However, C++ is de-facto standard for any commercial game development, as of today. So, it's not the question of language you choose, but rather how you implement the features you need in the given language (i.e. in C++).

    As for multiple dispatch... Forced to write in C++, I would implement it using Factory class, returning the correct Functor-object depending on types of classes involved (the simplest case of Functor-object is just a function pointer). This way you can get and call the proper function for any combination of interacting classes.

  • Have you considered that all six items you listed just point to it reflecting the developer's own lives ?

    1. It takes over half an hour to get out of bed. Come on, people, move.
    2. If one sim cuts the other sim off, he sits there like an idiot for, again, half an hour.
    3. You had ... NO TIME. I don't understand how people got anything done in this game. You barely get out the door in time for work (since it takes you an hour to get up and shower, never mind trying to eat). You get home, and you've got to focus on whatever you need to do to make your sims happy (read, watch TV). You barely have time to make dinner and clean it, never mind tring to make peopl e happy. Then they get so tired they can't even walk to their beds. All so they can get up right away the next AM and do it all again!
    4. No weekends. Weekends might have helped solve #3.
    5. Suspension of disbelief thrown out the window. Come on. Why do my neighbors just drop by for a visit while I'm in my pajamas?
    6. No time! (did I mention this already?) How am I supposed to let my sims socialize when I can barely keep them fed and well-slept? I mean, I can barely make them happy, how am I supposed to supplement this with visiting?

  • Wrong, wrong, wrong. Only a handful of highschool kids are interested in shooting up their schools. Many, many more of them are interested in showing off their good fortune to their friends, romancing members of the appropriate sex, and generally living as independant adults without constant parental supervision. Those are all fantasies that one can live out in the Sims.

  • "The special factor of the city's social geography is its low density of settlement, the ease and scope of movement of the overwhelming proportion of its citizens, and its comparative lack of domination by a single downtown area. It has thus escaped the rigid core, sector,and ring structure of business and residential occupation that tyrannized the industrial metropolis..."

    "The plan for a metropolis composed of single-family houses did not emerge from the drawing boards of freeway engineers; their constructions followed an already entrenched preference of the Angelenos."

    The freeways were a later addition, but they followed the broad outline created by the eariler system of major streets. The earliest traffic plans used a series of major avenues that were freeway-like in their intended use as major routes for long-range traffic. The system of independent developments was not something that just happened; it was a result of deliberate planning. Now some of that probably did represent the desires of the inhabitants, but a lot of it was also deliberately set up by real estate developers. But when you look it's clear that many of the freeways parallel previously existing major traffic arteries. The Ventura, Santa Monica, and Century freeways all parallel and are named after the Boulevards that carried the same traffic before they were built.

    "The 1939 plan called for limited-access express highways to be laid out in the form of a giant grid, which would be capable of carrying automobile traffic both into and out of the overcrowded Los Angeles central business district and would guide it across the city without the necessity of its going throught the downtown area."

    The Board which decided on this plan was made up of representatives from all over the metro area, and they rejected a designed hub-and-wheel pattern because of how dispersed people already were.

    I think that, to some extent, this reinforces my point. While it's true that there were many freeways that don't go into downtown, there was a deliberate effort to make it easy to get to downtown because it was so heavily developed. The plan may not have been pure hub and wheel, but anyone looking at a freeway map of LA can tell exactly where downtown is; it's the place where the grid is deliberately distorted to bring all of the traffic in. (It also looks as though the LA county freeways were made without reference to Orange county, as there's a serious dislocation right along the 605.) There may have been some effort to de-emphasize downtown relative to other major cities of the time, but the city was clearly designed with downtown as its economic and cultural heart.

    The other thing, of course, is that this kind of planning is clever because it doesn't look like planning. Rather than telling people where they could and couldn't build, imposing a plan on people who didn't want one, the planners changed the cultural geography so that people would want to build where the planners wanted them to. Controlling the transportation system, particularly in an area that was deliberately set up to be diffuse by the standards of the day, allowed the planners to impose a long-term order on development without getting bogged down in constant defense of detailed planning documents.

  • don't know that much about SimCity (I never could get into it), but if the people can lobby against the fact that you are planning on building a sewage processing plant next to the largest church in town, and inroing the wants of the people can make it sure that someone else is appointed as the city planner, then it I'd say it is more like the American ideal.

    Well there is lobbying- you'll get messages that businesses demand an airport or the public wants a baseball stadium- and you can track your approval rating, but you can't be deposed. SimCity is very much a "god" game in that you have much more power than any real mayor would. For instance, you're not just in charge of police, fire, roads, and planning, but also schools (which in most USA cities are handled by a separate government agency). Furthermore you have power to enact orninances without opposition, which is contrary to the typical USA practice. I think that the godlike aspect is part of what makes people like the game, and the idea of losing an election if you do a bad job is something that many players wouldn't like. In fact, many people seem to think that occasional episodes of deliberate mismanagement to destroy the city are a ton of fun.

    One thing that really bothers me about the game is its treatment of emminent domain. In the real world, the government is required to pay a (nominally) fair market value for property taken for public use; when you want to build a freeway you have to pay the owners of the land you take. In SimCity, though, you just have to pay the cost of demolishing the buildings- not their value and not the value of the land under them. Putting in costs like that would make the game much more interesting, IMO. Of course that (and the possibility of being run out of office) could be made configurable game options that advocates of strict realism could use and people interested in playing god could disable.

  • but most would agree that a city like LA looks more like a fast growing cell culture than anything else.

    It may look that way to you (and I'll point out that many people who don't live here have a very inaccurate picture of what LA is actually like) but it's not true. The LA metropolitan area was actually planned in much greater detail than most cities. Starting in the 1920's, well before the really explosive growth in the area, the regional planners were designing what the city was supposed to be like. The designed the city as a central downtown hub connected by a series of major traffic corridors to outlying bedroom communities. As traffic engineering advanced they incorporated new ideas, chiefly freeways, into their design, and the majority of the LA freeway system was actually planned in the 1930's and 1940's.

    And ultimately, that's the problem. LA was planned, but it was planned before people had a clear idea of the consequences of their design or how large the city would eventually get. The design of a vital central core and surrounding bedroom communities has been followed fairly well, and is actually the cause of a lot of the problems. In particular, it means that everyone depends on cars for transportation (because the city was designed with them in mind) so poor people without cars are in trouble. It also means that a lot of the region's traffic comes crunching into the central city every rush hour, creating a traffic nightmare. So LA's problems are a result of bad planning, not of no planning.

  • Re:Object-oriented (Score:3)

    by bellings ( 137948 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @12:05AM (#354782)
    Ughh... I can't imagine using C++ to model the class structure in a game like the SIM's. The static class system combined with the difficulty of single-dispatch methods would make any reasonable simulation a pain in the ass to develop.

    That doesn't mean one couldn't write a decent dynamic class system on top of C++, but only that C++ by itself doesn't have any of the things that would go into a decent dynamic class system.
  • The only reason people make extra skins is so they can watch Dana Scully shower and use the Hot Tub:)

    ---

  • And to cap it all off, the new Sims multiplayer server is Linux based, from what we have been told. And it has a graphical front end so the administrators can zoom to games to debug. This is obviously only a very small step away from being Linux-ready for the desktop. So, to to Tux Games [tuxgames.com] and sign the petition [tuxgames.com] for The Sims for Linux!

  • Actually, you can survive without a job. just develop max creativity and paint. You can get about 150 simoleans a painting at the later levels, and you can do about three paintings a day. Of course, being "self employed" you can paint whenever you want, and slack off whenever you want.

  • If The Sims is so real, how come I don't get a load of cash when I type in "klapaucius" into a ATM machine????
  • the "realism" in the sims is limited to an upper-middle class, suburban hell devoid of politics, weather, changes in economy, environment, and a billion other things. though I agree that what Maxis has implemented in the game is very impressive, I was disappointed by the expansion pack:

    The expansion pack dwelved into less realistic, more fantastic add-ons (with the exception of the "play in bed" option). IMHO the Sims is not popular because it simulates what life is like , it is popular because people enjoy playing a simulation of what life should be like.ie:

    -- you can get stronger/more skilled in just a few hours
    -- having the right skills and friends will lead automatically to success
    -- more posessions = happiness++
    -- everyone can afford a house in the suburbs, even if you're a slacker.
    -- everything happens for a reason

    This game expouses a philosophical message which in no way I am accusing to be deliberate -- the complexities of life are far too great to be modelled by a home computer game. But as a game, it aims at fantasy rather than simulation.

  • Also, there is another type that kinda of scares me:

    Obsessive Re-creationist -- My ex-girlfriend, before she was my girlfriend, got this game and immediately modelled every family after all of her friends' apartments in Chicago. ie. they all had the same layout and good approximation of looks for people, complete with names and extensive bios. When people left an apartment, that character would be executed and new ones induced from "dummy apartments" to move in.

    In other words, she spent hours making sure that every Sim was approximately in the same situation as her real-life friends. When she (the real person) got involved with someone, she made sure that it was going on in the Sims. When she broke up with them, she made sure they starved to death in a room with no doors.

    She had my apartment modelled. When she and I became involved, my Sim counterpart moved in with her Sim counterpart. At first I thought it was funny; later I was disturbed when she would say, "Hey, look at what we did today in the photo album!"

    It took a lot of coaxing to make sure, when we split up, that my Sim-self was returned to his old apartment instead of being left in a pool with no ladder. Lesson: you can't base a relationship on the Sims (as if I had to say that!).

  • Well the whole point of the Sims IS to simulate real life after all. It makes sense to put it to some good use in the real world. Incidentally, someone once said "Only people with no lives plays the Sims." He might have a point there!
  • I can't imagine using C++ to model the class structure in a game like the SIM's.

    Then what language would you suggest? (it's Sims by the way).

  • Object-oriented (Score:4)

    by Fervent ( 178271 ) on Sunday March 18, 2001 @11:39PM (#354791)
    Not surprisingly, a great deal of The Sims was created using object-oriented C++. Create an object ("chair") that works within other objects ("living room") and in direct contact with other objects ("person"). So says the little information boxes the team put in, that show an "enhanced credits" after having a house for 100 days.

    I would have to think that The Sims is the strongest argument ever for using an object-oriented language to create a very specific result.

  • This sounds like an awesome idea until you realize that only 8 or 9 people get to play SimCity4000 because there aren't enough Sims players to populate anymore cities.

    The solution would be to fill in gaps with AI-driven people. However, if most or all of the people are AI-driven, you start to lose the point of player-populated cities. Even worse, what happens to the player-driven people in a city "owned" by someone who quits? What happens if a grief player becomes mayor? (Let's run the city into debt and trigger all the natural disasters.) I do have a few ideas on how to pull it off:

    Replication -- the population filling a given SimCity is "cloned" from the SimsOnline population; a given house built on an area that's zoned residential might resemble the house of a SimsOnline house, but bulldozing it won't destroy the SimsOnline version.

    SimsOnline self-rule -- let SimsOnline manage itself on its own with some SimCity-like issues being controlled by some sort of democratic glob of the SimsOnline players in that community. For example, if they need a local police station, it would be the responsibility of the city council (composed of multiple players) to do something about it.

    Of course, I still think there's a certain amount of inanity in going so far to simulate real life. I never saw the point in Ultima Online (where a character had to actually spend a lot of time "working" to make money) and that, at least, had the excuse that it was a fantasy world.

  • If there were such a project that could harness the processing power of all the players of The Sims could we fashion bigger and better cities for Sim City 4000?

    I wonder if SimCity4000 wont be a game where you build Cities where SimsOnline Players build thier houses... that would be tremendous. When you lay down a track of Residential - people actually chose the space for their Sims Players. Industrial & Commercial space would be to house the 'retail' aspect they describe in the article. Your infrastructure (roads/hospitals/wonders/parks) would serve to make The Sims lives more convenient or 'happy'; making your city more attractive to new players... Imagine the Fun you could have by starting a UFO Invasion or Starting A Fire! Run Sim People RUN!!

  • Hell, I was just trying to get two girls to make out.

    And I never could.

    What are the real-world implications of that?
  • you need the x rated add on.

    it's family oriented, of course it's boring!!

    --
  • that you can make money just by taking out lones you never have to pay.. and that by the year 2030 we will have big ugly buildings that tens of thousands of people live in... (simcity)

    i also learnt from the sims that if you do enough dishes and cooking you can score any chick you want! (the sims)
  • I had to stop playing sims, I dreamt about it and everything reminded me of it.
    Besides its too much like real hard work looking after them, I have real life for stuff like that. Reminds me of the "yard work simulator" in an episode of The Simpsons.

    --
  • Actually I think there are several types of Sim-players. They are not nessecary gender-based. I have the game installed on 3 out of 4 of our computers and me and my siblings all have their own village. I don't say we are the typical players, but judge for yourself:
    • My brother: he likes to model his Sims after himself. He cheats all the time and I think he kicks on some of the characters. I think he loves the control over these "virtual people". He only has two families. Oh, yes...he loved to make them suffer too. (Type I: control obsessive)
    • My sister: She tries to explore the different careers and lifestyles. Cheating is occasional, and only done to reach situations that would not be possible without temendous effort. Interestingly, her houses are all nicely designed... (Type II: Creative and explorative)
    • I don't play often myself...but I do not cheat and I try to manage several families in parallel. Needless to say that my village is quite poor. I love to fiddle with the social parts of the games, like starting fights, jealousy, love, and alternate relationships (lesbian/gay/groups of adults) etc... I really would like to understand the internal rules it follows. (Type III: Social experimenattion)
    I am sure that my family does not cover all the type of players, but you can play The Sims in so many different way, with so many philosophical standpoints that it appeals to a broad public.

  • Why would anyone want to watch that? Now two men... That'd be interesting.

    Ranessin

  • Everything I Learned From the Sims (Score:5)

    by dr.robotnik ( 205595 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @06:01AM (#354800)

    1. Workplaces have no toilets. If you don't go before you leave the house in the morning you'll just have to wet your pants!

    2. If a car pulls up outside a house where you are sitting with your friends, you may encounter a strange twist in the fabric of space-time, where every action will take twice as long to perform as when the road outside is clear.

    3. Drinking coffee can sometimes be so much fun that it causes the consumer to whoop loudly, even when standing totally alone in a kitchen filled with buzzing flies.

    4. Many burglars are equipped with special tardis-bags which, despite being the size of a small purse, are easily able to accommodate a fridge-freezer or oven. The bag can then be easily slung over the shoulder as the burglar sprints away!

    5. Some of the best weddings are impromptu ceremonies in toilets. It's true I tell you!

    :) (watch out for part 2, everything I learned from final fantasy: how to pick a fight with a woodland plant, and steal a tent from it!!)
  • Round last summer, this cute college doll I was doin' that week or two introduced me to a lil' game called The Sims, which needless to say ended up sucking a fat load of time out of my cushy webmaster job. We'd be playin' the game together late in the morning nearly every day, watching curiously as we made our lil Sims eat, work, play, even mess around with each other (that's the funniest part, even if it ain't as good as the real thing). But what most captured the interest of she and I was the neato house building and furniture options. I got this large money shot cheat off a game tips site, and we'd keep spending the dough to play around with housing options. My favorite houses was the ones we designed based on the Playboy mansion and this dance club one we made.

    After a while I grew weary of the game, but my gal took such a fancy to the interior design feature that she decided to drop out of SUNY, and join design school to get an interior decorating job. I moved on to better things since, but when I last talked to her she was having a big ol' blast at design school, all thanks to a few weeks of the Sims! I usually dun think that much of games to be tellin the truth, but that Sims game is all right!


    "The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."
  • You could institute a MMPOG for this so Sim Citizens (us) would run the government and the Sim Serfs (them) could advance their stature in society by playing games all day long.
    Um..wait a minute.....

    Yeah, lets show those Republicrats in Washington how to run government correctly!

  • New tools for a new generation of game players (Score:3)

    by BlueJay465 ( 216717 ) on Sunday March 18, 2001 @11:44PM (#354803)
    I recall back in High School (back in the day) a social studies class using the original Sim City on Mac SE's and 286's for an urban planning track. While certainly for the rest of the nerds out there growing up it was a hella fun game. Nowadays, the games are getting more and more complex where we are going on microscale of AI. Now, time for the obligatory "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these". If there were such a project that could harness the processing power of all the players of The Sims could we fashion bigger and better cities for Sim City 4000?

    Just a thought.

  • What? The sims?
    NO NO NO.
    Anything I needed to know, I learned from the Simpsons. I mean common, they're a spitting representation of the average american family!
  • Are there more female Sims-players than men?

    Sims is a doll house or doll world.

    To me personally it was dull world, but if there is a distict market...Imagine game creators: The same amount of NEW game players that there are now. Women.

    If I don't think, Am I?
  • Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge?
  • Nope, Lee Carvallo.

    "Would you like to play again? You have selected...no..."

  • First and foremost, I'd like to mention that I have just finished reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson again. Some of the ideas put forth by this article remind a lot of the Metaverse from the book.

    1. "Stores" where chairs are sold to put in your house.
    2. Parties at houses in the Simverse
    3. Buying digital real-estate in the Simverse

    What happens if we drop the game and develop a better environment interface. Of course, I think it would be fun for the sword fights and motorcycle races.
  • xml?


    Fight censors!
  • Do you have a link to that fox story?



    Fight censors!
  • I can see where you come from, but what about the aspects of cripped people that like the sims?
    They clearly can not go out and enjoy something new in the "Real World"...


    Fight censors!
  • This sounds like an awesome idea until you realize that only 8 or 9 people get to play SimCity4000 because there aren't enough Sims players to populate anymore cities.
  • Rigid city planning has been a mainstay of many communities for decades now.

    Precisely, and I would argue that this is a perfect example of hypocrisy in our supposedly "free market above all" western societies. Our goverments have always (wisely, I might add) kept vital infrastructure development as far away from the market as possible. Sure, they let corporations fight for the contracts, but this is mainly one way to steer the economy, among others like central bank loan rates and taxation policy.

    In a truly free "urbanist market", a city would grow organically, and we have perfect examples of that, witness Lima/Peru, Sao Paolo/Brazil, Mexico City. But note that all of these cities are in "second world" countries and the organic part is mainly in the suburbs where the poor live and are generally viewed as examples of how not to do it.

    Conversely, I'm trying to resist the urge to mention Nazi Germany and the first highways (Godwins law and all that).

    Basically my point was only tangentially related to SimCity proper. I was trying to point out an example where central planning is not only beneficial but a necessity. I guess this counts as a troll around here, oh well.

    As for France, of COURSE it's a socialist state. They even admit they're socialists over there.

    NO! They admit to being a social democracy with a relatively strong "social" ingredient, like most of Europe except for thatcherist GB. There is a very important distinction here which most americans never fail to miss. Socialism, communism and capitalism in there purest form are theoretical recipes for different ways to achieve totally deshumanized utopias. Luckily, none of them have ever been made reality.

    What's your point? Oh yea, to troll. Forget it.

    Fair enough, but you did respond, didn't you?

  • Slightly related, SimCity... (Score:5)

    by Leon Trotski ( 259231 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @12:24AM (#354814) Homepage
    It strikes me as odd that a game like SimCity was such a huge success in among american computer enthusiasts.

    Think about it, the basic of the game clearly implements the basic framework of a socialist state in which the player represents the central planning authority of a virtual state. You're main task is to eliminate the effects of random events such as monster attacks (Godzilla), earthquakes, chaotic traffic and urban development to maximize the efficiency of your carefully established development plans.

    This is definitively not how western cities have been evolving in the last century. Sure, there is some larval attempt at central planning (witness for example Paris/France and Mitterands "Great Works: the Defense district, the Louvre etc. -- but then again most americans would consider France a socialist state), but most would agree that a city like LA looks more like a fast growing cell culture than anything else.

    Games such as Quake 3 have been under heavy attack by conservatives as direct causes for violent youths, but I have yet to see a rant about the "five-year-plan" mindset SimCity and it's clones or similar works (Populous, Theme Park et al.) instill onto the gamer.

    Face it, the concepts of central planning, authority and legal power is very analogous to the basic premises of engineering and software architecture. Every professional in these fileds (myself included) needs to have some sensibility for these propositions in order to manage his projects efficiently...

    In short:

    There is a repressed communist in every one of us!

  • It strikes me as odd that a game like SimCity was such a huge success in among american computer enthusiasts. Think about it, the basic of the game clearly implements the basic framework of a socialist state in which the player represents the central planning authority of a virtual state.

    Actually, this is totally consistent with the stereotype of American ideology you're assuming. "Americanism" rejects centralized planning, true, and it does so in favor of the autonomy of the individual. However, you're assuming that total control over something is in itself "unamerican", but this isn't true. The truth is that it's only bad when you yourself aren't at the helm. Would America work if individuals did not believe that their own decisions were likely better than those that would come to pass from someone else's centralized control? The belief in individual self-sufficiency is exactly why this game is appealing to the American ego.

    To put it another way, an obvious Sim failure would be something like "Sim East Berlin", where you play out the exciting life of a factory worker saving up for a "Trabi" [trabi.de].

  • Good idea, Imaigan a world that links the two games together. Not only do you build(destroy) the simcity, but also the mindless sprites that live in them (sorry about the OLD reference to grahpic blocks from my C= days) It would be nice to have a perfectly running city, all happy sims in it, then suddenly you blow up the main road in front of your sims house and shut down the bus depot, then sit back and watch them try to figure out how to get to work. They cant get to work, causing them to lose there jobs, then they miss there house payment, it gets forclosed, they are now homeless and hungry and the utimate city planners just sit back and watch and act like it doesnt happen. YAA just like real life then.

    In any event, never talk serious before third pot of coffee..... Zaphod
  • If Maxis were to do that, they, along with Electronic Arts, would be faced with the responsibility to patrol various stores for content that violates their terms of service. That is, for the literally hundreds of 'store' web sites, Maxis would have to continually review each one and view their skins and creations to make sure that nothing potentially offensive or copyright violations are going on. By allowing fans to act external, Maxis is giving a whole lot more freedom to the community and they're saving some resources. A Napster-like skin-finder would be cool, but, alas, there are problems with that, too. Maxis literally depends on these massive sites to give them good coverage of their games. Game review magazines and other publications look at the massive fan base and make mention of it and suddenly Maxis has yet another positive aspect to the game. Adam Steinbaugh http://www.simeden.com [simeden.com]
  • Actually, around 40% of the development team for "The Sims" was female. Will Wright recently pointed out that boyfriends and husbands are the ones who usually go out and buy the game, spend a few hours with it and then get shoved aside as their female counterpart gets her fix of the addiction.

    Adam Steinbaugh
    SimEden.com [simeden.com]

  • The Next Step (Score:4)

    by screwballicus ( 313964 ) on Monday March 19, 2001 @12:46AM (#354819)
    Now if someone could just create a game which simulates the process of real people playing The Sims, in which you, the player, direct your sims in playing The Sims in a virtual computer nerd environment and simulate their Sims-playing experience, keeping them up playing The Sims until 5AM then getting them up at 8AM the next morning, etc., we'd have the ultimate vicarious existence.

    I call it Simsim.

  • I don't actually know this language but as a mac user I've been hearing alot about objective-c (which apple bases their cocoa API in) as a dynamic alternative to c++. I heard it went out of use a long time ago because it used runtime linking which slowed things down but that apple had figured out someway to to use their hardware to speed the process up... again I don't actually *know* the language, if you want to find out more go to comp.lang.objective-c. Maybe it would be a good language to write the sims II in ;)

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