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Games Entertainment

Virtual Simerica 357

Posted by CmdrTaco from the something-to-sim-about dept.
Disoriented writes "A Time article speculates on where the Sims Online is going. Interesting and scary to see what America would be like without our inhibitions." I've played a lot of the playtest, and can't wait for the final version to come out.
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Virtual Simerica More

Virtual Simerica

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  • If this is Virtual America... (Score:5, Funny)

    by neostorm ( 462848 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @03:46PM (#4753776)
    What happens with they pass the Sim Homeland Security Bill?

  • Oh great... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Cali Thalen ( 627449 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @03:49PM (#4753799) Homepage
    As if (we) geeks didn't have enough reason to have no appreciable social life to begin with, now they're programming a 24/7 online version of life that will keep us from every having to socialize outside of our screens.

    Then again, maybe the bar scene will be a little less diluted with brave geeks, now that they have another place to hang...

    • Re:Oh great... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      As an aspiring pr0n director, I'm still waiting for the SimXXX module to come out so I can stop paying those bums to have sex while I film them.

  • Scary (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lokki ( 585269 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @03:49PM (#4753804)
    OK, who else is frightened by the woman in the article that describes creating Sims of herself and her recently-dead husband so she could work thru the grieving process?!? That's some major dysfunction IMO...

    • Re:Scary (Score:3, Funny)

      by L. VeGas ( 580015 )
      On the bright side, it gave her the courage to finally let go and bury him. Her house was starting to smell pretty bad.

    • Re:Scary (Score:2, Funny)

      by Kenja ( 541830 )
      What happens when her virtual husband dumps the virtual her and shacks up with the virtual cheerleader? Do they get a virtual divorce and split the virtual possessions? Can she get virtual alimony to pay for her not so virtual psycho analyst bills?

      • Re:Scary (Score:5, Funny)

        by lokki ( 585269 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:03PM (#4753906)
        What happens when her virtual husband dumps the virtual her and shacks up with the virtual cheerleader?
        Her sims kills his sim, then creates a sim to help deal with the grief of losing her virutal husband...

    • Re:Scary (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mark_lybarger ( 199098 )
      and paying some shrink >150$ per hour to "cope" with the tradgey is any better? it might be a little different than the "norm", but i think she's doing a fairly good job of coping.

    • No it isn't (Score:5, Insightful)

      by doc_traig ( 453913 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:08PM (#4753955) Homepage Journal
      There is nothing scary about how someone deals with the loss of a loved one as long as it doesn't cause harm to the mourner or others. In reality, it seems The Sims could serve as another vehicle for (limited) role-playing, a tool sometimes used in therapy to treat emotional distress. There aren't too many hard and fast rules when it comes to effective ways to deal with death, so anything that brings relief and closure that doesn't hurt the mourner or others should be seen as a good thing.

      - DDT

      • Re:No it isn't (Score:4, Insightful)

        by lokki ( 585269 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:14PM (#4753994)
        There aren't too many hard and fast rules when it comes to effective ways to deal with death,
        No, but AFAIK, dealing with the reality of the situation is kinda important. Reality being the key word here, and The Sims being the opposite of reality. Seems like a bit of a problem.

        • Re:No it isn't (Score:5, Insightful)

          by doc_traig ( 453913 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:25PM (#4754074) Homepage Journal
          ...dealing with the reality of the situation is kinda important...

          Absolutely. The positive experiences from the game need to be transferred in some way to "real-life."

          My mother passed away when I was too young to have ever really experienced losing someone but old enough to be terrified and detroyed emotionally by it. My siblings and I all coped differently, but the death was sudden and unusual, giving us no time in advance for any kind of emotional preparation.

          Without any mechanism to make the transition, something like The Sims might allow a mourner an opportunity to phase-out, to some minor degree, the daily interaction that, now absent, makes the process so awful. Would it have helped me? Probably not, my coping mechanism was in part to enforce the separation by not staring at photos, not watching old home movies, not reminiscing, etc... but we all deal with it differently.

          - DDT


      • Sure, role-playing can be excellent therapy. But why limited, Doc? Is there an acceptable level of role-playing? Certainly losing oneself in the role transcends the definition: the role dissolves in the playing; but isn't that the point, the asymptote the player strives for.
      • So what happens when her "husband" tries using the stove in the kitchen, starts a fire, and burns to death?

        This actually happend to my first pair of Sims... The fire spread quickly and eventually destroyed the house and was threatening my sim-neighborhood!

        I had to go build a wall in the middle of the fire with a telephone on it so one of my sims could "visit" the dead couple and call the fire department....
    • people who experience extreme grief deal with it in extreme ways. Whatever helps the poor woman heal, I say.

  • The possibilites are endless. (Score:5, Funny)

    by helix400 ( 558178 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @03:50PM (#4753806) Journal
    I wonder if we can form vigilante or militia groups with our other buddies online, and raid other people's neighborhoods?

    --
    Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others! - Kodos

  • MetaVerse - For Real (Score:5, Informative)

    by Flamesplash ( 469287 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @03:51PM (#4753815) Homepage Journal
    Sounds just like the MetaVerse from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. A lot of the ideas in the book must have sounded far fetched when he wrote it, but sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Who knows where this will all go.

    • Or where it really came from - Philip K Dick (Score:4, Informative)

      by Xerxes ( 82848 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @05:02PM (#4754351)
      The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, to be exact.

      Stephenson, Bah! Have you no sense of history, Man?!


    • So the next step is to be able to take my Sim down to the EverQuest Arena or enlist in the Galactic Space Infantry a la Unreal Tournament and the screen identities carry through.

      E.g. - A badass in UT2003 can then "come home" and hire himself out as a bodyguard or assassin. Hopefully soon we'll see many games (chatrooms, web sites, etc) linked together and be even closer to realizing a Stephenson-esque MetaVerse.

      Then we'll be arguing over open MetaVerse protocols and how evil company X is since they won't allow all the little MetaVerses to join their big MetaVerse.
    • I've played a good many video games involving a 3D first person perspective. From Doom, to Quake, to Tribes, to Ultima, to Exile, etc. I am an explorer. Much like Lewis and Clark, I like the experience of travel and discovery. What is over the next ridge? What might I discover in new lands? These days, reality is very limiting. Most of the world has been explored, and travel costs money or time, and extracts its own hardships. I have used video games as an outlet and escape so that I might explore worlds generated in peoples heads.

      I have become somewhat disappointed lately. Most companies are churning out junk food video games that do nothing more than give you a headache when you play them. I remember back to when I first ran Doom and how really cool it was to explore all those places in the game. At first, game creators genuinely put there hearts into it. Even add on mods were cool in the old days. I remmember how long I was looking forward to the Wheel of Time. That was a lot of work.

      What I've been looking for these days is not some stupid fantasy/magic like game, or Sims type world, but just a place to explore. What would be really cool would be a free universal "world" server engine that allowed each individual to create their own worlds. Each world could be linked together much like web pages are. What would be even more cool would be something like the windows into those other worlds, just like the Quake portal windows in Rocket Arena. You know, the ones you look through before you enter the areanas. You should be able to walk from server to server freely. None of this logging on stuff. A world admin would simply define a portal tag that pointed to another server, just like web pages. Each world would be the creators own expression. I could literally walk around for days through server after server discovering new pages (worlds).

      To make things fast and efficient you could do lots of local caching, build the world up as you travelled through it, and have pre-defined objects like tables, chairs, etc. You could order your first DVDRom full of world 3D objects, or download them in real-time. Texture maps should all be local for speed. About the only thing that should travel over the comm channel would be 3D coordinate data, compressed if neccessary.

      How about if I see a Mountain in the distance I just walk up to it and start climbing? Tribes was cool because you could walk around the terrain, but it was a bit limited as to what you could do. I have a love and hate relationship with Quake. I like the detail in Quake, but hate not being able to "go outside". For psychological reasons it is very important for th mind to wrap itself around a setting, a location via visual ques. This is what was so cool about Doom the first time I played it. Even though I couldn't "go outside", their were mountains in the background image that game me a comfortable locational feeling.

      Ideally, anyone could run these world servers. They wouldn't be vendor specific. The protocol would be open and would become the defacto standard for 3D exploration, just like the web has for document browsing. I'd love to start this project myself and do a master's thesis on it, but I believe it would take someone of Carmack's level to do it right. And, most importantly, the service should be free. Only the client should cost money, a one-time-cost of around 20 bucks. Upgrades would just give you compatibility with the latest protocol extensions while giving you better graphics. This would be similar to a SMTP system.

      That is what I'm looking for. I'm really looking forward to Myst Online, but I'm afraid it will cost too much money to be useful to me. I like the ID/Quake model of supply and demand...sell the client, and let the users play for free.

      Anybody else know why the gaming industry keeps putting out junk?

  • Virtual Warfare? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by AltImage ( 626465 )
    I remember TV/movies promising that _eventually_ we'd carry out all our wars through virtual simulation. Maybe we could have a simIraq scenario here where nobody gets their hands dirty. Oh wait..I see that on TV every night already. It's called CNN.

  • Dolls (Score:5, Interesting)

    by minus_273 ( 174041 ) <aaaaa@NOspam.SPAM.yahoo.com> on Monday November 25, 2002 @03:55PM (#4753837) Journal
    how is this any differnt from a little girl playing with dolls. As the article says it is a game mostly playe dby girls. I personally have never played nor know anyone who does. (WHY???WHY would you want to do mundaner chores? ) However, from the description, it no differnt from the fantasy world we live in wen we play with dolls and action figures. Except in this case you can play with millions of other people that you dont know and not just the girls from school or the neightborhood.
    I cant understand why it is such a big hit but i see nothing special in the fact that it is. I also dont derive any meaning from that .. If you do then it is no differnt than saying that FF teaches you magic and Doom teaches you to kill/shoot.
    just my $.02

    • Re:Dolls (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Vagary ( 21383 ) <jawarren AT gmail DOT com> on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:24PM (#4754072) Journal

      Unlike dolls it requires less imagination and imposes more contraints. This is why adults like to play it: their imaginations are dead and they can't fathom living in a world without rules and regulations. Rather than being a game where you can live out your fantasies, as you might expect from something like this, you get to do chores (read: "micromanage") instead.

      As another poster has pointed out: most of the replay value in The Sims, at least among real gamers, is from hacking it. Just think how much more they'd prefer a graphical MOO? Now that it's online, and therefore [hopefully?] hack-resistant, the most geeks will see in it is a means to pick up chicks. (As PC Accelerator did so long ago...)

      • Re:Dolls (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Xzzy ( 111297 ) <`gro.h7urt' `ta' `rehtes'> on Monday November 25, 2002 @05:21PM (#4754489) Homepage
        > This is why adults like to play it: their
        > imaginations are dead and they can't fathom living
        > in a world without rules and regulations.

        oh come on now. I'm as big a cynic as anyone, and I still wouldn't come out saying something like this.

        I think the real lure to the "computerized dollhouse" is purely caused by entertaining our eyes. A real dollhouse that could boast the number of building options that the Sims has could cost a thousand dollars by itself, and that's not even getting into all the goodies the expansions offer. The sims also requires far less real estate; one or two gigs on a hard drive as opposed to half your bedroom.

        A little more subtly, the sims feeds an innate human urge to tinker around with stuff they otherwise couldn't. Want to see what happens when you put a slob and a neat freak into a house together? The sims lets you see what it's like. Want to see what happens when you pick fights with everyone you meet? The sims lets you watch it happen.

        Think of the sims as more of an human interaction LEGO system. They give you hundreds of pieces to do with as you will, tinkering for as long as it suits your fancy.

        I'm not a sims fan myself, but at least I can see it offers more than a cynical photograph of what goes on in the average adult's mind.

        • Re:Dolls (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Caraig ( 186934 )
          The only problem with it being a 'human interaction LEGO system' is that the rules are constant. They are determined by the programmer(s) and can be rightfully called arbitrary. The user has no control over these arbitrary variables.

          For example, in the article it mentions that a sim *must* have extended social contact with others in order to be happy. Now, I will agree that social interaction is vital to human emotional health, however we all require and/or desire it in different degrees. These variables are beyond our control; they are amongst the arbitrary variables set down by the programmer.

          Another factor is that of the most recent slam against TSOL, which is that McDonalds is going to have a corporate presence, and consuming McDonald's food increases a Sim's 'fun' and 'fed' levels. Personally, I don't have fun eating McDonald's food (and I avoid it at all costs, which is to say, always), and it doesn't do much more than make me feel unwell, albeit fed. In a less-specific sense, I can imagine vegetarians *really* do not like (most if not all) McDonald's food!

          However... insofar as we are working with arbitrary variables *that are still valid for a nontrivial subset of the population* then TSOL can be pretty intriguing, even to non-sociologists. I'm not a Sims fan either, but I'm going to watch this, to see if we get things like online protests, boycotts, demonstrations, meetings, town halls, etc. We've already seen from MU*s that there are people who are amused by, and go out of their way, to ruin enjoyment for others, and out-and-out destroy what others have created. The MU* communities have adopted a number of measures to take against anti-social people such as that; it'll be interesting to see what measures the residents of TSOL take, and in addition what they'll be doing to address other issues. (At least they won't have to worry about PKing....)

      • What a load of crap (Score:3, Insightful)

        by revscat ( 35618 )

        Unlike dolls it requires less imagination and imposes more contraints. This is why adults like to play it: their imaginations are dead and they can't fathom living in a world without rules and regulations.

        What a load of self-congratulatory bullshit. This might be hard for you to comprehend, but sometimes things that contradict reason happen. One of those is that people sometimes are more creative when they are given boundaries to work within. The Sims is a perfect case. Sure you can get all sanctimonious when you give someone GCC and ImageMagick and they don't do their own Sims, but if you give them the ability to use preexisting components and a rich universe to boot, you'd be surprised.

        Ass. And I don't even play the game.

    • personally have never played nor know anyone who does. (WHY???WHY would you want to do mundaner chores? )


      The short answer is sex. Hot steaming SimSex. I haven't played the game in years as I got really bored of the way I was playing it, but the first thing I did was try to get the roommates into an intimate lesbian love affair. I also made it a habit to drown their neighbors, build walls around them and burn them up, etc. As to people who actually play it like they expect you to play it, well, that's just boring too. I wish you could be a SimStalker or SimSerialKiller.

  • I heard the playtest sucked... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bonker ( 243350 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @03:56PM (#4753849)
    The things that made the original Sims game interesting for more than just a couple hours were all the various ways you could break the game. Installing user-created mods or families. It's one thing to have a textbook adulterous relationship in the context of the game. It's quite another (and significantly more entertaining) when Beavis and Butthead come over and start trashing your house and lighting fires.

    The people I've spoken to have all said the same thing. All this has gone from the Sims online. It's all about fighting your meters and trying to keep your sims happy and not about testing the bounds of the electronic world.

    Thanks, but when I die in a game, I like it to be from being whacked with a Firey Sword of Cleaving and not because I got a paper-cut reading the newspaper.

  • Wasn't this in Snow Crash?!? (Score:3, Funny)

    by kgb1001001 ( 199064 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @03:57PM (#4753855)
    Gee -- all we need now is a Sims sword-fighting routine and we have the Metaverse...

  • Isn't this already happening? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JJAnon ( 180699 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @03:58PM (#4753859)
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't this been a problem for a long while? I remember reading stories about people who play EverQuest 10 hours a day. Someone I knew was fired from his job because he used to sneak an hour out of every workday playing EQ.

    I don't see any specific reason why the sudden advent of The Sims is going to create a big enough blip in the social landscape that we need to start worrying afresh.
  • some naked, shaved pussys [virtually.net] in the game!

  • SIMs as experiment (Score:5, Interesting)

    by harlows_monkeys ( 106428 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:02PM (#4753896) Homepage
    There was a very interesting story in Analog about a year or two ago. The story started out with the protaganist attending two conferences that were taking place in the same city. One was a conference on virtual reality. The other was a conference on nanotechnology.


    The protagonist met an interesting woman at the nanotech conference. The next day, he met a woman who could almost be her twin, but not quite, at the VR conference.


    He managed to figure out that the woman from the nanotech conference was there to kill the leading nanotech researcher, and the woman from the VR conference was there to kill the leading VR researcher.


    It turns out that both women were from the future...but very different futures. In one, nanotech had been developed, but fell into the wrong hands. The world was under the power of a dictator, whose nanotech made him pretty much invincible. In the other, VR had been developed to the point that virtual worlds had become more interesting to many people than the real world. People were "living" in VR instead of reality. As a side effect of this, people had been able to experiment with different social structures, and they had figured out how to basically implement Utopia--but because so many people had slacked off from real life to do this, the infrastructure was collapsing, and so mankind was doomed.


    The protagonist realized that VR-world went bad because nanotech had not been developed in that timeline--because someone had assisinated the lead nanotech researcher! In nanotech-world, the dictator had been able to take over because society had not been restructured along the lines discovered in VR-world, because VR had not been developed, because someone had killed the leading VR researcher. If both VR and nanotech were developed, things would have been great.


    It was a pretty cool story.

  • Both Time and Newsweek covered the Sims Online (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ryu2 ( 89645 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:02PM (#4753897) Homepage Journal
    Both of the top 2 weekly news mags covered the Sims Online this week, and Newsweek even gave it a cover story, where there is so much else real news going on in the world.

    Maybe I'm just a conspiracy theorist, but does anyone want to speculate if there was some marketing money involved here to get the Sims featured so prominently?
    • Aren't Time and Newsweek owned by the same MaSTER PoWER?

      I seem to remember a similar thing with that retarded jumping macintosh last year.

  • The Sims Online + some form of Sim CIty (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mike3411 ( 558976 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:02PM (#4753903) Homepage
    The Sims is pretty cool, but I've always been a bigger fan of Sim City (I think 2000 was the best so far). Now, if they could somehow combine that with the Sims online, I'd be hooked. Imagine designing and administrating a city populated by "real" people. So much fun..... and I promise I would restrain from causing disasters via the disaster button.... most of the time.
    Hrm, we'd need a new drug-reference analogy to replace the likes of "Evercrack". What's more addictive than crack???
  • ... I'm gonna hold off until they come out with the Sims Online Pornographers expansion pack. Sex is the only reason people use the Internet anyway.....

  • Why I stopped playing the Sims... (Score:5, Funny)

    by dfenstrate ( 202098 ) <dfenstrate.gmail@com> on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:03PM (#4753910)
    Back in 2000 (when I was a Business Admin major, and had plenty of time. I'm now a Mech-E student, and I don't sleep.) I picked up the Sims and installed it on my computer, and I quickly got addicted.
    I'd play 3-5 hours most nights, getting my character better jobs, improving the house, wooing neighborhood women and having my character make friends. Did pretty well, too.
    Then one day, I got up from a session, and started walking down the hall to the bathroom.
    I started thinking things like:
    "My Bladder meter is getting pretty low. Hygene Bar could use a refresher too, maybe I should jump in the shower. And it would be nice to up my social meter."

    Then I realized I was looking AT MY REAL LIFE through the metric of The Sims. Realizing how pathetic this was, I took said bathroom break and shower, went back to the room, and unistalled the Sims.

    I now hang out with real people. When I'm not posting on slashdot anyway.

    • Re:Why I stopped playing the Sims... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:46PM (#4754228)
      > I started thinking things like:
      >"My Bladder meter is getting pretty low. Hygene Bar could use a refresher too, maybe I should jump in the shower. And it would be nice to up my social meter."
      >
      > Then I realized I was looking AT MY REAL LIFE through the metric of The Sims.

      I tried The Sims on a whim and a friend's recommendation, and enjoyed it enough that it was morning by the time I decided I needed sleep. (But that's been true for me since the first DOS (R.I.P.) version of SimCity.)

      But I found it frustrating to have to fight the energy/social/fun meters while advancing in my career. Fer chrissakes, this character's only worked for three days straight, and is already depressed/lonely? What's wrong with him/her? Needing a shower every 1-2 days, fine, but a party?! This is nuts!

      So I created a Sim a little more suited to my own personality and called him Mini-Me.

      Playing Mini-Me was more fun, but after a few sessions, Mini-Me still found it hard to advance his career, because he didn't have enough Friends ("Aaw, crap, I have to invite those idiots over?!"), and didn't have enough Energy ("I just wanna fsckin' sleep!") to throw the requisite parties after work.

      So Mini-Me took a day or two off Sim-work ("Grumble, grumble") and wound up l33ching some other Sim's wife ("Ain't enough hours in the day to do it myself!"). She then stayed at home to organize the requisite friend-making parties (and click on "Hell, no!" whenever the adoption agency called) while Mini-Me worked his way up the career ladder ("Fuck yes, I come home, go to bed for an hour or two, wake up for the party, make a Friend, and rack up another career level! I 0wnz 411 j00r 51m5!").

      The only reason Mini-Me got married was to make Friends - not because he wanted any Friends but for the sole purposes of advancing his career. (And Big-Me, as the player, still found it horribly boring to spend hours queueing up "Invite $SIM", "Greet", "Joke" "Talk" "Dance" and occasionally "Flirt" commands just to get to the top career level).

      > Realizing how pathetic this was, I took said bathroom break and shower, went back to the room, and unistalled the Sims.

      The day Mini-Me reached the top of his career ladder, Big-Me realized, with a sigh of great relief, that unlike Mini-Me, he had a good enough job that he doesn't have to put up with that kind of crap in real life. So why should he have to put up with it in a game?

      At this point, Mini-Me (and his entire city!) were promptly transformed into several thousand sectors of free diskspace, and eagerly await the installation of DOOM III.

  • With each version the program acts more and more like real life. I can hardly wait for Sim-Traffic (with deluxe rubbernecking capabilities), Sim-Empty-Wallet, and Sim-Can't-Get-Laid.
  • That the complexity of the SIM games as well as others are appearing to surpase that of other software packages such as Operating Systems.

    Note I said appear.

  • Live your dreams!! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by craenor ( 623901 )
    This is the start of it. Years have gone by while we worked our way to this point. Some visionaries have pointed that this is our future in film, book and popular media.

    The foundation of that future is now being created though. Not by the government, doctors, priests or the military, but rather in the homes, offices and studios of today's premier geeks.

    Programmers with the skill to creature an enduring world and the backing to bring that world to life are the creators of societies newest niche.

    You may not think that mmorpg's and other online enduring games will be that big. But just wait until generations grow up with them instead of being introduced to them.

    Will it be a good change? A bad change? Time will tell, but if you are going to be realistic, you have to know that this will create change.

    You can choose to not believe me if you wish, but that means in 30 years, I get to say, "I told you so."

  • What about bitter/loner Sims? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by burgburgburg ( 574866 ) <splisken06.email@com> on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:10PM (#4753965)
    I'm a bit miffed that there is a game bias towards interactions with other Sims for rewards. What if you want your Sim to be a bitter loner, who sits around his darkened studio apartment all day, listening to mp3s of jazz 78s, working as an offsite computer consultant, and cooking ramen noodles on a hot plate? Shouldn't highly dysfunctional/self-destructive life-styles be considered valid too?

    • I have two alternative answers to that:

      1. The only thing American society hates more than an intellectual is a loner. (Go watch Bowling for Columbine.)
      2. Due to Metcalfe's Law [everything2.com] (ie: people only will join the Online service if it's a party), loners do not contribute as much to Maxim's bottom line.

      In the article Wright says that the game is designed to encourage the kind of behaviour that Maxim appreciates in society -- this would actually be scary if a significant portion of the population started playing it... But what I'm really looking forward to is seeing what kinds of bots people can get away with.

    • Re:What about bitter/loner Sims? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by StarFace ( 13336 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:50PM (#4754268) Homepage
      That is what annoyed me most about the original and its add-ons. It didn't consider the fact that not everyone is extremely outgoing, and neglected the types of people that would prefer to stay home working on their projects. As it was, there were projects to be had, but they were all somewhat dull. Each painting looked the same (it would have been vastly better if you could "upload" your own art into the engine so that what the character paints is what you've created, or even the reverse -- upload all of your artwork and then use a simple pattern code to "create" new paintings that you can "download" in 640x480 format or something, trade online, ect. At least hang it on the wall in your Sim home and increase the "Fun" level of the room.) Instead, the game just got really dull unless you were running around all of the time with eighteen friends.

      Another flaw is their overall outgoing meter, which when cranked to the bottom allowed your character to at least go a few days before "needing contact." The only problem is that it regenerated just as slowly. As any true introvert knows -- when you finally do need a little contact you can usually refresh that extremely quickly. You don't need to constantly socialize for three days to feel good about yourself again. In truly extreme cases, you get all of the social contact you need while at work, and your private life can remain just that -- private -- with no long term degeneration in the quality of life. Additionally, a little computer time reading emails, BBS, and perhaps IM chat would serve as well, but this option did not exist. The fact that full loners need to be alone to function properly is something that extraverts will never fully fathom, just as an introvert cannot fathom always needing somebody around to feel good about themselves.

      So, while the option existed to make a loner, the game didn't handle it well at all, and really only worked with a narrow scope of individual. It looks like the online version is gonig to be even worse.

    • Shit, you just described me. Replace Jazz with Post-Rock and hot-plate with sterno. Maybe I should buy Sims Online and get a better life.
    • Ah, another thing I didn't care for was the emphasis on consumerism. Too much of the game was spent Getting a Better Job so that you could Buy More Neat Stuff. I suppose an inclination towards that is indicative of the current state of affairs, but it woefully neglects the types who just don't get off on that. There should have been more of a role-playing element in on the production end of things, both with hobbies and with your job. It would have been so much more fun for me to choose a career that meant something to my character, and then directly influence the Sim World with the accomplishments made there. How neat would it be to walk into another person's home on the block and see that they had your books on a shelf; or were listening to one of your songs on their stereo; sitting in a futuristic chair you had research over and designed; or visited a child that you had saved via heart transplant at the hospital.

      Yeah, the game starts getting really complex, but it would have had so much more appeal than the endless cycle of promotions and better furniture. These sorts of things would have helped to flesh out the non-social characters more.

    • I know a lot of people who are very happy to live with very little in the way of material possessions. I'm not quite as healthy as that - I like to buy stuff but not just for the sake of "having better stuff". It bugs me to no end that in The Sims, materialism is a biological imperative - if you don't keep buying more luxurious possessions and expanding your home your Sim inevitably becomes unhappy. There's no option to be a hippy who's content as long as they have a guitar and some decent clothes to wear.
    • I'm a bit miffed that there is a game bias towards interactions with other Sims for rewards. What if you want your Sim to be a bitter loner, who sits around his darkened studio apartment all day, listening to mp3s of jazz 78s, working as an offsite computer consultant, and cooking ramen noodles on a hot plate? Shouldn't highly dysfunctional/self-destructive life-styles be considered valid too?

      Obviously, the SimRIAA would bust your Sim's arse for listening to illegal mp3s. After this, he gets fired from his SimCompany and his apartment, along with everything else he owns, would be auctioned to pay for the SimRIAA lawsuit. After serving for 3 months in SimAlcatraz he dies of scurvy caused by SimNoodles.

      THE END!

    • working as an offsite computer consultant

      That got me thinking, how long until you can find a _real_ (pseudo anonymous) job inside the Sims? And submit the results from there of course, and get paid real money.

      Now that'd be really weird and unnatural, but it could be made to work. :)

  • Sim Crap! (Score:5, Informative)

    by MrPerfekt ( 414248 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:12PM (#4753980) Homepage Journal
    I played the beta for about a week... this was a few weeks ago, like three I think. The experience of the Sims Online is going downhill fast. I realize it's still beta but Maxis seems to enjoy making the game harder and harder.

    For those that aren't hip to the Sims, you have to build your Sim's skills up by doing a multitude of different things that increase one of 5 or 6 skills. Now, this idea isn't bad. But in the week that I played it, they made skills build slower and do I mean sloooower.

    Now to get one point of a skill (say creativity by playing a guitar) I have to sit and watch my Sim play.. for an hour. AN HOUR. You can't do anything else with your Sim obviously while you're doing it so during that time, the Sims Online becomes pretty much a glorified chat room with annoying text bubbles and no scrollback.

    Yes, you can get up and leave your computer while you're doing that but.. after 10-15 minutes of inactivity, you're kicked from the service. Great stuff.

    And if that wasn't bad enough, skills ratings decay while you're offline, pretty severely too. Factor in that they keep up'ing the prices for all the items and the fact that once it goes live, you can expect to pay at least $9.95/mo to waste your life in their virtual world and have zero to show for it.

    Rave on, raver. I think I'll stick to RCT2 if I really have to play a Sim game.

  • And this is different how?? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Iguanaphobic ( 31670 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:13PM (#4753986)
    Interesting and scary to see what America would be like without our inhibitions.

    Sort of like looking at today from the perpective of the fifties. Today's morality is nothing like it was fifty years ago. Try looking at American "culture" through the eyes of a Victorian era Englishman. He would be horrified at the "total lack of inhibitions".

    • Interestingly enough though, people's behaviour has not really changed all that much. It's just that the behaviour is no longer taboo to discuss. In many ways, todays culture is more responsable than the in Victorian times, but it does look worse because we are much more reluctant to try to hide or ignore our social problems.
    • Interesting and scary to see what America would be like without our inhibitions.

      Sort of like looking at today from the perpective of the fifties. Today's morality is nothing like it was fifty years ago. Try looking at American "culture" through the eyes of a Victorian era Englishman. He would be horrified at the "total lack of inhibitions".

      this is a common misperception you have demonstrated, this myopic view of history. you see a frightening loosening of morals over time before you. it is a false perception, relax.

      who said this:

      "Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common." [chrisnelson.net]

      give up?

      it was written on an assyrian clay tablet dated at 2800 BC. we haven't gotten much worse. we haven't gotten much better, either. ;-P

      i went to pompeii once and was surprised at this one house on whose walls inside were preserved dioramas covered with more examples of indecent sexual acts than you can find trolling the worst porn sites on the web today. i won't even describe the features of the fountain in the middle of the room. god knows what went on in there.

      for every age of man, there is a constant amount of people who live lives of moral high holy purity and those who live lives of extreme moral terpitude, and everything in between.

      of course it gets equally sticky when we include on our personal observations of the moral decay of society over time our personal views on standards of human sexuality (sorry for the use of the verb 'sticky' in this context).

      in your stereotypical view of prudish victorian times, you would find on the streets of london amongst the middle and lower classes more prurience and indecency than you would find at any britany spears concert. and amongst those moral uptight upper class victorians, let us only guess at the hypocrisy that went on behind closed doors. the moral decay of society indeed. i'm certain you would find in the nunneries and priesthoods at the time, the lower class members of high moral standing who fled the horrors of impure london in their time, and pined for the good old days of 1750s london, when things were good and decent. and those in the 1750s... you get it now, repeat ad nauseum until you get to adam and eve. (and what did that story teach us again?)

      there were farmers screwing sheep in 4000 BC and there will be farmers screwing clones of dolly the sheep in 4000 AD. not much really changes, really.

      don't judge an era by who was in control of the media at the time, or the us supreme court. human nature is a constant across time and space.
  • Home invasion robberies. I join a home in the game, and all it is is a box with 7 weight sets while my housemates just sit and pump iron all day. I ask them why, and the answer is "if we build up our muscles we can raid other peoples houses and beat them up and rob them". Give the game a month, and you'll just have roving gangs of thugs. I can't wait.

  • SC4 > TSOL (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mannerism ( 188292 ) <keith-slashdotNO@SPAMspotsoftware.com> on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:14PM (#4754001)
    From what I've seen of it, TSOL is a far cry from what you might expect when a guy as creative as Wil Wright wields the resources of Maxis to create a virtual online nation. The economy, for example, can only be described as surreal. The concept of each server as a "city" is true only in the sense of its population; there are no definable neighborhoods or any true concept of location -- travel between individual buildings is accomplished through teleportation, making location and distance irrelevant. Obviously, this is a game of social interaction at a level slightly above that of a graphical chat room with avatars. It may be interesting to observe in that sense, but by no means is it a simulation of a nation or even a city. I'm sure it will attract legions of fans (my wife seems to like it), but it's certainly not of interest to me.

    Maxis' other forthcoming product, on the other hand, does look very promising. SimCity 4 appears to be a genuine evolution of the SimCity line. If you're a /.'er looking to while away some hours, I suspect you'll find it much more appealing than TSOL.

  • I like the Sims (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jhampson ( 580482 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:14PM (#4754002)
    Yes, it's like a dollhouse. Yes, it has mundane tasks. But the mundane tasks(as in life) are the means to which you get better 'stuff'. It's fun to get neat stuff. I always liked my GI Joe, and I always wanted to get him better gear(like the real working submarine or the kite!). The Sims are easy to project yourself onto, and it's a lot easier to get yourself neat furniture, chicks, etc. It was a bit traumatic for my son when his dad-character got killed in a kitchen fire, though. (Well, for a couple of hours, anyway.)
    And isn't it fun to play your computer with other people esp. when they're from far away? "Wow, I'm playing with a guy from Alaska!" Just like when those video-trivia-quiz machines first popped up in bars and places like Damon's, where you could compete nationwide.
    I wouldn't be at all surprised to see real-world relationships spring up from this. Didn't some Everquest-ers get married recently?
    I also read an article about how therapeutic 'The Sims' is for shut-ins and the elderly. Bringing them online would be a lifesaver in many cases. I think that there should be a discount for the elderly.

  • I used to work Maxis Tech Support (Score:5, Informative)

    by Syncdata ( 596941 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:15PM (#4754009) Journal
    "To many of us, it is more than just a game. We don't just play The Sims; we express ourselves and our lives with real emotions, situations and interactions."
    This woman is not the exception, she is the rule. When a user would download a bad object/skin/what have you, that would crash the game, there were three steps.
    #1:Sim File Cop (a prog to find bad skins, etc...
    #2:delete the house and the family within
    uninstall the game completely and start from scratch
    Suffice to say, 35% of the time, callers forced with #2 or #3 turned into supe calls. This prog really has turned into a replacement for life for a number of users.
    Curse you Will Wright!

  • CyberNation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drunkrussian ( 619107 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:16PM (#4754016) Journal
    Tom Clancy wrote a book about a virtual nation that existed entirely on the Internet of the future and demanded diplomatic recognition. The book was pretty bad, but the idea is an interesting one.

    I remember reading an article about Everquest a while ago that said that the amount of trading in real money that went on within the EQ system made it a larger economy than that of several real-life nations. I can't remember the source of the article, unfortunately, so I can't check its accuracy. However, I think it is entirely possible when you consider that the number of players is certainly greater than the populations of some members of the UN (for example, Tuvalu, population approximately 5000).

    I am sure that one day Internet societies will be demanding diplomatic recognition as states. Right now, you can already see some examples. Google for "micronations" and see what you get. The ones I've been involved with were all political simulations that did not claim any sovereignty or try to have any relationship with the real states, but there are some that do.

    A virtual environment like the Sims is even closer to a virtual state than a micronation or EQ, because the Sims is all about simulating life. The title SimNation is relatively appropriate; you can think of it as a gigantic distributed simulation of a society. If there was a governmental structure, that would make it a distributed simulation of a nation.

    Anyway, another site to check out is Active Worlds [activeworlds.com], a 3D virtual environment. It's not as good a simulation of human characteristics as The Sims, but it still is a good enough representation of real life that simulated virtual nations have been founded within it.

  • We already have an America without inhibitions. (Score:3, Funny)

    by nebaz ( 453974 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:17PM (#4754019)
    It's called Los Angeles.

  • Inhibitions? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Vaulter ( 15500 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:18PM (#4754033)
    Interesting and scary to see what America would be like without our inhibitions

    Come down South on a Saturday night after a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. You'll see what we're like!

  • Sims? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bytesmythe ( 58644 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <ehtymsetyb>> on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:20PM (#4754040)
    I never understood the obsession with "The Sims". I tried it out, but ultimately I just can't play a game populated with characters that are actually LESS motivated than I am.

    The damn people won't get out of bed when the alarm goes off, and there's no way to get to work other than car pool. If the Sim has to be at work at 8, so you have the alarm set for 6, they'll STILL miss their ride because it apparently takes 3 hours to get showered and dressed in the morning.

    I can only imagine what it would be like if they had pets in the game. A bunch of dead neglected dogs, cats, birds, hamsters, etc.

    FWIW, I won't be into gaming until games become Matrix-like. Current games miss out in three major areas:

    1) The experience isn't 1st person enough. FPS games are one thing, but the networked versions only allow interaction in an extremely narrow set of circumstances (like CounterStrike, with all the pre-defined missions, etc.) Multiplayer worlds use a 3rd person perspective, which obviously doesn't lend itself to a "realistic" seeming game.

    2) The group interaction in games feels fake. It works better (for me) in FPS games simply because having that first-person perspective draws you into the game a little more. Still, there is a lot to be desired.

    3) Current games simply aren't realistic enough. I want to feel like I'm actually inhabiting a fantasy world. Let's use Vampire, for instance. Not the computer game this time. LARP (Live-Action Role Playing for those of you who don't follow this junk). Now, exactly how much can you get into this game when a person using their "vampric" hearing sense is standing right next to you while you're supposed to ignore them? And certain actions are executed against other vampires on the basis of a rock-paper-scissors match!? Come ON! If I'm going to play a game, I want to feel like I really have those abilities, whether I'm playing something like Vampire, or Diablo, or CounterStrike. Simulating it with graphics doesn't help matters a bit.

    Perhaps this is still why I like mudding. There are other people to talk to, and, while the game is only text, it has a first person perspective and a flexibility that no other kind of game can truly match. (ObPlug: If you think you'd be interested in the mud diversion [or used to be, but haven't mudded in ages], try it out! Just telnet to tera.teralink.com 4000.)

    • I can only imagine what it would be like if they had pets in the game. A bunch of dead neglected dogs, cats, birds, hamsters, etc.

      It'd be like this. [ea.com]
    • I can only imagine what it would be like if they had pets in the game. A bunch of dead neglected dogs, cats, birds, hamsters, etc.

      They had a downloadable hamster ("Downloadable Hamster?" Sounds like a really bad college band) that, if not kept healthy, would infect its owners with a fatal virus.

      The result? You guessed it: SimPlague. Just goes to show ya.

    • Now, I don't LARP (I only tried it once at a sci-fi convention) but I can see how it'd be a lot of fun. The examples you cite as being "unrealistic" are _of course_ so, but they're sacrifices to accomodate the ugly realities of real-life. The player doesn't really have super-hearing, so they have to PRETEND, as the eavesdropee has to PRETEND the other player isn't standing next to them. Rock-paper-scissors is a way to PRETEND to fight, without actually engaging in violence. You see a trend here, right? You say you like mudding, aren't you pretending that you're acting in a living, visible world instead of just typing and reading words? How is that different?

  • Stability of online societies (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:20PM (#4754043) Homepage
    I'm curious to hear how the multi-user version works out as a society. Most MMORPGs are either bad neighborhoods or have oppressive oversight. If the Sim designers can make something that's stable but not at either of those limits, they'll have accomplished something.

    I don't want to play the thing, but I'm looking forward to the academic papers after it's been running for a year.

  • Going a bit offtopic. You know what would be neat at least for someone like me?

    Have the Sim Online game have a SimApple SimStore. Then people could hang around in line just waiting for the store to open :)

    I wonder how long the line would be, and if it would compare with the actual Real Apple Store openings :)

    Maybe you could get extra credit in the game for visiting an Apple Store or leading a "Switcher" life. ;-)

    Anyone have any idea when us Mac users will get to try the play test? I haven't seen a version for mac users...

    Can't wait to try this though...

    • Re:What if.... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Better yet, open a simBestBuy and sell simSims. This way, you could control your Sim playing his simSims, for even more thrills!

  • The Days of Perky Pat (Score:4, Interesting)

    by whig ( 6869 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:28PM (#4754095) Homepage Journal
    Is it just me, or does life increasingly seem to imitate a Philip K. Dick story?

    For anyone who is not familiar with the reference, the subject refers to a short story which later evolved into a novel, "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch." In these hypothetical futures, people lived vicariously through simulations, often to the neglect of their actual lives. There's a lot more to it, but if you want to know the whole story, you should read it. Anyhow, once again, Dick's predictions bear a disturbing similarity to reality.
  • "You start to see patterns you don't when you're living. It takes all the messy grayness of real life and makes it bright and shiny."

    Soma! Get your Soma, here!
  • All I want to know is if my Sims can start playing a game where they emulate thier life...

  • Life Imitates Art (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wizard992 ( 176718 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:31PM (#4754121)
    This actually happens with a number of games and quite a few people. I have friends that identify completely with their Evercrack characters; one of my more socially inhibited friends actaully introduced himself as his character name at a bar one night. His web page has pictures labeled with his name; only problem is they are screenshots of his character.

    Some other friends of mine had to stop playing Grand Theft Auto 3 when they noticed how agressively they were driving. They would be going to work or something and have thoughts about driving on sidewalks and through parks to cut some time off the trip, and started getting very dangerous to other drivers on the road.

    I have never been one to fall into the trap of blaming video games for real-life problems, but when certain people or personality types identify so closely with a game, what does that mean for society? I can imagine people hurrying to get home after work so they don't miss sim-happyhour at the sim-pub on TSOL, instead of going with friends or co-workers for a real-life happyhour.

  • Someone PLEASE tell me (Score:5, Funny)

    by Strange Ranger ( 454494 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:36PM (#4754153)
    What is the point? As one poster said, testing the boundaries of the local version = somewhat entertaining. But SIMS online? I can just imagine trying to explain this to my father:

    "Well Dad, you can talk and interact with others, buy and sell fake stuff, live in a fake house, soon they'll even have virtual pets you can own."

    [Looking at me like I have 2 heads]"So son, you're saying I go can online and play a simulated version of real life?"

    "Yep, you got it."

    "Son, wasn't that the really bad thing in that Matrix movie you made us watch?"

  • Watch out for hacked clients (Score:5, Funny)

    by duck_prime ( 585628 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @04:52PM (#4754284)
    I heard there are some cheating users who hack the Sim client to write bots to ... er ... watch TV and, um, get snacks? ... with superhuman efficiency...

    Oh never mind.
  • The Sims Online will then fork over $9.95 a month for access to its servers. Based on pre-orders, Electronic Arts expects to have "hundreds of thousands" of subscribers at launch.

    That is millions every month. Not bad for a game that no one would touch when the creator first introduced it.
  • Time goes off on a tangent about how Will Wright created the first Sim City due to his interest in map creation for a bomber game. But it's not true. Wright has already written about how he came upon the concept for the game, when reading the Stanislav Lem book "The Cyberiad," specifically the chapter "How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good." There's a short synopsis here:
    http://www.wam.umd.edu/~abbate/cyborg/cyber iad.htm l
    Every Sim player should read this story, it is a classic.
  • I did a quick search of the list and found not a single instance of the word 'teach' or 'useful'. I was hoping that somebody might point out that the Sims could in fact be a great training tool for the millions of disenfranchised, apathetic, socially maladjusted children filling our classrooms.

    Can't you see it? A Sims kid, learning the rules of school success? The price of cause and effect? What it means to identify patterns not only in grammar or math but in social behaviors? You are in fact rewarded for being an intelligent, conscientious, care-giving individual. In the Sims world it's just points...but in the 'real world' the point system is stronger friends, families, and social positioning...

    The kids 'today', sounds familiar doesn't it?, are so saturated with much better much more interesting subjects to study: Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, etc.. Why would they be at all interested in reading, writing, math or maybe even how to get along with another human being when the alternatives are so much more entertaining?

    The Sims way of life might actually be a great way of bringing our kids 'back to life', i.e. understanding the basic rules of cause and effect in a socially and economically complex environment, what we call the real world.

    dgd

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday November 25, 2002 @06:21PM (#4754930)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

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