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Games Entertainment

The Little People In Your Games 34

Posted by Zonk from the creeeepy dept.
1up.com's Crucial Classics series has a feature up discussing the little people inside your games. From the article: "...someone realize[d] that it was a niche to be exploited by computers, which up to that point weren't particularly cuddly. To be fair, neither were Little Computer People, confined as they were behind the fourth wall of a monitor. Which was probably for their own safety, as they were just the sort of creatures that might die a horrible smothery death in the arms of a little girl."
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The Little People In Your Games More

The Little People In Your Games

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  • Great writeup (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ArmorFiend ( 151674 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:55PM (#12957081) Homepage Journal
    Great writeup! After an entire paragraph I have no clue what this story is about, Zonk!

  • GG Editors (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JFitzsimmons ( 764599 ) <justin@fitzsimmons.ca> on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:58PM (#12957098)
    Can't RTFA even if you wanted to on this story. After you click through the advertising, there's no article!

  • Link to the article (Score:5, Informative)

    by Russellkhan ( 570824 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:58PM (#12957103)
    The link given just leads to the main page at 1up. The actual article [1up.com] mentioned can be found here.

  • Why the Apple II version? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by newrisejohn ( 517586 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @10:09PM (#12957183)

    I think the Commodore 64 version [retrogames.com] looked a hell of a lot better. Those were the days, man.

    I played this when I was five. The original disk still resides somewhere at my parents, along with a dead C64.

  • OK, I made my last post before I RTFA. Now that I have read it, I don't know why anyone thought it was interesting enough to post here. All it is, really is a review of a 1985 C64/Apple ][ game, with a sidebar mentioning later games/products that are similar but more successful.

    I know I'm not supposed to grumble about it, but I've submitted much more interesting stuff than this that got rejected.
    • I agree.

      The article feels like it's a review of an old Sims game. "Feed, water, go to the can, etc" sounds a lot like a game I could play right now, with better graphics, AI and sound.

      It's nice to get nostalgic once in a while, but make sure it's over something that will really get our gears turning.
  • I've seen screenshots used in Fark Photoshop contests, but I couldn't figure out what game it was.

  • Abuse of Little Computer Lifeforms (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MiceHead ( 723398 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @11:38PM (#12957740) Homepage
    I think it's interesting that people abuse the systems; and that the systems possess the capacity to be abused. The article points to a now-defunct website [archive.org] created by someone who enjoyed torturing their simulated being in Creatures [gamewarede...ment.co.uk]. An excerpt:
    Her name is Slave. After I created her I started by hitting her constantly for about 5 minutes. Then I taught her all the words(using the SST) so it would be easier to make her scared of her surroundings. After she knew all the words, I placed her in a small area, surrounded by the FF Cob, with 5 Grendels. I left her there for about 20 minutes, beating her when she attempted to defend herself from the Grendels. After she was sufficiently traumatized, I put her back in the garden. In the Garden I forced her to Get, Look, Push and Pull everything around her, all the time, constantly beating her. I made her fear running so I wouldn't have to deal with that little problem(you fellow torturers out there know how annoying it is to chase them down once they get away). I also forced her to eat weeds, rewarding her when she did so. At the time I exported her, she's a quivering mass of fear. She might eat, if you're lucky, but she probably won't survive long enough for food to do any good.
    Also worth noting is some of the feedback this fellow received [archive.org], including various death threats. The most well-known cases of abusive behavior towards simulated lifeforms probably occur in The Sims. From a Wired article on same [wired.com]:
    To Wright, one of the most memorable albums told the story of a woman's abusive relationship and how she eventually got out of it. But a search on the Sims Exchange of the word "abuse" reveals that Sims albums have become a common therapeutic tool. All told, 63 albums deal with abuse issues.
    Many of us have probably stomped anthills in our youth, (or worse [ebaumsworld.com]?), and bullied/been bullied. Does this power dynamic fall along the same lines? The example from Creatures, above, surprises me. But I will admit to building a Sims household with a swimming pool and no ladder.
    _______
    Epidemic Groove [dejobaan.com] - An indie-developed casual RTS/Action hybrid for Windows.
    • Yeah, I was reading that Norn torturer's site and it's rather puzzling. It kind of disturbs me that he would do something like that to the poor little creatures, but I have trouble relating to his mindset. It's a big grey area, and I would never do what he did personally, but it's not at all inconceivable that the person is very sane and has an understandable motivation for doing it--shock value, for instance. What would be more disturbing is if he DIDN'T have a site and still did what he did (he appears
      • It's a big grey area, and I would never do what he did personally, but it's not at all inconceivable that the person is very sane and has an understandable motivation for doing it--shock value, for instance.

        I haven't actually looked at the site in question, but it's a pretty fun moral question regardless - can a collection of bits and bytes really be considered 'alive', and can it really 'suffer'?

        I think one of the aspects which will make it seem like 'torture' is the apparent response of the computer pr
    • Choosing evil over good in a videogame like this always bothers me for some reason. For example, Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic obviously had the option to go to the dark side, and I played through it once like that. Halfway through, I was disgusted enough with my character that I wanted to quit - it took me three days to play through the game on the side of good, and two months to bring myself to finishing the game evil. I recently bought Jade Empire and played through it "open hand" (good), star
    • The thing is that after awhile, there's nothing left to do BUT abuse the guy.

      I had a copy of LCP for the Amiga. At first, I played it straight, keeping him fed, playing games, etc. It was kinda neat.

      But that got boring, especially since it really wasn't all that complicated a program. So I decided to see how far I could push it. You deliver food and water to him, and you also deliver food to his dog.

      I decided to see if I could get him to eat dog food. After all, if you're REALLY hungry, and that was
    • I think you are on the tip of an issue that is just starting to develop. Although one is not harming a living thing, or even a thing at all, are we still doing something wrong? Is it a negative on our psyche?

      Here's a disturbing question that will take your issue a little further: If one were to use CGI to create photo-realistic child pornography, that was not based on the likeness of actual children, would that be wrong? No child is being exploited, and the veiwer is supposedly getting to see what th
      • Ok, first lemme just preface: Wrong or not, it is (at least in the USA, as far as I know) illegal. VERY much so. As for wrong, I donno. To me the logic against CP is that it hurts children. If no children are hurt, can it be considered bad? But I reckon that that's your question restated, so it's a moot point.

  • OK, the actual article is here [1up.com]. My own write-up on the game is here [everything2.com]. The Zzap!64 review is here [zzap64.co.uk].

    For those of you still not sure what this is, it's a game where you have a person in your computer, and you can feed him (they're all male for some reason), buy him books and records, ask him to play the piano, and scritch his hair. If you don't feed him, he'll go to bed, turn green, and die. It's a pretty original game, and you can get the C64 tape re-release second hand for around its original cost of £

  • Johnny Castaway [onetel.net.uk] (1993) from Sierra On-Line was an entertaining screensaver. While it wasn't really a game (no user input), people found it quite addictive to watch. The free version does install on Win98SE, haven't tried XP.
  • Like Guardian Bob and Dot Matrix?
  • What the HELL is it with these moron webmasters who decide the optimal way to present an article is GREY TEXT on a white background!

    Do these people have no clue about contrast? Do they actually WANT to make it harder to read their content?

    Or is it the fact that there is very little content to this article, and they want to use the Wired approach of "we will make it impossible for an average reader to read this in less than three hours by using bad color schemes, so that people will think this article was
  • If you're going to resort to alliteration, don't force two words together. In the words of Bill Walton, "that's just terrrrrible".

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