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      <h5><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">//<a href="../../../index.html"><font color="#7C420E">loonygames</font></a>://<a href="../index.html"><font color="#7C420E">issue 
        2.15</font></a>: //<a href="index.html"><font color="#7C420E">Livin' With 
        the Sims</font></a>: //<a href="index.php"><font color="#7C420E">1</font></a>, 
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          <td align="LEFT" valign="TOP" width="100%"> <font color="#000000" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"> 
             </font> <p><webdog><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2" color="#0022A8"><b><font color="#693A0C">What's 
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<p><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><a href="index.html" target=""><b><font color="#00025E">Livin' 
  With The Sims</font></b></a><br></b>
  theAntiELVIS explores the wild and wacky world that is Will Wright's <b>The Sims</b>, 
  asking the inevitable quesiton, &quot;is <b>The Sims</b> the first step toward a virtual 
  life where everyone is Swedish?&quot;</font></p>
<p><font color="#000000" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><a href="../pixel/index.html" target=""><b><font color="#00025E">Pixel 
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  Check out our newest comic strip, <b>Real Life</b>! Updated daily!</font></p>
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                      <p><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0000FF"><i><font color="#904C10" size="3">Livin' 
                        With the Sims</font></i></font></b><br>
                      
                      <div align="right"> <font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-1">By 

                        <a href="mailto:theAntiELVIS@gracelessland.com">theAntiELVIS 
                        </a></font></div>
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                    <h5 align="right"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#00025E">Vol. 
                      2, Issue 15<br>
                      March 13, 2000</font></b></h5>
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            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#00025E"><loonystart> 
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            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The French have carved 
              a name for themselves in the depressing minimalist existentialist 
              niche of the Philosophy market. Only the Germans give them any real 
              competition. <b>The Sims </b>has a bit too much humor for it to 
              qualify as really hard-core <i>c'est la vie</i> wrist-slitting existentialism. 
              In fact suicide is just one more of those options a sim doesn't 
              have available. I'd place the life philosophy of the game a little 
              farther North in Scandinavia, probably Sweden. You need a sense 
              of humor to get through the Winters up there, but at the same time, 
              six months of sleet isn't a fertile growth medium for a positivist 
              moral philosophy. Thus the Vikings. But I digress.</font></p>
            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The value of the experience 
              of creating a game like <b>The Sims</b> lies in appreciating all 
              those things you had to leave out, like religion and cancer and 
              divorce and death. Only by exploring a concept like &quot;people 
              simulator&quot; within a very narrow feature set can designers and 
              developers explore the foundations of this kind of program. Just 
              as <b>Wolf 3d</b> had to come before <b>Half-Life</b> or <b>Soldier 
              of Fortune</b>, <b>The Sims</b> has to come before <b>Virtual New 
              York</b>. Right now people are building the first truly persistent 
              3D worlds for online play. I'm sure a few of them are playing with 
              <b>The Sims</b> and rethinking some of their assumptions about what 
              gameplay is. One of these assumptions is that you have to let players 
              kill other players to have a good time. Another is that if gameplay 
              involves thought or problem solving, that's just another kind of 
              &quot;key&quot; to open some sort of &quot;door&quot;, to allow 
              the player to run into a room and kill some other people. In real 
              life one thought often leads to another, while the reward for solving 
              a tough problem is generally six or eight even tougher ones. Most 
              people who burst into a room and mercilessly slaughter everyone 
              end up on the news channels. For a little while, anyway.</font></p>
            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">What's the value in playing 
              a game like <b>The Sims</b>? Besides having your game-playing mind 
              sent in directions it rarely travels, it's fun. What other reason 
              is there to play a game? But if you need a larger context to place 
              things in (and when your game machine costs as much as a small recreational 
              vehicle, a larger context helps), it proves that Real Life™ has 
              commercial potential as entertainment. Television has been onto 
              this for a long time. &quot;Reality&quot; shows are huge ratings 
              wells, sucking in millions of people who may not realize they are 
              having their own lives repackaged and sold back to them. Me, I've 
              been coming home from work for a week and &quot;relaxing&quot; by 
              making sure my sims get off to work on time. The other night I was 
              paying some bills, and I looked up, and Otto was paying his.</font></p>
            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b>Sting, Lassie, The 
              A-Team, and The Message in The Medium </b></font></p>
            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><i>Arletha Lithium is 
              a middle aged waitress who has given up on love. Bitter in her loneliness, 
              Arletha sits in her filthy bungalow and watches television while 
              she waits for her ride to work at the Stuckeys out at exit 39. Arletha 
              only enjoys the Romance channel - there is nothing she would rather 
              do then sit on the couch and watch other people live interesting 
              lives…</i></font></p>
            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">As for <b>The Sims</b> 
              itself, its philosophy is clear. Life is about the Three C's: Companionship, 
              Consumption, and The Can. Especially The Can. We're talking 8-bit 
              bladders here. Of course, it could just be that they all eat and 
              drink like rhinos. Life in the Neighborhood is a real Jungian/synchronicity/Sting-concert 
              affair. Just as the fluttering of a butterfly's wings in Tibet causes 
              a tornado in Kansas, a sim needs to make money to buy food to eat 
              and then eliminate to keep living so they can make money to buy 
              food…. And along the way it all gets just unbearably dull, so to 
              keep them interested in the whole process they also need to have 
              comfort and fun, which generally costs money - well, you see where 
              that's going. It's really an American Suburban Commuter Simulator, 
              without the driving. Which only makes the fact that everyone is 
              speaking Swedish that much more confusing.</font></p>
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<p><i><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2">Credits: Illustration 
  &copy; 2000 Tinusch. This article is &copy; 2000 theAntiELVIS. All other content 
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  So don't do it, or we'll deport you.</font></i></p>
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