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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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<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>
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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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                <td width="45%" align="right" valign="top"> 
                  <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> 
              </font></p>
            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Here's a telling point. 
              No one has tattoos or piercings. While sims may sport orange hair 
              and a bit of leather, for the most part they are identifiable as 
              yuppies at 1000 yards. Pacifist yuppies, at that. So far I have 
              not seen them murder each other. They can get into some pretty nasty 
              shoving matches, but not so much as a broken arm or bitten-off ear 
              for injuries. They don't own guns. They don't own a lot of things 
              real people own - like cars, businesses, pets (well, the stupid 
              tropical fish), stocks, bonds, mortgages, or even a washer/dryer 
              combo. In fact they seem to have no concept of &quot;laundry&quot;, 
              as we know it. This is an interesting alternate reality. Maybe if 
              there had been just a few more degrees Kelvin accumulated before 
              the Big Bang went-off, and so a few more charmed quarks and a few 
              less strange ones in the primordial cake mix, a new physical law 
              would make laundry impossible. Wouldn't that be great?</font></p>
            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The point is, sims aren't 
              thinking about the Big Bang. Sims think along the following lines:</font></p>
            <blockquote> 
              <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><code>WOW AM I EVER 
                HUNGRY JEEZ THAT WAS GOOD WHOA I GOTTA PEE WHAT'S ON T.V.? I HATE 
                THAT SHOW I HATE THAT SHOW I LIKE THIS SHOW WHOA I GOTTA PEE WOW 
                AM I EVER HUNGRY I SURE AM LONELY I SURE AM LONELY I SURE AM LONELY 
                I'M BORED I'LL WATCH T.V. I HATE THAT SHOW I HATE THAT SHOW I 
                LIKE THIS SHOW WHOA I GOTTA PEE THE STOVE IS ON FIRE THE STOVE 
                IS ON FIRE WHOA I GOTTA PEE MAN I'M TIRED I THINK I'LL HIT THE 
                HAY SNORE GOD I HATE MY JOB WHOA I GOTTA PEE&#133;</code>.</font></p>
            </blockquote>
            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">So your average sim is 
              just a bit below the collie-dog rung on the intelligence ladder. 
              Sure, they can fetch, but would one swim a river, climb a mountain, 
              cross a desert, and help some nuns along the way while fetching 
              a doctor for your burst appendix, Timmy? No, a sim would just step 
              over your pain-wracked body on his or her way to the refrigerator. 
              They have no moral awareness to guide their actions. That's your 
              job as the player. Moral awareness is something technical people 
              call Hard To Program. Whenever they come across something that falls 
              into the Hard To Program category, they delegate it to the wetware. 
              Personally I would be delighted if Ulysses T. caught Otto in bed 
              with Barbara, and shot them both in a fit of jealous rage. I wouldn't 
              be killing them - another sim would, in a reaction to his environment. 
              But Maxis (wisely) left-out this level of detail because it's Hard 
              To Program, and because they want to sell this game to kids.</font></p>
            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Likewise sims are a little 
              blank to the passage of their life because they don't get sick, 
              they don't age, and they don't die unless it's by starvation or 
              fire (which is bad enough, I guess). They have effective immortality. 
              So for them life must be like watching that episode of the A-Team 
              where they visit B.A.'s mom for the 200<sup>th</sup> time. You know 
              at the end they'll get away in the van. And so it's no wonder a 
              sim would push past a burning friend to get to the bathroom when 
              their peanut-sized bladder is full. Immortality is a pretty selfish 
              thing by definition. It dooms their kids to always being kids (they 
              have to go to school <i>forever</i>).</font></p>
            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">So what happens when 
              <b>The Sims</b> meets the <b>Quake III:Arena</b> engine on the Internet? 
              Will the dividing line between our real lives and our virtual ones 
              not just blur, but disappear altogether? If that happens, how much 
              of the real world do we take with us into the virtual one? Do we 
              take our laws? Will we worship god in our persistent simulation? 
              Will we need radiation treatments there? And how much will come 
              back the other way, from the virtual life into the real one? Will 
              we become as blank and unaware of each other as my sims are? Will 
              we be happy in an anti-depressant Ken and Barbie world? And how 
              are we going to work Capture The Flag into a world where you score 
              points by maintaining your interpersonal relationships? There are 
              a lot of practical matters to be worked-out.</font></p>
            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">It may have been Marshal 
              McLuhan, or perhaps his brother Tony, who said something about how 
              the means we use to communicate and express ourselves, provides 
              a form of feedback that in-turn molds our awareness of self, and 
              thus the things we express. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was Tony that 
              came up with that one. Anyway, if that's the case, and if our future 
              is engulfed in a virtual reality wherein we are all a sort of benign 
              Borg sim, will we become like Otto and his kind: Immortal, bored, 
              and selfish? And how real will it be? When the carpool comes to 
              pick me up, will it really take me to my job off on some other server 
              somewhere? As we squeeze more of ourselves into thought bandwidth, 
              where will the physical us go? Maybe we'll be stripped-down to some 
              pickled-menudo-looking ganglia floating in a jar of tepid gray liquid 
              or something. I'm sure whatever they come up with will cost about 
              twenty bucks a month, and they'll debit your ATM card for it. And 
              it will have lag. And for some cryptic legal reason, your thought 
              uploads will be slower than your thought downloads. Some things 
              never change.</font></p>
            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><a href="mailto:theAntiELVIS@gracelessland.com">-tAE-</a></font></p>
            <p align="right"><i><font size="2" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">- 
              If the legends are true, theAntiELVIS lives in <a href="http://www.Gracelessland.com">Gracelessland</a> 
              and spends his time eating anti-peanut butter and banana sandwitches. 
              </font></i></p>
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              <p align="left"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"></loonystart> 
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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 
  is &copy; 2000 loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited. 
  So don't do it, or we'll deport you.</font></i></p>
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