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        <h1><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b><i><a href="../../index.html">loonygames</a><br>
          <font size="1">a <a href="http://www.bluesnews.com">blue's news</a> 
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<p>&nbsp;</p>Vol. 
                2, Issue 15<br>
                March 13, 2000<br>
                </b>
              <b> 

                </b>
               
                <b><i>Livin' 
                  With the Sims</i></b></p>
                An 
                  article by theAntiELVIS</p>
                <p></p>
              
              <p>
                

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              <p>&nbsp; </p>
              <i>Is 
                <b>The Sims </b>the first step toward a virtual life where everyone 
                is Swedish?</i></p>
              
              Earl 
                Sphincter is sleeping. He was up at the crack of dawn to shower, 
                dress, eat, and catch his ride to work at the Institute. He almost 
                missed work this morning - just before going out the door he broke 
                down, sobbing, overcome by his unbearable loneliness. But Earl 
                has bills to pay, and a 'fridge to stock, and plans to enlarge 
                his home. So squaring his shoulders and choking back his tears, 
                Earl went out to greet the day.</i></p>
              I'm one 
                of those freaks who enjoys shooting the Scientists in <b>Half-Life</b> 
                - mostly just because I know I'm not supposed to. I used to build 
                sprawling urban blight on purpose in <b>SimCity </b>and <b>SimCity 
                2000</b>, with integrated Crime Zones and Eternal Traffic Jams. 
                Then I'd torch the whole lot and start over. So when I popped-open 
                <b>The Sims</b> my first move was &quot;let's see if this thing 
                will let two mixed-race lesbians adopt kids&quot;. So I cover 
                the whole demographic: a young white woman, hip-dresser with a 
                bob and shades, meets older black woman in a sweater with gray 
                hair. I build them a nice little bungalow. I furnish it well. 
                I make sure they are well fed, amused, and clean. And not only 
                do I not get that offer to adopt, these two just totally hate 
                each other.</p>
              Six sleepless 
                days and nights later, I have experimented with numerous permutations. 
                A slovenly biker dude and a serious-minded career woman, one black 
                and the other white. No dice. A paunchy balding middle manager, 
                white, and a four-eyed nerd with a pocket protector, brown. Well, 
                at least those two got along. Finally I went for the buff Ken 
                doll lookalike, and a Barbie-esque beauty queen, both white, and 
                guess what? They were falling in love and reproducing in no time. 
                Likewise with a middle-aged small time crook, male, and a middle-aged 
                librarian, female, and both black. Two Asians of similar age: 
                ditto. A pattern began to emerge.</p>
              Turning 
                to the manual, in the section entitled &quot;Moving In&quot; on 
                page 56 we read &quot;The Moving In proposition is…available only 
                for same-sex friends. Opposite-sex friends never have Move In 
                available…&quot; Why not? On page 57 under &quot;Marriage&quot;, 
                it says: &quot;Only opposite-sex relationships qualify for a proposal 
                of marriage. Marriage is the only means to bring an opposite-sex 
                character into the house to stay&quot;. Well, there is currently 
                a controversy going on about same-sex marriages, so maybe Will 
                Wright is just taking a stand here. I can even see a certain game-design 
                reasoning to all this. These two rules control migration of characters 
                through the homes in the neighborhood, and without pretty strict 
                rules for this, you'd quickly end-up with 16 people living in 
                a one-room studio. And I have discovered that with a <i>lot</i> 
                of effort you can get same-sex couples to fall in love, although 
                I still can't get the little schmoes to cross the race line…</p>

              </p>
              </p>
            
            
            
              <br><br> 
              </p>
            <p>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?</p>
            <p>The point is, sims aren't 
              thinking about the Big Bang. Sims think along the following lines:</p>
             
              <p>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;.</p>
            
            <p>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.</p>
            <p>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 200th 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>).</p>
            <p>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.</p>
            <p>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.</p>
            <p>-tAE-</p>
            <i>- 
              If the legends are true, theAntiELVIS lives in Gracelessland 
              and spends his time eating anti-peanut butter and banana sandwitches. 
              </i></p>
            
              
            
             
              <br> 
              </p>
            <p>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.</p>
            <p>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.</p>
            <p>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.</p>
            <p><b>Sting, Lassie, The 
              A-Team, and The Message in The Medium </b></p>
            <p><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></p>
            <p>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.</p>

            
            
                
              <br> </p>
              
              
              I'm playing 
                this game and I'm thinking about stuff that has names like <i>biology, 
                sociology, </i>and<i> psychology.</i> About what elements of similarity 
                in two personalities make people compatible, and what differences 
                make them interesting. And race relations. And what, exactly, 
                is <i>my</i> stand on same-sex marriage? Y'know, I don't think 
                about these things when I play other games.</p>
              <b>Polygamy, 
                Death by Fire, and Why the Swedes are so Ornery</b></p>
              <i>The 
                von Prangs of the Prussian nobility immigrated to Sweden after 
                the war, where they established a banking and legal empire in 
                <b>SimCity</b>. Unfortunately the family fortune was squandered 
                on bad laetrile investments in the 1960s, and now young Otto von 
                Prang must make his own way in the world as a security guard on 
                the graveyard shift.</i></p>
              Ultimately, 
                <b>The Sims</b> is about ego. Not those of the little doll-people 
                on the monitor - they don't have any - but about the self-perception 
                of the player. If you're a power freak, it's a god-game, and your 
                sims will rarely exercise their &quot;free will&quot; mode. If 
                you're a builder person, you'll see the lives of the sims as a 
                revenue producing process that lets you build bigger and buy better. 
                So it's an economic/building game. If you're a tyrant sicko you'll 
                build a house with no doors, and move the 'fridge out into the 
                front yard every other day. While sims have a handful of &quot;personality 
                traits&quot; that define their behavior, <i>The Sims</i> has more 
                to say about <i>your </i>personality by placing these fragile 
                virtual lives in your care. How you deal with it says a lot.</p>
              At first 
                I identified with the game's animated denizens. They do the same 
                things I do. They go to work, they pay bills, they make dinner, 
                they clean up, they sleep and use the bathroom. And they make 
                and lose friends, fall in love, have fun and get depressed. Tough 
                not to see a bit of ourselves in all this. Okay, I don't go to 
                the bathroom eighteen times a day, nor do I have &quot;accidents&quot; 
                on the living room carpet. And I work a bit more than six hours 
                a day, and if I took every other day off I would definitely get 
                fired. And polygamy is illegal. And I have a car. And I have political 
                and spiritual opinions. And then there's sex - sims don't get 
                any. They hug and kiss and give each other back-rubs a lot. Like 
                the nice part of an EST seminar before they lock you in the little 
                room for two days. It's as if life has been reduced to physical 
                existence, where interaction with objects takes precedence over 
                interaction with people. Sims live their lives in a sort-of valium 
                haze always partially disconnected from their environment. Like 
                the other night Otto had a little problem in the kitchen when 
                the stove caught fire. At one point Otto caught fire. Not only 
                were several visitors completely unaware of Otto's predicament, 
                Otto himself seemed fairly disinterested in the fact that he was 
                consumed in roaring flames. I like to think that if I were doing 
                an impromptu impersonation of the Human Torch, my pals might snag 
                a rug to roll me in.</p>
              
              
            
            
                
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<p><i><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2">Credits: Print CGI is 
  &copy; 2000 <a href="http://www.square8.com">Square Eight</a>. Used with permission. 
  Article is &copy; 2000 its original author. All other content is &copy; 2000 
  loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited. You got that??</font></i></p>
 