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Vol.
2, Issue 15
March 13, 2000
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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. The Sims has a bit too much humor for it to
qualify as really hard-core c'est la vie 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.
The value of the experience
of creating a game like The Sims 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 "people
simulator" within a very narrow feature set can designers and
developers explore the foundations of this kind of program. Just
as Wolf 3d had to come before Half-Life or Soldier
of Fortune, The Sims has to come before Virtual New
York. Right now people are building the first truly persistent
3D worlds for online play. I'm sure a few of them are playing with
The Sims 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
"key" to open some sort of "door", 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.
What's the value in playing
a game like The Sims? 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. "Reality" 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 "relaxing" 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.
Sting, Lassie, The
A-Team, and The Message in The Medium
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…
As for The Sims
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.
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