Diary of a Newbie part 1
by Alphaville Herald on 10/02/04 at 2:51 pm
By Montserrat Tovar
one day curiosity got to me and i became a sim. you could say that i joined the crowd materializing into the ether instead of walking to walsingham.
first thing i had to do was create my sim. it was interesting to do because in spite of pages and pages of parts and heads, there were, in reality not many choices. it is hard not to make a pretty sim. you have to work hard to be ugly. you have spend time on being un-attractive. the sim world is a world where everyone is required to aspire to an aesthetic determined by barbie and ken, with an occasional nod to sid and nancy. a sim is set up to look like a sexual object. that?s part of the game, to aspire to be an object. the sims themselves hear this very clearly ? look at the top 25 sims and you will see 25 versions of what the graphic designers in charge of sims think the word ?hottie? means.
if sims is analyzed as if it were a book (and there are boring arguments that could be made that it *is* literature that i could agree with) then clearly sims is a romance novel, where the dialogue is created on the fly. sims are driven to certain types of activities and encounters as a part of their quest to satisfy their needs and keep the need bars green. the most interesting need bar is the social bar. it can drive some very strange encounters. most of the basic activities available to sims are pretty mind-numbing. the weirdest of these involved skilling at a computer where the user ends up spending time sitting at a computer watching his or her little sim pound away at a computer. wired magazine once said that there was a lot of asperger?s syndrome in silicon valley. you look at sims architecture and, well, you have to wonder about that.
choices available to the users are not the responsibility of the users. the blame for the mind-numbing quality of the game does not rest with the user. it rests with the software architects and it rests with the game and interaction designers. dr lawrence lessig of the stanford law school once explained very clearly in his book ?code as law? that software architects and designers intentionally limit the scope of end user choices through the process of user-path and interface design. they don?t want end users to have lots of choices. the architects want the users to get on with the transaction, finish it, and go on to the next thing. best practices suggest that the efficiency of a transaction is a higher good than the transaction?s aesthetic value. so you watch your little sim do its activity and after a little bit you see that you are watching loops. loops are boring. a person who signs up for sims is signing up to observe a series of loops while having a conversation with another user who is also observing a series of loops. that?s the game: sleep loop, skilling loops; bathroom loops; eat loops. etc. the variable is to observe the amount of time that elapses between the need to go through a loop: how long can i go before i have to take my sim to the bathroom? let?s watch and see. a hell of a cliffhanger there, guys.
more interesting to me are the social assumptions. tso is sold to the enduser as a community game. this means it is a product that has the intention to commodify, to make an economic profit from, human desire for social interaction. in this case, the designers were clueless: it appears that they either underestimated the power of human connection, or they fell down in human factors and complexity, where complexity occurs intangibly. sims has around 80 thousand registered users. each of these users may be a unique personality. that seems like a lot of variables and a lot of complexity, if one has set themselves up in the control business, which is what ea did. sims designers also disregarded the possibility for values conflict between rl world and sims world. sims designers did not consider that behind each sim was a human who had brought his or her conscious and unconscious assumptions about an entitlement to ordinary human rights like the right to free expression and the right to freely assemble. ea said, well we have a terms of service agreement. the unspoken question is this: does ea have the right to require the humans behind the sims to sign away the human rights guaranteed to them in rl in documents like magna carta and the us bill of rights? it is an interesting question because it seems clear that at least the unconscious answer to that question is no. the conflict appears in this form: ea and sims designers see sims as product elements. sims see themselves and each other as humans. as humans they expect human rights. ea and sims designers expect not to have to grant human rights to product elements.
these are the questions. the rest of the stuff about skins and wallpaper and pornography is just conversation.
TSKELLI
Feb 10th, 2004
The question is interesting. Thank you for raising it.
TSO is, first and last, a game. EA was trying to make a game … an online game to be sure, but a game nevertheless, an online entertainment service, in essence, taking place on servers owned by Maxis/EA. Human rights, per se, really don’t apply within that environment … you have the right to have the TSO applied fairly. If you do not like it badly enough, you can unsubscribe (a critical difference between this and rl!).
The interesting thing about TSO is that since it is not set in a medieval fantasy world or a futuristic sci-fi world, it seems much, much closer to real life … which makes people think that they are entitled to free speech, freedom of assembly and the like. After all, the Sims *do* look and act like contemporary people (or at least a somewhat tongue-in-cheek rendering of that). So the atmosphere of this particular game lends itself to that kind of confusion. You do not hear players in Dark Age of Camelot or Star Wars Galaxies complaining about human rights, freedom of expression, lifestyle choices and the like …. when they complain the complaints are about bugs, lags and the like. The environment it different … people are not there to live a simulated fantasy real human life, but that of a knight or bounty hunter or what not and are more interested in levelling, killing foes and the like. TSO’s atmosphere is very different, closer to real world than these others are, and therefore generates more expectation on the part of some participants to believe they are entitled to real world freedoms despite the reality that they are customers of an online entertainment service, in essence.
i agree that the devs seem to have really misunderstood in some basic sense what they were creating here due to the human element being present, and the fact that this human element would present itself in a really different dynamic given the setting of TSO as compared with most other online games. But the fact remains that this is a game, and as such the rules ouf real world rights simply don’t apply, in my view.
some have argued that this is more like a shopping mall, where you are entitled to human rights protections even though it is private property. Well, while that is an interesting argument, it isn’t particularly compelling to me because here you are charged admission to participate in an online entertainment service … there is no real element of “public space” here, in contrast to the shopping mall or a Hotel where the space is publically accessible and purposefully held open to the public and therefore in some sense within the public doman regardless of the reality of the private ownership of the land. perhaps the shopping mall analogy applies to the internet, or some parts of the internet, but it seems a different case from that of an online entertainment service like TSO.
kelli
PLEASE ANSWER MY Q
Feb 10th, 2004
my parents say i have aspergers syndrom. i dont no what is is could anyone help me out by telling me what it is?
Darksoul
Feb 11th, 2004
A good article on the particulars of asperger’s is located at
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.html
laserone
Feb 12th, 2004
I am so tired of people who write long pieces and can’t bother themselves to write properly. Ever hear of the Caps button?
Ms Oprah Winfrey
Feb 12th, 2004
Someone please proofread these articles before they are posted. The punctuation in the article makes it barely readable.
Maria LaVeaux
Feb 13th, 2004
English is my second language, and i had no difficulty in following the article at all despite the lack of capitolization. Perhaps it is because i am less interested in form than i am in content.
It was what he said that interested me, not how he said it.
Maria.
m. tovar
Feb 13th, 2004
ms winfrey:
how bout you tell us all about your business propositions?
DmnLmaX
Feb 18th, 2004
oh crap i didnt capitalize here and i forgot a period….plz disregard this post i must not know what im talkin about….and anything i type dont matter…lets focus on the idea and not the grammar…im so shocked someone actually complained about that stuff…it boggles the mind
Maria LaVeaux
Feb 19th, 2004
DmnLmaX;
“lets focus on the idea and not the grammar…im so shocked someone actually complained about that stuff…it boggles the mind”
Unfortunatly chere, It doesn’t Boggle my mind. I am all to familiar with this tactic. “When one has nothing of Value in the way of an opinion counter to what has been said, one attempts to Humiliate ones opponent into silence with shallow, meaningless personal attacks.”
These are the same sort of person who would publicly make fun of a persons accent or Physical appearance in order to attempt to discredit the speaker instead of attempting to deal with issues they are Ill equipped to address.
Tovars essay was well thought out, and though the style of presentation might be difficult to read for the Truely Illiterate, I found it very easy to keep the thread of his thoughts clear in my mind.
Since “Diary” inferes a continuing journal, I look forward to the next installment.
Keep writing Tovar, and Ignore the small minded.
Maria.