Diary of a Newbie #3: the bleakness of crowds

by Alphaville Herald on 09/03/04 at 11:21 am

by Montserrat Tovar

sometimes i wonder why i am writing this. i say this because it seems like there is not much to say about sims: the play of simming becomes a predictable sequence: eat, sleep, skill, bathroom. sometimes you shop for something to wear and there is nothing interesting to buy. smeared throughout this routine is a series of conversations written in the local dialect, which is the language of texting. rl or real life works hard to intrude into this sequence and sometimes it is disconcerting: you say something to someone and you end up staring at an avatar for what seems like centuries. later on you find out that the person you were talking to had to answer the phone or something. rl they will say, and that is the sign for the things that must be.

after a while you discover that there is a bdsm culture among sims and that comes as no great surprise. the internet, in my experience, is marvelous at providing opportunities for sexual exploration. On the internet sex is something that will come and look for you even if you are not seeking it. i have always marveled at this tendency on the net, and marveled also at the way that the net always seems to be running a show about power politics somewhere, especially if the show is dressed up in sexual drag. the top usually wants to be seen as a member of some long-dead aristocratic class and the bottom is usually required to speak and behave as a young innocent. this is all recreational sex and you can get that among the sims, too. on the wider net some subs have kept journals and they have sometimes exulted in their own power, which they see as the power to withhold consent. the power of the master or mistress to these subs seems a kind of illusion, and it is no doubt interesting to reflect on the hugeness of your own power after you?ve been tied up and gagged.

the sims game is tedious, and so i reflect on tops and bottoms. hitler and goering and osama and saddam and even little bush are tops and people hate them for it. these guys are imperious, whimsical, intransigent, and they hurt people. take that impulse, dress it in black leather, spike heels, or the language of a two dollar bodice ripper and people can?t wait to get there. what drives people to the game? it is so damned tedious. the game is full of subtexts about how much people?s lives are not working right now.

the marquis de sade could not have existed before the french revolution. he could not have existed before galileo blew up the cultural underpinnings of the middle ages. the marquis de sade was a poem about the destruction of medieval values, and also he was part of the birth of the revolutions of enlightenment. i think that. i think that you can draw a line between the excesses of french revolutionary culture that permitted the existence of de sade and the bill of rights in the us. it is all part of the process of cultural formation. in the 1920s and 1930s when people began to see convenience foods like canned soup as liberators for women, sometimes in the magazine ads you will see the revolutionary cap. liberty, equality, and fraternity in a can. now people take this same cultural formula, that they have applied in the past to everything from canned soup to the need to call education the act of teaching young children to stand patiently in line, and they project it on to a really cold interface on a screen, in the most dreary manner possible.

they call it a game.

it is a poem.

7 Responses to “Diary of a Newbie #3: the bleakness of crowds”

  1. Know won yuknow

    Mar 9th, 2004

    This series has got to be the most boring crap I have ever read! Will this mindless babbling ever stop? I would rather hear Van fart the national anthem then read anymore of this elitist nonsense!

  2. urizenus

    Mar 9th, 2004

    So stop reading it. Crimey, it’s like some people have lost the ability to stop reading when they get bored.

  3. RB

    Mar 9th, 2004

    Agreed.

    Real thought has actually gone into this. And a smart brain wrote it. A nice change from alot of rubbish we *could* be reading.

    - RB

  4. brad

    Mar 10th, 2004

    It sounded more like a historically backed view on today’s modern “culture” (I used that term very loosely). You’d rather hear someone fart, because you’re nothing more then a product of what this person is discussing.

  5. m.tovar

    Mar 12th, 2004

    so don’t read it.
    tso didn’t happen in a vaccuum, guys.

  6. Banshee

    Mar 15th, 2004

    “i say this because it seems like there is not much to say about sims”

    Hehehe, but you seem to have quite a bit to say about lol.

    “the play of simming becomes a predictable sequence: eat, sleep, skill, bathroom.”

    But the point of that is that these are the constants of everyday life, and the rest of what takes place happens over that surface. Most of us hardly notice this in real life, most of the time, unless we are food or sleep deprived, at which point these needs make themselves known. One can criticize the rate at which the needs need to be refilled (which is in any case lower than in the offline sims, where they deteriorate very rapidly indeed, but there it is more like a “game” in any case), but having these set the backbone for the daily existence seems appropriate to me … it doesn’t make what happens over that surface any more or less predictable than in real life. I know that today in real life I will need to eat, sleep and pee …. does that mean that my real life day is meaningfully “predictable”?

    “on the wider net some subs have kept journals and they have sometimes exulted in their own power, which they see as the power to withhold consent. the power of the master or mistress to these subs seems a kind of illusion, and it is no doubt interesting to reflect on the hugeness of your own power after you’ve been tied up and gagged.”

    Hehehe, but you don’t get it, then, Montserrat. Unless there is some level of consent there is no tieing or gagging happening … that is the point. I am not a BDSM practictioner, but I think I understand what they are getting at here, at least.

    “hitler and goering and osama and saddam and even little bush are tops and people hate them for it. these guys are imperious, whimsical, intransigent, and they hurt people. take that impulse, dress it in black leather, spike heels, or the language of a two dollar bodice ripper and people can’t wait to get there.”

    But is that really what is going on with a top in a BDSM relationship? Again, I’m an outsider to that community, but from what I have read about it and observed from the outside, I do not think that most BDSM “tops” are the way you describe, really, but maybe I’m mistaken.

    “they call it a game.
    it is a poem.”

    And here I think your point is … that the way that TSO is played is itself reflective of the breakdown of “values” in contemporary western society, occurring as some kind of excess of liberte, equalite, fraternite as to arrive at a kind of libertinism? TSO as a poem about the current state of the culture? Perhaps. To me it seems more reflective of what people would do with their lives if they had no responsibilities and no repurcussions to their actions … in other words, if they had the freedom of movement and action, and lack of responsibility, that the environment of TSO allows a sim (no need to work, really, unless you want to, able to retreat from sticky situations by simply deleting and recreating yourself, etc.), what would they do? Moonlight as prosititutes? Try their hand at being a full time sexual slave? Try on a different sexual orientation for a test drive? Or a different gender? Take on the life of a mafioso, or that of a self-appointed politician, or that of a Ralph Nader like do-gooder? The choice seems endless, and it is interesting to me to watch people make those choices in the game … and even the choice to play the game as a game reaching for the goals that it sets, or to play it as oneself, eschewing the idea of taking on an alternate identity, is an interesting choice to observe and see how it plays out. I see TSO less as a poem about contemporary culture and more of a reflection of the wide variety of different mindsets that come into the game, the needs people bring with them into the game, and the fascinating observation of just what people would do if they could do so without responsibility or repurcussion.

    B

  7. m. tovar

    Mar 16th, 2004

    banshee:

    your comments were interesting and you inadvertently underlined my point(s):

    (1)
    tso is concerned about what you labeled “constants of everyday life”. my curiousity was about why people would want to go participate in a game or social network that seems to emphasize the food-sleep-pee process. it is true that a person in the course of a day will have to do all those things, but these processes do not, for most people in the normal course of a rl day, define the meaning of that day. my curiousity was this: for tso, those events are what is available to do for most sims, unless they want to risk their lives in the robot factories, or skill, or perform activities for small change, so the sim-day is more likely to be defined by the need for greening than is a rl day. robot factories, skilling, and the sales/preserves/gnome activities work together with the need to green to create a world that seems in the same sense that orwell, dickens, and sometimes neal stephenson, are bleak.

    so then i have to ask: who loves this game? what is the seduction of the game? where is the satisfaction in sitting at a computer watching an avatar watch a computer or yak into a mirror? what kind of rl world regularly drives a person to this kind of screen experience? why is this a “game”, if “game” is about entertainment?

    (2)
    i am not a bdsm practitioner either, but i have known several people who are. bdsm has some consent language and practices, for example the “safe word” which the sub uses to declare a stopping place. the thing that fascinates me about bdsm and which i apparently did not express well was that the appearance of power lies with the dom and the actual power with the sub. it is similar to what a person can notice if they look at victim/victimizer pairs: the victim is often a victimizer and the victimizer is also often a victim. the sub is a dom and the dom is a sub. it is like if a person stands on a ladder and someone knocks the ladder over, the person falls down. the dom stands on the consent of the sub. when the sub uses the safe word, the game is done. it is for that reason that i think it is interesting to meditate on one’s power while gagged and tied up. it is a complicated way to express personal power, by giving consent to be abused; it is an interesting way to speak.

    (3)
    relative to your comments about values etc i think you have misread me perhaps. i don’t say that tso is a poem about current state of culture except perhaps indirectly. i suggest that tso is a poem precisely about those ideas that you mention: that people want to have different lives than the lives they have chosen but lack the ability or wherewithal to make the needed changes. they come into tso which is like fritz lang’s metropolis world except it is a colored screen, and they find it attractive enough relative to their own lives, to stay there. i have met sims who are sims because they want social contact that their own lives do not provide. i have met sims who play as families. i have seen sims who apparently run parallel lives/families and relationships on the screen, except that the “husband” or “wife” is a different “husband” or “wife” than the husband or wife they have at home: the role remains the same. i agree with you that people seek possibilities online, but i would expand your statement to include the idea that they seek possibilities online that their own rl lives do not offer them. given the bleakness of the sim world, it makes me wonder how a lot of people manage to live. urizenus has suggested that tso is a doorway to other connections, and i have heard people speak of “meta-game” where tso is also a doorway. that makes sense to me although i am new and have not seen it.

    again i want to say that i appreciate your comments.

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