The Alphaville Herald

Diary of a Newbie, part 2

by Alphaville Herald on 07/03/04 at 10:49 am

by m.tovar

in thinking about my infancy as a sim, it has been hard for me to express myself about it, even to myself. i go to the sims place and i see so many things. it is hard to know what to write down first. right now i am most tempted to use the words “the commodification of social interaction” where “commodification” means that a person pays a sum of money to speak to people that he or she would normally avoid in a supermarket or caf.

it seems like most people involved with the internet are involved with it from the consumer side of things and mostly they are buying and selling objects and interaction, whether or not they recognize it as such. they are also simultaneously experience the results of many decisions that were made without their knowledge and consent. most of these decisions have to do with what they, as end-users, will or will not be able to do while online. these actions or tracks are called “user trajectories” and they’re all carefully engineered by platoons of people with titles like “graphical user interface designer” “experience designer” “usability engineer” “experience strategist” “trajectory designer”. if a user can do something while online, it is there because the interface engineering made such a thing possible. it is in light of this that i find the discussion of violence, sex, and other gray behaviors in sims-online so interesting. these gray promises are there because ea made them possible in the sims-online interface. no one has really spoken to that, and that is predictable.

while there are undoubtedly a number of things that the sims-online user will interrogate in detail, the game’s graphical user interface is generally not one of them. i think that the sims user does not interrogate the interface because the audience appears to be mostly made of “late adopters”: people who are coming late to the party, so to speak; people who are, relative to the internet and screen-interaction, what programmers used to call in a “larval stage” of development. they are living out their plague years and later on it may be that they will speak of their sims time in the same hushed and guilty tones that some people use when speaking of their relationship with aol. i am also sure that sims users are ready to deny this with one voice, loudly, just as they will probably want to deny that they handed over their “added value” to the highwaypersons who met them at the city gates when they entered the land of the sims.

since 1996 my involvement with internet projects has been from the corporate side. coming to the corporate side of that world initiated me into language and information that was not available to me as a consumer and end-user. the new information and language affirmed a lot of what i had previously thought about what was going with the internet. it also taught me that i had, if anything, underestimated and understated the situation. i had also underestimated the amount of time and energy that was being thrown at the social commodification project for both graphical and text-based interfaces. these projects have one goal in common, though. they are none of them entirely about social interaction. some social projects are fronts for data-warehousing enterprises, others are building customer-driven product knowledge bases, others solicit feature-functionality requirements for the next version of a given product, and still others are trying to cluster demographic groups. this list is not exhaustive, and is not meant to be so. sims-online is a graphically based, nominally entertaining project. i suspect, but cannot confirm, that it is trying to cluster demographic groups. i suspect this because of the way the sim bodies are designed: the appearance of sims was created for a male gaze. behaviors around domesticity and grooming are created with a magnificent ignorance of the actions involved. sims-online appears to have been designed by, and for, stereotypical boys.

it is true that virtual communities, like blogs and the internet itself, have been appropriated by the marketing and sales departments/divisions of large companies with products to sell. when i wander through sims i wonder, for example, if sims-online producers have meetings about product placement. i am fascinated by the side-market, through e-bay, in sims-online status objects. prices on ebay for these objects make me think that the sims-online players have money to spare. because of this i wonder when i will start seeing licensed limited-edition sims status objects designed by the likes of porsche and versace for sale on ebay. this idea surely must have occurred to the sims-online marketeers already. corporations think this way. end-users do not think this way. end-users think about their last flame festival, or about getting hot chat with that sizzling new member they saw for the first time yesterday. they don’t think about cost of entry in terms of information. they don’t think about the meaning of what they’re doing, or even why they are moved towards one action or behavior instead of another. they assume freedom of movement where none exists. it fascinates me.