Category Archives: games

“Permaplat”

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di091008

The crystal above my sim’s head is called a “plumbbob”.  Its color shows the mood of the sim, from the deep red of absolute despair through bright green satisfaction to the pure radiant white of sheer ecstatic happiness.  A happiness that can be hard to understand even for those close to you, at least when it comes from inside and just keeps flowing.

Today was not “my day”. Actually yesterday took a nosedive too, after I wrote my entry for that day.  I have had problems with the electricity to the home office for a while, as described on Tuesday. I have moved my main computer (the quad-core) into the living room, where I am typing this now.  I kept the 3-core in the home office, but it was not entirely stable.  Yesterday evening it turned itself off again, and the lights flickered.  But then the lights continued to flicker, and got even worse.  A few minutes later, the lights sputtered and dimmed and went out. They did not come back.  Today I have replaced the fuses, and they seem unharmed, but there is still no power in the home office.  Or in my bedroom either.  But my mobile phone managed to wake me up this morning, hopefully it will continue to do so for the weeks I may have left here.

About that, I called the company that had the house to let at Møll. It was not rented out yet, but they had a lot of  people who were interested.  Well, so much for that.  Since the price is fixed, I have no chance to compete with the families.  People will always rent out to a family over a single man, if the alternative exists.  This is just common sense.  Even if most single men above the age of 25 were not insane (which most probably are), they could still die at any time for any random reason. But to wipe out a whole family at once, you need a front-page-worthy car crash or something like that.  So family it is.

Not that I had much time today to chase a new place to live.  I had to get to work quickly as I had to take phone calls instead of someone who was absent for some good reason.  I don’t have a problem with people being absent. In fact, I may start being so myself.  After this, the guy who should take phone calls together with my neighbor suddenly fell off the loop, leaving said neighbor alone to fend a storm of phones (there was some small disturbance in the Net). So I had to step in repeatedly.

Now it so happens that I don’t normally talk.  I mean that literally.  I can talk for about five minutes a day (more if I can speak softly) before my throat gets sore.  Something is up with my larynx, vocal cords or whatever it is called.  It has been gradually worsening for years.  I thought for a while that my lack of talking was the reason for this rather than just the effect, but I have thought about it.  I have Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, the awesome speech recognition program from Nuance.  It is now so good that speaking to your computer is a good alternative to typing.  I have used it for NaNoWriMo for several years. And each time since it became good enough to keep using, my throat got sore and I had to cut down on it.  So this has lasted for many years, it is just that normally I don’t speak so normally I don’t notice.

Anyway, after this workday my throat was sore, verging on raw.  Experience shows that in this state it is also highly vulnerable to infections, which is another reason why I try to avoid it when possible.  Unfortunately today it wasn’t possible.  I have told my boss about the problem and have been exempt from the twice-a-week half-day phone duty.  But as permanent backup at a time where there is always someone absent, I still have to be sneaky to not destroy my throat. And some days, like today, you just can’t be sneaky, because there are people out there who need help and someone’s got to do it.

Then I came home and found that it is not just the home office and bedroom that are without power. The electric stove is also off the grid.  It should in theory be on a different course. At least this explains why the sparky sounds came both from my computer and the ventilator over the stove even though they are in different parts of the house.  So, no more hot meals for the remainder of my stay here.  Oh, wait!  There is the double hotplate / standalone cooktop that I have lugged along for 25 years where I had no use for it, just because, well, someday I might need it.  Today I needed it. MUAHAHAHA!  Then I kinda burned the bottom of the grilled cheese on the unfamiliar equipment.  But still, it was grilled cheese.

And on that note, we approach today’s topic.  You see, grilled cheese is a recurring in-joke in the Sims games, particularly Sims 2.  The game has a few major life aspirations that determine your goals and what makes you happy:  Family sims are happy when spending time with their family, marrying and having lots of babies, and staying with the same spouse all their life.  Romance sims want to kiss and make out and more with every adult they meet.  Fortune sims want to earn lots of money and get ahead in their career.  Knowledge sims want to maximize skills and perhaps become scientists or criminal masterminds.  Popularity sims want lots of friends and frequent parties.  Grilled Cheese sims want grilled cheese.

Grilled Cheese aspiration is ridiculously easy to keep happy:  Serving grilled cheese makes them happy, eating grilled cheese makes them happy, talking about grilled cheese makes them happy, and convincing someone else to make grilled cheese makes them deliriously happy for a long time.

When sims are happy enough, they enter “platinum mood”.  This has a number of small benefits and is easily seen from the bright white glow of the plumbbob, the soul gem over their head. Normally they need to keep fulfilling new wants to stay in this happy mood though.

But there is something called “permaplat” (permanent platinum mood).  It can be achieved by fulfilling a “lifetime want”,  like reaching the top of their destined career, or marrying off six children, or having eaten 200 grilled cheese sandwiches.  With the more lifelike FreeTime expansion, you can also gain permaplat from sufficient life experience, and with Apartment Life there are books you can read that will help you accumulate this experience faster after you have studied them.  Once you have reached this pinnacle of life, you will be happy forever. Well, not exactly:  Disappointments can still drag you down, especially if they are big or follow close on each other. But within an hour, the permaplat sim bounces back to full happiness again!

I won’t say I have reached this, exactly.  Life is not a video game, although video games may try to reflect life in various ways.  Perhaps if I had been Enlightened (in the Eastern sense of the word) I would have permaplat.  But as it is, there is something similar, just not as extreme. I seem to spend most of my life in an undeserved state of great happiness, not quite ecstatic for the most part but very upbeat.  Of course, this does not make for great journal entries, so it is sorely under-represented in writing.  Then something happens, like parts of the house losing power or my job doing unspeakable things to my throat, and this makes for easy writing.  But the truth is, after an hour or two I am back in platinum again, and only the pain in my throat makes me stop singing with joy.

Oh, there is a lot more to be done. A LOT more.  When my life is over I will probably wonder if I have even begun.  But there you have it.

City of Heroes: Power Spectrum

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2008-12-22 20:06:50

Colors are very important for heroes! You can’t have a green aura with a red suit, right?

And now for something entirely different.  I haven’t written about the online superhero game City of Heroes in a long time, but it is still going strong.  The question is, will it still be going strong once there is direct competition?  The people who play a superhero game are not necessarily the same as those who play elves and dwarves (although I see some suspiciously elf-like heroes sometimes). But with the release of Champions Online, there will for the first time be another dedicated superhero MMORPG, and one developed using newer technology and learning from the experience of CoH.  Learning very closely, actually, because the company that releases Champions Online is the same that originally created City of Heroes. They later sold CoH to NCSoft, a large Korean-American MMORPG company which had published and supported the game from the start.

So how does CoH prepare to meet their doom the competition? In the long run, by promises of a third expansion. There are currently two games in one, City of Heroes and City of Villains. Strangely, it is often the same people who play them both.  (I don’t like villainy myself.) A third expansion will make it possible for villains to be redeemed, gradually, through a series of quests, while heroes may become vigilantes and eventually go bad.  It will also add large new areas in another imaginary world where the heroes of Paragon City have become tyrants, and the villains freedom fighters.

This is still some way off though, and in the meantime there is Issue 16: Power Spectrum.  “Issue” is their name for the free expansions that are added to the game, typically three times a year, although not necessarily exactly every four mounts.  Some are larger and some are smaller. This one is small in the sense that it does not include new areas or radically new powersets. Instead it changes how the game works, in a number of ways.

The most obvious, if you visit the test server, is the colors.  Players can now modify the colors of all powers that have a visible effect.  Most powers have, so there are a lot of interesting colors to see.  Originally the color was hard-coded into each powerset, so it took a lot of programming to make them available to the players.  But the result may well be worth it.  The fact is that most people who come to the game with a concept of a superhero already in their head, also has color as an important part of the concept.  For instance, my Lightwielder characters from the (still unfinished) books are typical Defenders in City of Heroes, but the powerset that best corresponds to them is “Dark Miasma”. Not good!  Now, with Power Spectrum, I can change those powers to bright white, as they should be.  Your hero may vary.

While this is the most visible change, it is not the only one. The project of “power proliferation” continues, with powers that have formerly only been available to heroes becoming adapted to villains and the other way around, and some powers becoming available to more archetypes than before.  For instance, tankers and scrappers can now have an energy aura that absorbs attacks, something only available to villains before.  On the other side, villain dominators can now have Earth Assault, which is related to but not quite the same as Earth Control for Controller heroes.

Perhaps the deepest change however is not very visible. It is the way teaming works when heroes (or villains) are of different levels.  Levels play a defining role in all MMORPGs.  To go up in levels is the most important thing for many players, and it is not unusual to park a hero once it has reached the maximum level and start over with another.  But the usual approach means you move through the game world in a very defined way:  You start in the newbie zone of Atlas Park or (more rarely) Galaxy City, then move to Kings Row or The Hollows, then Steel Canyon or Skyway City, then Talos Island or Independence Port, then Brickstown or Founders Falls, then Peregrine Island, the final zone where the portals to other worlds are.

From the very start, it has been possible for a higher level hero to sidekick a lower. The sidekick operates as if 1 level lower than the mentor, but has only the powers available at his real level. The powers are boosted to the higher level, though.  Also very early came the concept of exemplaring, or reverse sidekicking, where the  higher-level hero fights on the lower level of his sidekick, but retains the enhancements to his powers, at least within certain limits, so is somewhat better than he originally was at that level.  The hero that is exemplared down does not get experience points, however, instead getting double influence points (the currency of the game).

This has changed.  Now, the team leader or owner of the current mission sets the level for all members of the team.  Lower-level characters are automatically sidekicked, and you can have as many sidekicks as the team limit allows.  (Still limited to 8 characters, not counting pets.) Conversely, higher-level heroes are automatically exemplared down to the level of the team leader / mission owner.  However, they now get xp as if they were fighting enemies their own level.  So if you would get 1000 xp for fighting a minion, you will still get 1000 xp even if it is only worth 100 to those who are naturally at that level.  This will encourage people to return to lower-level zones and help teams of younger, weaker heroes.  It is in fact possible to level all the way to 50 without ever leaving the newbie zones, if you always team with newbies.  Not a good idea, probably, unless you are my signature hero, The Eternal Newbie.  ^_^  But it is nice to be able to visit the lower zones again occasionally without having to create a new character.

Simulated angel

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di0908023

OK, this is going to be a bit weird.   Then again, so am I.

Regular readers will know that I have played the Sims games from the start in 2000, upgrading to Sims 2 in 2005 and until I got Sims 3 this summer.  Over time I developed a special way of playing, where I was always looking out for the happiness of my imaginary characters.  This culminated in the Prosperity Challenge project, where I took on the role of “Guardian Angel” for a whole neighborhood of Sims, simulated people “living” in my computer.  For each and every member of each and every family, I would seek to provide a balance between their free will, their immediate needs and guiding them toward becoming the most they could be within their aspiration.

The neighborhood started as six small families, broke and deep in debt, with no skills, no jobs and no friends outside the family, and all of them having lost loved ones before seeking refuge in the small mountain village.  From this foundation I gradually nurtured a village filled with love and friendship, where the various talents worked together to create a better future for all.  A good education, a harmonious family, a career fitting to fulfill their lifetime wants.  Befriending the randomly generated, computer-controlled characters they met in school, college or work, they drew more and more people into their society, starting to take the shape of a small town. And I would still take care of each of them individually, sometimes taking into account things that had happened much earlier in their lives (and months ago in my own timeline).

What was it that tempted me to take up such a hobby?  And why did it take this particular form?  Many players of the game will torture and even kill their characters, or use them to play out scenarios of casual or uncommon sexual relations. In a way this makes sense since they play for the enjoyment of the player, who is real, while the little computer people are not.  Or not by our standards.  To me, they were conferred a secondary reality, a thin and wavering one for sure, by the virtue of living inside my mind.  They were, as I see it now, inhabitants of the second dimension.  And it was natural for me to want to treat them the way I would want someone from a higher dimension to treat me.

***

If we for a brief time suspend disbelief (lots and lots of disbelief) and imagine that I lived in the world described by Ryuho Okawa in his “Laws” books… suddenly this all makes more sense. Why was I drawn toward acting as an angel toward lesser beings?  Because I actually was a higher-dimensional being myself, incarnated in this world as part of my education. Probably not an actual angel from the seventh dimension, but not all that far off:  Quite possibly from the Realm of Light in the sixth dimension.  Regular readers will know that I constantly make references to the Light where others might say God or Buddha or The Almighty or some such. This fairly lofty origin (though still far from the top) would explain why I was born with unusual intelligence and a deep longing for knowledge and insight in the workings of the world, or why I wanted to be a prophet at an age where other boys wanted to be fireman or pilot. It would also specifically explain my programming skills. Perhaps I was sent to Earth merely for my own education, but probably not:  I may have had some specific task in sights when I incarnated, something that would benefit many people, as is frequently the case for those who descend from that sphere.

But unfortunately, something went off track and whatever I was meant to do, never happened.  Instead I ended up alone, watching the world as if from a distance, while helping my Sims achieve the happiness and prosperity I was sent to give the humans of this world.

Where did I go wrong? What caused me to turn my back on the human world, to “bury my talent” (to use an expression from one of Jesus Christ’s stories)? How did I forget my purpose on this plane of existence? I honestly don’t have a clue.

***

Of course, my cluelessness could simply stem from not living in a world where Atlantis and Mu were real continents and where most of the world’s gods and heroes were at some point real (albeit somewhat different from how they are remembered today). That instead we each only have one life in this world, and then a final judgment, if even that.  Living in a world where talents are bestowed by genetic lottery rather than celestial hierarchy, a world that will eventually be deserted and share the fate of Venus, and where all our words and all our works will be utterly wiped from the visible universe like footsteps in the sand before the rising tide.

In such a world, playing angel for small computer people may well be the most reasonable thing for one such as me to do. Probably not, though, but “it felt meaningful at the time.”

Imaginary family superhero team

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2009-07-19 22:21:48

OK guys, this room is clear. There are nasties to your right, so follow me closely and keep your cinders ready!

Not content to have an imaginary girlfriend, I seem to have acquired a whole imaginary family. At least that is a likely interpretation, although I suppose it could also be a bunch of friends playing together and using Ventrilo or Teamspeak to coordinate their actions.

I have four computers in the house capable of playing City of Heroes, the online superhero game. At the same time, the Controller archetype is known to be the most vulnerable of the five basic archetypes and a classic support character. So what was more natural than assembling an in-house team of four controllers, with a shared power set even, and go setting bullies on fire? (Regular readers will recognize my oft repeated fascination with setting bullies on fire, after in my childhood reading about the prophet Elijah calling down fire from heaven repeatedly on cocky opponents. I later found out that this option had been discontinued in Christianity, which is surely just as well, but it still exists in City of Heroes.)

At level 17, The Firestarters are still rather squishy. They take missions (quests) a level or two below their own to stay safe, although I suppose it may be about time soon to pitch them against equal opponents. Anyway, it is a pretty sight and lots of fun for a mission or two. I don’t feel like playing like this all night though. It requires too much attention and concentration. I would rather not become so immersed in a lower world that I forget who I am.

Daggerfall legal download!

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di090710

Typical shop in Daggerfall.  Shops that sell Daggerfall, however, have been absent for quite some time.  Luckily, you can now download it for free.

The greatest computer role playing game ever made, if we ignore the primitive graphics at least, is now released on Bethsoft’s Elder Scrolls download Page. There is also a link to DOSBOX, a program that will run old MS-DOS games in Windows (or Linux, supposedly even Mac).

This means nobody needs to mail me and ask for a copy of Daggerfall anymore because they let someone borrow the disk and never got it back or the toddler broke it or they could not find it on Ebay.

I have written extensively about Daggerfall during my first years of the Chaos Node: The game was my constant companion from some time before this and until I no longer had any computers old enough to play it.  Then I wrote about it again in January when DOSBox finally could run it in the official version.  (There were tweaks to do it before, but I never got it to work then.)

I know that to a number of people I am “Mr Daggerfall”, not least here in Norway where my reviews in Databladet were laying the groundwork for the popularity of the Elder Scrolls series here.  Unfortunately Databladet went the way of all flesh, and we who worked for it drifted apart.  This also largely happened to alt.games.daggerfall eventually, the Usenet group where I made a number of interesting friends. Good times were had by all, as we gathered to swap tales of our exploits.

None of these things will come back, this is the nature of time and the world.  But at least it is now possible for anyone who wants, to play the game for free.

Thunder and router

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di090707

Old router brought back after years in a dusty plastic bag.

Last night as I was about to go to bed, very sleepy, I thought I heard far-off thunder.  I turned off all the computers and the network (router and ADSL modem) and disconnected them from the mains.  I did not however unplug the phone cables.  Perhaps I should have, but probably it would have made no difference.

When I woke up, it had rained but was already clearing up.  The air stayed cooler both indoors and outdoors for all of the day.  But I could not connect to the Internet.  I decided to give it time and went to work. It has happened before during thunderstorm season that the ISP’s node has been out of commission for a few hours.  But when I returned, I still could not get online.

Still, there was something strange going on.  My Winamp Remote icon in the Windows tray showed that I was connected, although I had been unable to connect to it from work.  (I often play music at work from my hard disk at home, now that I have transferred all my CDs to hard disk.) When I tried to load a page, it started, seemed to load a tiny bit of it, but then gave up.  And when I ran network diagnosis on the Vista machine, it said I was connected to the Internet after I fiddled a bit with the cables.  (I am not sure that was actually necessary.)  I even got City of Heroes running on that machine. It took some tries to get connected, but once it hooked up, the speed was just fine.  Still, I could not load web pages on any of my computers, nor connect the LiveJournal client or Opera Unite.  Something was amiss.

I unplugged the WAN cable from the home network router and plugged it straight in my main PC.  It warned me that there might be limited or no connection, but moments later I could connect to everything at the speed I have purchased and then some. Of course the other machines were now disconnected from the Net.  The main problem with this was that I could not dualbox in City of Heroes.

Lately, after  days of a strict Sims 3 gaming diet, I have returned to City of Heroes. My imaginary girlfriend, who for good measure roleplays my imaginary wife in that particular game, has several characters around level 30 on Virtue, the unofficial official roleplaying server.  (There are no official roleplaying servers, but the players have decided on this one for roleplaying.) Anyway, level 30 is a good time to start on the zone Brickstown, which has a nice mix of smaller and larger groups of villains shortly after you leave the train station. Well, the short of it is that my imaginary female companion has mostly support characters, defenders and controllers, which are not all that good at playing alone.  Sometimes she gets a spot on some random team, but if not I will log on one of my official characters and help her out. I have a number of tankers and scrappers on Virtue, which go well with her defenders and controllers respectively.  (By “her” I am referring to an imaginary player, but the dynamic would be the same with real players.)

Because of all this I really wanted to have at least two computers online, but I could only get one to work.  On the other hand, when the router was connected, I could call up shared files on another local computer in the blink of an eye.  Clearly both the router and the ADSL modem worked, but somehow it seemed that they hated each other’s guts.  I could even connect to the modem through the router from my PC, so clearly the connection was there. But the router did not want to route data to and from the Internet.

I am not sure the thunder was part of this at all, truth to tell. The surge would have needed to go through the modem without hurting it, then hitting the router, yet doing so little damage that it could do anything else than load web pages.  Suspicious.  If we exclude malicious intent, the most likely cause is probably overheating.  The Jensen router is very compact and gets hot even in winter. In summer it is disturbingly hot to the touch and could really have needed some cooling.  It may be too late now, however.

Around bedtime I decided to fetch the old router, which I had stopped using sometime before I moved here.  The problem was that its wireless network was very weak and had a ridiculously small radius, something like the size of my previous living room.  I did not get a good connection from my bedroom. There may have been other issues too, but if so I have forgotten them.  One nice thing about it is, it is much less hot.  I unplugged the old and plugged everything into the even older, which had spent the last several years in a dusty plastic bag in my cupboard. It did not work.  I was not too surprised.  I had a new ISP since then, probably two.  I found the user manual (which was on a CD) and managed to log into the router. Here I changed the setup from PPPOE to Dynamic something, and within a minute the computers were connected!  Good as new!

Happy ending, except that I was now extremely sleepy again and also felt a little sick. I went to bed, the computers happily chatting with the Internet.

To be continued?

Sims 3: Children

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di090624

Girlfriend’s daughter wants a laptop that she can play Sims on!  This stands to reason, since her mother is also a computer geek like me.

Needless to say, the girl is not mine, even in the game.  Although she is a major reason why I decided to live with them, to help the little girl grow up well.  Growing up well has taken on a new dimension in Sims 3:  It now directly influences the traits of the children.

If you are playing the pregnant mother (there are no pregnant fathers in Sims 3) then her happiness during the pregnancy transfers to the baby.  If she is healthy and happy, you get to choose the two starting traits of the child.  Remember, each Sim has a maximum of 5 traits, chosen from a few dozen good, bad and just weird ones. Two are determined at birth, the third when the toddler grows up to child, the fourth when she becomes a teen, and the last when growing up to adult. At any of these occasions, a truly horrible past is likely to be reflected in negative traits, such as Evil, Insane or Kleptomaniac. A so-so upbringing will give a random trait, while a happy life leaves the choice to the player rather than just picking a good trait.  This is a nice incentive to keep an eye on the kids, but also painfully unrealistic.

It is a sad sign of how much the fake liberal philosophy has permeated society that the game has completely abandoned any trace of inheritable traits.  In The Sims 2, there was a strong tendency for nice Sims to have nice Children, active Sims to have active children and so on.  You could then modify these traits if one of the parents (or even grandparents) had a particularly strong side, they could encourage children to develop in a special direction despite their genes, but it took lots of time.  The new system makes for more drama and hilarity, sure, but it is a long step backwards in realism.  At the very least the two birth traits should have been picked at random from the parents’ traits.  (Or the parent’s trait, in case of parthenogenesis.)

Have I gone on and on about (sim)parthenogenesis yet?  I should.  The game takes place in a town with a limited but fairly large number of houses.  It is not actually a town, of course, but there are a couple dozen families I think.  There are not quite that many when you start, but new families will randomly move in from time to time.  Some families will also randomly move out unless you have a hack to stop them, such as the ever useful Awesomemod.

Since time flows for everyone in this game, the members of the various families will grow older and eventually expire.  (They may also die in accidents, but this is not common.) If the neighbors did not also reproduce, we would soon end up with a literal ghost town.  The game is very reluctant to let any household die out, even if it happens to only contain a single sim or a couple friends of the same gender. So does it compel them to seek out a mate?  No, it simply dumps a baby on them.  If they do happen to be married, the baby will have two parents and inherit its looks from both of them.  But if the parent is single, the baby has only one parent and retains its skin and hair color, although it is not a complete clone. Also, there is no visible pregnancy.  (This makes sense as it can happen as easily to males.) We call this parthenogenesis, virgin origin. Lest someone suspect blasphemy, let me assure you that the concept is well known from biology, as many insects routinely reproduce without intercourse, as do a few vertebrates.

Wanja in the picture above is a spontaneous offspring of Ari Moore, my self-sim’s in-game girlfriend. (Not to be confused with my imaginary girlfriend. This is my imaginary self-sim’s imaginary girlfriend.)  Ari lived with two other women and had, to the best of my knowledge, no romantic relationships.  Certainly Wanja is listed as having only one parent, and looks a lot like her mother (but not an all-out clone). Since I was not playing that family, the game randomly gave the child two traits, fairly decent traits luckily, but none of them were from her mother.  So it fell to me to give her some realistic traits while raising her. As you can see, it worked out pretty well…

Sim children have a lot of schoolwork. Certainly more than Americans, who only have symbolic amounts of homework compared to other civilized countries. On the other hand, they have a longer vacation. Wait, that’s on the same hand. Anyway, Sim children have no vacation ever, and their homework takes the better part of the rest of the day unless they get help.  Luckily a skilled parent can cut down heavily on the time spent and the frustration felt.  Failing that, doing homework together with other kids will make it more fun, although I am not sure if it actually goes faster.  More testing is in order.  Sim Magnus usually would help Wanja with her homework, of course. He also had the option to tutor her, although I am not sure what effect (if any) this has in the game.

If your simulated child fails to do homework one day, all is not lost.  When in school, there is a small menu where you can decide what they do there:  Work hard, work normally, make friends, hang out with existing friends, or do homework.  If they fail entirely to do their homework, and don’t work hard during school hours, grades start slipping.  There is a happiness reward for good grades, but not only that: Bad grades means your kid risks growing up to an insane kleptomaniac or a neurotic with commitment issues.

Luckily there are certain random events that let a child improve its standing in school temporarily by for instance catching a particular fish or writing a report.  My teen sim had this, not sure if they get them in grade school too.  It does not happen all the time though so don’t rely on it.

Teen Sims still have homework, and can take a part-time job as well. Luckily they come home earlier, just like in Sims 2. But between work and romance, the long homework really does cut into their lives. Having a parent (or resident genius) to help comes in very handy.  I suppose this also applies in real life. Then again I am not some liberal post-modernist extolling the virtues of the post-nuclear family.

Self-simming

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di090623

My cell phone is ringing, while my girlfriend is telling me what she REALLY thinks about me. How did it end up like this?  Luckily it is all a game, namely Sims 3, and I have a backup from before I got a girlfriend to begin with, before the whole midlife crisis thing.

Pretty much each evening I’ve spent a good chunk of time playing The Sims 3. I finally got around to making a self-sim!  Actually you saw him yesterday too, although that was not an entry about the game.  I am not good at making sims, since my right brain hemisphere is pretty much stuffed with hay as regards any talents more complex than walking and slightly erroneous typing. You would probably not have mistaken this guy for me if you met him on the street. But once you know he’s my self-sim, you can probably see it.  If you have seen me in the flesh or on the innumerable photos in my journal in 1998 and a few years onward.

Even though I was pretty enthusiastic about the game already, I was taken by surprise by just how much fun it is to have a little computer guy who looks and acts vaguely like me, except he is a talented painter and scientist and grows a garden of “life fruit” that keeps him aging much more slowly than people around him.  (Myself I only have the brainwave thingy, and it is not quite that efficient.  At least not yet.)

Also, it makes for a wide range of illustration “photos” that I could not possibly produce in real life.

Sims 3: Paintings and novels

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di090615

Tools of the trade(s).

If you don’t want to run on the career treadmill, or if your life goal is to be an illustrious author, you would love to live in the world of Sims 3. In this near future scenario, the demand for handmade paintings and novels is insatiable. I have of course come up with a rational explanation for this. Obsessed, me? Nah, just your ordinary genius. Here we go:

If you look at the workplaces in Sims 3, you will notice that nobody works at a factory or warehouse or drives a truck. These things either don’t exist or nobody cares enough to place them on the map. Even the fast-food outlet is not hiring. The jobs either require a human touch or a bit of genius: Medicine, science, law enforcement, music etc. (And, strangely enough, the military; I suppose some people still believe in military intelligence…)

So my theory is that in the timeline of Sims 3, manufacture has been entirely automated and is now in the claws of industrial robots, with minimal if any human supervision. There is an unlimited variety of mass produced goods – you can for instance get your clothes and sofa in matching polka dots if you so desire – but there are still things the machines can’t do.

With the market for machine-made stuff saturated, people value things that are actually handmade, such as firsthand paintings and new novels. Actually this is a trend already in motion, and one that has been predicted to explode once nanomachines make it as easy to copy hardware as it now is to copy software. (I don’t believe that will happen, by the way. But robotic manufacture? It could well happen in our world too. We’ve been on that path for a long time.)

Anyway, that’s the conjecture. The “fact” of the game world is that paintings and novels are paid fairly well. The last couple days I’ve been playing a guy who wanted to become an illustrious author, that is to say someone who has realized his full potential in both illustration (painting) and writing. I’ll share my mistakes for the benefit of those who will follow after me.

My first mistake was to take a job, and keep it for too long. The guy wanted to get a job in medicine, something that does not at all relate to his lifetime goal. I let him get such a job, and he wasted years emptying bedpans at a lousy pay, just like in the real world. Also like in the real world, as soon as he started to get a livable wage, he was put on call. He would come home stressed and dirty and tired, take a shower and sit down with the chess board to have some fun while improving his logic skill. (Logic skill is used in the medicine career in Sims 3; your opinion may vary on whether this also is like the real world.) This guy was even a genius, meaning he took easily to logic. But by the time he was in a reasonably good mood, it was time to go to bed. And then the phone would ring, and he would have to hurry to the hospital and work until he was on the verge of collapse. He barely made it back to the bed without fainting, and then three hours later it was time to get up and go to work again. It is entirely too realistic. So he finally quit. I should have done that long before.

My next mistake was to start with the writing instead of painting. I guess my personal bias blinded me. And in all fairness, I believe writing pays more. However, there are still at least three good reasons to choose painting first:
1) Painting is fun. Not as fun as computer games, but your Sim will grow steadily more smiley as he keeps working. This is not true for writing (and most other things that earn money). With writing, you have to take breaks and do something fun or you will get depressed, or at the very least lose out on those lifetime happiness points. Remember, if your Sim is happy, those points trickle in and lets you purchase various upgrades to body and soul eventually.
2) Painting pays off as soon as you are finished. With books, you get only small advances while you write, and most of the money comes over the next six weeks, and only once a week, on Sunday. That is fine when you are financially secure, but it sucks if you have to sell your dining table to pay your bills.
3) At a high skill level, a couple paintings in each room will greatly raise the room score, and your Sim will get a bonus to happiness for as long as he stays in the room. My artistic Sim now has them even in the bathroom. As long as he is at home, the happiness points keep rolling in, even in his sleep. Novels have no such effect, as far as I know.  (Then again he keeps them in his inventory.)

A related mistake was trying to keep friends. There is a reason why writers are regarded as reclusive, and I may have been wrong in assuming that they were simply that way before they started writing. (It is hard for me to say, since I have been writing since before I started  grade school.) Between gardening, writing, and replenishing his fun, there was time for little more than eating, peeing and sleeping. Writing really is a full-time job, at least until you become famous. Since he was a friendly, charismatic person (I gave him those traits because I wanted to learn to know the inhabitants of Sunset Valley), he constantly wanted to be friends with people, or meet someone new, or just chat. And I let him. But of course the friendships unraveled quickly when he tried to actually get some writing done.

I don’t really count the gardening as a mistake, although it takes its time. The thing about gardening is that eventually you will be able to grow life fruit. Sirius Sim was lucky and found a life fruit seed fairly early, and a money tree seed as well. (I dislike the money tree, too jarring break with realism, but the seeds are not labeled when you pick them. You can see how common or uncommon they are, but not what species.) Life fruit and money tree are both “special” seeds that you can find near the graveyard or research center, and the sooner in your life you find a life fruit seed, the better your chance of becoming immortal or something close to it. You need a gardening skill of 7 to plant special seeds though, and he did not have that when he found them. So gardening was in order. Of course, you may want to become immortal through your works of art. Me, my Sim and Woody Allen all prefer to become immortal through not dying, although only my Sim has a reasonable shot at it.

Once I shifted my focus to painting, things soon started to improve. The first paintings are not enough to pay the bills, but it does not take long before money worries start to fade. Well, unless you have the “snob” trait, in which case you probably have to buy lots of expensive stuff. But who in their right mind would choose to be a snob? By the time he had fully mastered the skill of painting, the house was moderately larger and he had enough cash to do nothing for a generation or two if he so desired.

I’ll still maximize his writing skill, since it is his lifetime want, but after that I intend to let him make more friends and perhaps, one day, find love. I mean, this is not my self-Sim by any stretch of the imagination. He already met a super cute woman who was a nice bookworm like himself and they became best friends in the course of one evening. But of course she was already married. That’s the kind of blows faith strikes in Sims 3. In Sims 2, all the townies were single. Oh well. Let us hope she has daughters as cute as herself. Sirius is planning to stick around for a few generations, after all…

Sims 3, wife simulator

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di090607 “And then she had to open her big mouth.”

“Wife simulator” is a pun, of course. (If there really are wife simulators out there, I would rather not know.) It refers to the phrase “life simulator” that is fondly used about The Sims series. Some may wonder why you would want a life simulator when you already have a life. The game, they conclude, must be for those who don’t have a life. But this requires the (all too common) fallacy that there is only one life possible, namely the one you have. I know better, since my life is very different from yours.

One of the many things my life does not include is an actual wife. (There is occasionally some doubt about this, because of role playing, but believe me, I would have known. And in any case, just suspend your stunned disbelief for the sake of the exposition.) The funny thing is that virtually all my grown-up Sims in the Sims 2 were married. There were a few who had a permanent fear of marriage, but they were otherwise quite content to live in a monogamous relationship. Most of these couples also had a child or more. Actually, most of them wanted to have children. And that makes a lot of sense, because their lifespan is limited, and it is kind of sad to end up with a house with only an urn in it. In a way, it feels like their life is wasted – or nearly so – if they don’t have a new generation to benefit from it.

In real life, of course, there are more meanings to life than simply accumulating cool stuff for future generations and teach them various useful skills. And since The Sims 3 is generally more realistic than its predecessors, perhaps it will have more singles? Yes, probably. As I mentioned in my initial review, it is now possible to create a Sim with the personality traits Loner and Unflirty. Between them, these two traits pretty much makes sure the Sim does not get romantically involved, barring intervention from their creator. (And why would their creator do that after taking the trouble to make them that way?)

After playing for a while with my loner, I made someone who was almost the opposite. While still Good, she was Family-oriented, Friendly, Charismatic and Lucky. And with a little prodding, she actually got a good number of friends and lots of acquaintances. But romance is another matter. It takes a lot more dedication than in The Sims 2, where the Sims would more or less fall into it by themselves. Here it seems to take an extreme dedication. In fact, and this is horribly realistic, it seems to be easier for them to have babies than find love.

Not one to give up halfway, I set out today making a couple instead of a single Sim. They are pretty much the perfect couple, with an ideal mix of shared and complementary traits. Both of them are Good, Friendly Geniuses, but she is a Frugal Bookworm while he is a Lucky Computer Whiz. While there is some more stress involved for me in juggling two Sims, they have a blast. Since both of them can use the Friendly “brighten day” interaction, as well as giving compliments, they can quickly cheer each other up after a hard workday. (Sims take compliments quite seriously, and are happy for three hours after one, if they accept it all of course. Being so compatible, these two always do.) It is, as I have long suspected, wonderful to live with your best friend.

Now, about the romance… Between their jobs where they try to advance, and her lifetime goal as a novelist, there just isn’t much time for romancing. And evidently it takes time now. Despite the occasional kiss, there just aren’t any more advanced romantic interactions available. Even though they both roll the wish for “woohoo” (sex) and a baby, the path from here to there is just so long. I hear this is the case for some real people too. I blame the women and their weird notion that flowers and candles are in any way related to the birds and the bees. OK, I can see bees liking flowers, but that’s it. Birds most assuredly don’t like candles. (Moths do, I guess, but let’s not go there with this safe, family-friendly romance.) Please, my dear Sim couple, you’ve been married since before I started playing you!

(Returns from game) Well, it was doable, and it only took the evening. The key is to start with something reasonable, and keep an eye on the list of available interactions. After kissing massage shows up (which turns out to be the old backrub from Sims 1 and 2, but now it has become a more intimate thing than kissing. What do I know?) After massage, make out becomes available. And eventually, after climbing the ladder of interactions, “woohoo” and “try for baby” show up. The happy couple are now able to find a suitable location on their own, and do not have to be sent off to a bed first. Yay! We try for baby, and thanks to their relatively young age, or the kids radio they have listened to, or sheer good luck, pregnancy ensues! Thank goodness, now we won’t have to go through this again for quite some time…