Sims Life

What other game can you relate to better other than Sims? I have found the Sims characters to do more and be more active than I am in my daily life. Sims continues to grow and become more and more realistic.
The Sims is a strategic life simulation computer game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. It was created by game designer Will Wright, also known for developing SimCity. It is a simulation of the daily activities of one or more virtual persons in a suburban household near SimCity.
The Sims was first released on February 4, 2000. By March 22, 2002, The Sims had sold more than 6.3 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling PC game in history. The game has shipped 16 million copies worldwide as of February 7, 2005. Since its initial release, seven expansion packs and a sequel, The Sims 2, have been released. Another sequel, The Sims 3, is currently under production. The Sims has won numerous awards, including GameSpot's "Game of the Year Award" for 2000.
The Sims focuses entirely on the lives of virtual people called Sims, placing the player in control of their virtual world and their daily activities, such as sleeping, eating, reading, and bathing. Will Wright, the game's designer, calls it a "digital dollhouse"[citation needed]. Although players are encouraged to make their own characters, certain pre-made characters, such as the Newbie and Goth family, have become popular.
The player controls almost all aspects of the lives of a family either premade or self-created. Many choices lead a player's sim to a large household or a single life. The idea for The Sims is thought to be drawn from Will Wright's experience in the 1991 Oakland firestorm, when his house and many of his possessions were destroyed in the fire. Wright was required to move his family elsewhere and rebuild his life. These events led to Will's inspiration of creating a simulated game about life. The game is also loosely based on SimCity, another computer game designed by Wright in which the player must manage a city and its citizenry, dubbed "Sims". The idea of simulated people led Wright to believe that he could program and design the perfect construct of the main aspects that a computer or video game possesses.
Wright originally proposed the idea of a virtual "dollhouse" to Maxis in 1993 while the idea was still in development, although the proposal was met with skepticism. Computer hardware during the period was not thought to be capable of running such a simulation smoothly. In 1995, Wright was offered an opportunity from Electronic Arts to continue developing the concept and game so that EA could publish it. Development of the game, initially dubbed "Project X," commenced in 1995.
After production for the game finally began in 1995, Wright was interviewed about his idea in a PC Magazine article published around 1995, in which he talked about the chance for players to control a computer generated character in their own environment.
In 1997, the name of the game was changed from "Project X" to "The Sims"[verification needed] as a reference to Will Wright's earlier Sim games, which had been very successful in the early- to mid-1990s. Instead of objectives, the player is encouraged to make choices and engage fully in an interactive environment. This has helped the game successfully attract casual gamers. The only real objective of the game is to organize the Sims' time to help them reach personal goals.
In the beginning, the game offers players pre-made characters as well as the option to create more Sims that they can control. Creating a Sim consists of creating a family, identified by a last name, that can hold up to eight members. The player can then create Sims, by providing the Sim a first name and optional biography, and choosing the sex , skin complexion and age of the Sim. The personality of the Sim is dictated by five attributes: Neat, outgoing, active, playful, and nice and a specific head & body type. A Sim's body is bundled with a specific body physique and clothing. The player cannot change a Sim's face, name, or personality once they have been moved onto a lot.
Each family, regardless of how many members are in it, starts with a limited amount of cash ($20,000) that will be needed to purchase a house or vacant land, build or remodel a house, and purchase furniture. All architectural features and furnishings are dictated by a tile system, in which items must be placed on a square and rotated to face exactly a 90 degree angle with no diagonals permitted. Walls and fences go on the edge of a square and can be diagonal, whereas furniture and Sims take up one or more squares and cannot be diagonal. There are over 150 home building materials and furnishings for purchase.
Sims are directed on the basis of instructing them to interact with objects, such as a television set, a piece of furniture or another Sim. Sims may receive house guests, which are actually based on the Sims of other game files. The player cannot control visiting Sims, although it is important for Sims to interact with one another in order to develop a healthy social life and gain popularity.
Sims have a certain amount of free will, meaning they will engage in activities when left to their own devices, though player commands will override anything a Sim decides to do on its own. However, Sims may not perform important commands, such as find a job or conceive a child. Unlike the simulated environments in games such as SimCity, SimEarth, or SimLife, the Sims are not fully autonomous. They are unable to take certain actions without specific commands from the player, such as paying their bills. Thus, if left alone, without any player supervision, the Sims will eventually develop overdue bills and their property will be repossessed.
The player must make decisions about time spent in personal development, such as exercise, reading, creativity, and logic, by adding activities to the daily agenda of the Sims. Daily need fulfillment must also be scheduled, such as personal hygiene, eating, and sleeping. If the simulated humans do not perform need fulfillment, they suffer consequences. For example, if they do not eat, they will die of starvation. If they do not go to the bathroom, they will wet themselves. If they do not have fun, they become depressed, and unwilling to do things. When Sims have low motives they are more likely to be nasty to other Sim characters by insulting them, slapping them and even attacking them.
Financial health is simulated by the need to send the Sims to find jobs, go to work and pay bills.
There are several career tracks, with ten steps in each. A Sim that makes a number of new friends and learns the right skills, can get promoted, and receive a raise and changed work hours. The original careers are, Business, Entertainment, Law Enforcement, Crime, Medicine, Military, Politics, Pro Athlete, Science and Xtreme. The expansion packs add new careers.
The inner structure of the game is actually an agent based artificial life program. The presentation of the game's artificial intelligence is advanced, and the Sims will respond to outside conditions by themselves, although often the player/controller's intervention is necessary to keep them on the right track. The Sims technically has unlimited replay value, in that there is no way to win the game, and the player can play on indefinitely.
A neighborhood in The Sims consists of a single screen displaying all playable houses. In addition, the game includes a very advanced architecture system. The game was originally designed as an architecture simulation alone, with the Sims there only to evaluate the houses, but during development it was decided that the Sims were more interesting than originally anticipated and their initially limited role in the game was developed further.
The first game of The Sims has several limitations, most noticed was that children never grow up to become adults, though babies do eventually become children. Also, adult Sims never age and there is no concept of weekends. For example, adults and children are expected to go to work and attend school respectively, every day. Adults receive a warning if they miss one day of work, but they are fired if they miss work for two consecutive days. Children can study at home to keep their school grades up.
While there is no eventual objective to the game, failure does exist in The Sims. One is that Sims may die, either by starvation, drowning, perishing in a fire, electrocution or by virus. In this case, the ghost of the deceased Sim may haunt the building where it died. In addition, Sims can leave a household for good and never return. Two adult Sims with a bad relationship may fight, eventually resulting in one of them moving out. If a child has failing grades for too long, he or she will be sent to military school and also leave the lot for good.
The Sims uses a combination of 3D and 2D graphics techniques. The Sims themselves are rendered as high-poly-count 3D objects, but the house, and all its objects, and are pre-rendered.

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Bush, Hawthorne and The Internet Today

I can see how Bush’s Memex could be compared to Hawthorne’s describtion of the wood burning stove. The wood burning stove can be put in individual rooms of a house instead of the family coming together to stay warm by the fireplace. I know that once my family got a computer with the internet we would all fight for time to facebook, instant message, email, ebay, among many things. That was less time spent with my family and more time spent collecting friends online as if they were baseball cards.
In Bush's 1945 paper, he describes a memex as an electromechanical device that an individual could use to read a large self-contained research library, and add or follow associative trails of links and notes created by that individual, or recorded by other researchers.
The technology used would have been a combination of electromechanical controls and microfilm cameras and readers, all integrated into a large desk. Most of the microfilm library would have been contained within the desk, but the user could add or remove microfilm reels at will.
The vision of the memex predates, but is credited as the inspiration for the first practical hypertext systems of the 1960s. Bush describes the memex and other visions of As We May Think as projections of technology known in the 1930s and 1940's in the spirit of Jules Verne or Arthur C. Clarke's 1945 proposal to orbit geosynchronous satellites for global telecommunication. The memex proposed by Bush would create trails of links connecting sequences of microfilm frames, rather than links in the modern sense where a hyperlink connects a single word, phrase or picture within a document and a local or remote destination.
The closest analogy with the modern Web browser would be to create a list of bookmarks pointing to articles relevant to a topic, and then to have some mechanism for automatically scrolling through the articles, for example, if you use Google to search for a keyword, obtain a list of matches, and then use "open in new tab" in your browser and visit each tab in sequence. Modern hypertext systems with word and phrase-level linking offer more sophistication in connecting relevant information, but until the rise of wiki and other social software models, modern hypertext systems have rarely followed Bush in providing individuals with the ability to create personal trails and share them or publish them widely.
The memex would have features other than linking. The user could record new information on microfilm, by taking photos from paper or from a touch-sensitive translucent screen. A user could "... insert a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. ... Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him." A user could also create a copy of an interesting trail containing references and personal annotations and "... pass it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail." As observers like Tim Oren have pointed out, the memex could be considered to be a microfilm-based precursor to the personal computer. The September 10, 1945 Life magazine article showed the first illustrations of what the memex desk could look like, as well as illustrations of a head-mounted camera, which a scientist could wear while doing experiments, and a typewriter capable of voice recognition and of reading text by speech synthesis. Taken together, these memex machines were probably the earliest practical description of what we would call today the Office of the future. Bush's vision for the memex extended far beyond a mechanism which might augment the research of one individual working in isolation. In Bush's vision the ability to connect, annotate and share both published works and personal trails would profoundly change the process by which the world's record is created and used.
A wood-burning stove is a heating appliance capable of burning wood fuel and wood-derived biomass fuel. Generally the appliance consists of a solid metal (usually cast iron or steel) closed fire chamber, a grate and an adjustable air control. The appliance will be connected to a suitable chimney or flue which will fill with hot combustion gasses once the fuel is ignited. It is critical that the chimney or flue gasses are hotter than the outside temperature as this will result in combustion gasses being drawn out of the fire chamber and up the chimney.
Closed appliances offer far greater efficiency than open fires as the user can control the combustion inside the fire chamber through the air control (this ensures that the wood burns at a controlled rate). Heat is radiated into the room as the stove body becomes hot. Open fires suffer from lower efficiency as they have access to far greater oxygen supply, which causes them to roar away meaning that more heat is sent up the chimney rather than into the room.
After years of trying to stay warm in a cabin in Boone with friends and family by the fireplace and years of wanting to stay on top of everyone’s status on Facebook I have come to realize that as great as the wood-burning stove and the memex I much prefer time away from the computer.

My First Computer Experiences

In 1991 I remember my father bringing home a computer from his business.   I was four years old and thought this huge, bulky machine was great.  My family thought it was an eye sore having something so large and undecorative, so we stuck it in my sister’s room. My sister and I would play all sorts of games on it for hours at a time determined to win and move on to the next level.  My favorite games were Pac-man, wheel of fortune, and wall blast.  The images were very pixilated and used bright neon colors. There were only games, a typing program, and programs for my fathers business.  I remember there only being drives for the huge, hand sized floppy disks. I now find it so strange that we never had a mouse to navigate our way around the computer screen.  We had to use keys on the keyboard to find our way around. 

            The following year I started kindergarten and was able to use the computers a few days a week for spelling and math activities. There were headphones for each computer that had bulky earpieces and a piece that came down to your mouth for you to be able to speak into.  I remember thinking the headsets were so awesome because they looked like headsets employees had to wear at McDonalds to place your order. (For some reason that fascinated me.) I continued using computers almost everyday throughout elementary school.  I use to have to use encyclopedias to find information for projects and papers but toward the end of elementary school and beginning of middle school I could just type in a few words and get endless amounts of information.  I still find it unbelievable how much information you can get on the most random of topics. 

            When I was in fifth grade we had upgraded our computer at home and got the Internet.  There were countless fights in our house about wanting to use the phone and someone being on the Internet and vice verse.  I can still hear that awful, load, and annoying dial up tone to connect to the Internet that seemed to take forever.  When we first got the internet I would use it some for class projects but as soon as AOL Instant Messenger came around when I was in sixth grade it was all down hill from there.  My father would have to pry me away from the computer.  Now that I look back on it, it was a huge waste of my time.  It only fueled rumors and gossip for people my age. Today I have found better use for Instant Messenger.  I very rarely sign on but I find it helpful in the workplace.  It is easier for me to ask someone across the room a question if I am in the middle of something instead of stopping what I am doing and walking over to them.  It is hard to believe how far computers have come in just a few short years. I can’t wait to see what is ahead.