I thought we were going to be playing The Sims today, but we aren't, but Laura says that we can send 5-6 people into the game lab to play then come back and send the next group over.
Laura's story of Bogost:
Very famous game theorist at Georgia Tech. He got his Ph.D. at UCLA in comparative literature. He worked for Persuasive Games at the same time. In order to get a Ph.D, you have to go to 6 years of schooling after college, and you apparently get pleasure as opposed to money. You have to get an MA before a Ph.D, know two languages other than English, take a ton of exams, get a job, then publish a book within 5 years of being hired. So when Bogost finally turned in his dissertation after 10 years, it apparently sucked so bad that they failed him. He went on to become very famous and do a lot of good things, which shows that you should always pick yourself up and keep on keepin on.
"Video games are an expressive medium." Bogost will talk about games as art, and will give us a way of analyzing them called "procedural rhetoric."
- The Sims Presentation
- Brought the player into the individual home
- Plumbob
- Diamond shape that hangs over the player’s avatar person
- You can control his every move or give him free will and let him do what he wants
- Sandbox game
- No rules
- Do whatever you want
- Control their daily lives
- Cooking, eating, relationships, learning
- Creative outlet
- Design
- Narrative
- o History
- Created by Will Wright, creator of Sim City in 1989
- 6.3 copies sold worldwide by March 2002
- Expansion packs
- Livin’ Large
- House Party
- Hot Date
- Vacation
- Unleashed
- Superstar
- Makin’ Magic
- Player Modifications
- Give you a ton of different things you can do with your sims
- The Sims 2 and Expansions
- Released 2004
- Selling a record 1 million copies in first 10 days
- Features
- University
- Nightlife
- Open for Business
- Pets
- Seasons
- Bon voyage
- Free Time
- Apartment Life
- Almost on a 6 month cycle
- Characters were able to slump and slouch rather than being stiff and 2 dimensional
- Don’t have to buy all of them, but you have to have the base game then you can add the expansion packs to them in any order
- The Sims 3
- World Adventures
- Ambitions
- Late Night
- Generations
- May 2011
- Players have been collaborating with each other for years
- Medieval was a really big theme, and EA liked it, so they released Sims Medieval
- Set in Medieval times
- Can have quests and lords and stuff
- Create a World Tool
- Create a Pattern Tool
- Modifications
- Players dissect the code and make their own modifications
- Player communities would share them
- Items, skins, clothes
- The Sims 2 Content Manager Tool
- The Sims 2 Home Crafter Tool
- The Exchange & Your Sim Page
- Apparently you can download mods that allow you to work with Mario and Luigi stuff, be Lady Gaga, things like that
Are games forcing us to behave in ways that are more mechanical than the ways books make us behave? Well, they both make us perform a certain procedure in order to fully experience what the medium has to offer. Laura showed that reading a book is procedural.
Is there anything human that is not a biological or cultural procedure? I don't think that there is because what makes up a human's existence is his ability to utilize the contrast of nature (biological procedures) and nurture (cultural procedures). In other words, the combination of these two aspects in one's life is what makes him the person he becomes. With both, biological and cultural, come certain procedures that define how he reacts in certain situations and how he sees the world around him, and all these things accumulate to represent everything that is "human." Laura thought my answer was really good. Bam.
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