I’ve been The Sims Online free now for over a week and I sincerely needed that vacation. I got into the addictive side of the game and almost completely forgot about my thesis. Not playing however has given me thoughts to ponder about and I’m finally getting into the real spirit of analysis.
I tried logging on again last night and felt a pang of nausea hit me. I entered a room to make money and found myself in a TSO drama discussion. After 5 minutes, I just couldn’t take it anymore and logged off.
In the course of my gaming experience I’ve talked to a few players about their freedom to be who they want to be in the game. That they’re free from all of society’s rules and regulations about how to be and what to look like. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about!
My own gaming experience has been quite different. TSO’ers are extremely emotional. They are very easily offended and my own sarcastic humor has often put me in situations I don’t want to be in. Either I just throw a sentence in the air that is sarcastically complaining about my life and I get a whole lot of “Awww…what’s wrong? Do you wanna talk about it?”. Or I comment on pathetic conversations and I instantly hurt someone’s feelings.
So the whole ‘freedom’ thing about playing has infact been more of a social prison for me. I constantly need to watch what I say and do. Now I don’t know if I entered the game nervous cause I needed to make friends for research purposes or if TSO just isn’t the game for my personality? Or I’m just not a good gamer.

DiGRA 2005, Changing Views: Worlds in Play has started and I wish I was there!!! One thing’s for sure though…..I have a lot of reading to do! There’s a lot of interesting papers written by fantastically brilliant people.
Of course the topic of virtual goods and ownership is a hot topic. To be honest, I’m getting kinda bored with the topic. It seems to me that once you get over the whole “Oh my! You can buy virtual goods for REAL money!” shock, you need to be a passionate player and hopefully a brilliant in game designer to really give a damn.
My thoughts are wavering off to a place I initially hadn’t intended to go. I had hoped to focus my thesis on governmentality and the virtual reality is reality concept. But I find myself wondering into a dangerous territority. The territory of defining MMORPGs as games. Try defining what a game is and what play is….and I’m sure you’ll find yourself confused. I dare you….!! ;)
I’ve been using Klabbers’ Taxonomy of Games (which is sadly missing from most of the research I’ve been reading on MMORPGs) to classify The Sims Online. He’s found a unique way of combining ‘a generic model of social systems – consisting of actors, rules and resources with Marshev’s and Popov’s semiotic theory of gaming’ (Klabbers, 2003). At first glance, i felt this Taxonomy did not help my analysis of TSO as I felt there was a whole level of communication play that was ignored. But Klabbers pointed out to me that there’s a meta game going on here, that deserves a seperate taxonomy. I won’t bore you with all the details I’ve come up with here….but thought it necessary to give you some background info.
I suppose my point in this post is that no matter what MMORPG you are playing there is one aspect of the gaming experience that cannot be preset by rules or game designers, the communication and the societies spawning from this communication. I therefore start to question who owns the ‘play’ aspect of these virtual worlds? Exchange of virtual goods and so on is all very interesting, but what about the sensorship and control of how a game is ‘played’? Can a game designer tuely own the play element of a game? But I suppose there are laws here as well….really need to fresh up on my reading….be back soon with more.

So it’s the first of June and I finally got around to buying the May issue of Wired Magazine (you’d think it would be cheaper). I came across an article written by Steven Johnson revealing astounding research that the world’s population has increased their IQ level even though there seems to be a decline in schools. After much to do about nothing (exaggeration of course) he writes:

Now…it’s no secret that my thesis will be pretty much MAXIS bashing about dictatorial rule and the designers not realizing that they have a political role in the game a.s.o. But today I learned that MAXIS actually does some nice things as well. This weekend for example, they’re letting us run around skilling and making money as much as we want without having to worry about our Sim’s needs (hunger, bladder, energy a.s.o). Very considerate and nice of them, I think. Too bad I’ll be away at a wedding this weekend, so I can’t reek the benefits of it.
I also learned that when you’re played for two years you receive a Mystery Tree, which is worth a few million simoleons.
Which also got me thinking of something else. Very many of these players have played for a long time! Ever since beta in September 2002. Now, they’re pretty much maxed on their skills and worth quite a lot of money. When there’s nothing left to spend all the money on, what is MAXIS going to do, I wonder. Delete and start over? No, that would cause an uproar!

There are many interesting aspects to TSO gaming. I was very intrigued about a week ago when I finally logged on to one of the radio stations while playing the game, Maxed Out Radio with the fabulous DJ Benny. I had the best time ever in TSO!
There’s an aspect to the game called skilling and it can get so boring. But I’m kinda understanding a genius around the design aspect. Because it’s so boring and because it takes forever…players are finding ways to amuse themselves. Radio being one of them. I had a great time in the game that day and made several new friends (which is essential to the game).
Now this is pretty innocent and nice…but there’s more. I’ve often heard other sims talk about ‘the patch’! It is a program, not designed by MAXIS, that enables your sim to be naked. I’ve never really felt the necessity for it, until I was running around in a sprinkler in my bikini the other day and everyone laughed and told me I was running around topless. And since I didn’t have ‘the patch’ I couldn’t see it and couldn’t do anything about it. So I decided to try and look for a site that offered this download and OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There’s a whole Sim sex culture out there! I’m not going to bother listing all the sites I found. It just blew my mind away!

I’ve played TSO for 4 months now. It wasn’t until my tv broke in April that I really got into it. Since then….I’ve had some very interesting conversations with other players. The population of the city, Alphaville is about 80% Americans (figure taken off the top of my head). My advisor and I had a conversation about how I could force governmental policy out of the game and came to the conclusion that I should be a griefer and see what happened to me….if the residents themselves took action or if MAXIS would inetervene. I thought a great way to do this was to throw lots of dirt in the Sims air about Bush. Now, I never could bring myself to grief. To me it was like standing in the middle of the town square shouting abuse at other people, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Now I understand that my master plan would never have worked either. Most TSO players can’t stand Bush! In fact, I don’t think I’ve met anyone that actually likes him or are Republican for that matter! And the conversation comes up very often, even without me initiating it. It makes me wonder if most gamers are democrats. Just an interesting observation I thought I’d share with whoever actually bothers to read this blog! I would love to investigate it further.
I have also noticed, however, that just because Americans are democrats, doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re open minded about the rest of the world or races for that matter!

Bamse and Aquarius
Bamse was kind enough to give me a picture of the event! Isn’t this just lovely?!!
They’re getting married again June 4th at 24hrs, Norwegian time (sorry I can’t be bothered finding out the different times for everyone)

For those of you non TSO players! Sign up!!! It’s a 14 day free trial…let me know if you’re coming and I’ll show you around a bit!

Thanks to Terra Nova, my thoughts and frustrations have been cleared! For a long time now, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to look at game design as a political force within virtual worlds! Sure, Julian Dibbel and others (see list of papers) have helped, but my it wasn’t until I read James Grimmelmann’s ‘Virtual Power Politics’ that things just suddenly became clearer about what the hell I’m spending all those hours in TSO for!
Suddenly Klabbers, Zimmerman, Turkle, Taylor, Castronova, Jenkins (basically anyone you can find on the right hand side of the blog, are connecting in my mind! And I can’t wait to start writing my thesis!!! Finally I can inform my advisor of some progress!
Want to write more, but need to dash! Very important football match today!!! ;))
But thank you Terra Nova! Don’t know how I would survive without you!!!

Attended my first TSO wedding yesterday, and it was lovely! A bit…ROTFL, but also very sweet! Was particularly touched by Aquarious’ ability to express her love in Norwegian!!
A bit embarrassed cause I didn’t have a present to bring, but they’re getting married again soon, so I suppose I’ll have a chance to make up then!!
So congratulations Bamse and Aquarius!!! May you have a long and wonderful time together!!
And thank you so much for the invite!

Right…just realised that it has been virtually (such a weird word to use these days) impossible to post comments on this blog! So I presume many have tried and failed! No wonder I’ve felt so lonely!;)
Everything should be ok now. I’m in the middle of trying to get a good picture of Dekcuf in the profile, but as you can see my technical design abilities are dreadful! (Sean!!! I need you!!!)
Hope to have something better soon! Was bored with the picture of me eating in Korea and also wanted to have this blog available for potential interviewees, without having to give out too many personal details! Of course it could be argued that I’ve been living in Alphaville more than in the real world, so the image of Dekcuf seems more like me than the image I see in the mirror!!!;)
More coming in just a few hours! Have to read through some new papers about designers being the governing control of MMORPGs, something I think I might start disagreeing with!