The Ludologist

I am enthralled by the reddit thread on “What is the worst thing you’ve ever done in The Sims series?”

One time I killed a sim by drowning. Then I made everyone show up to his funeral in swimwear.

*

It’s not too sadistic per-se, but it involved a lot of deaths.
I wanted to make a church with a full, complete graveyard. So I built a small, simple structure moved in a family of 8, get them all inside, remove the door, fill with fire. Yay, 8 new tombstones!
Repeat like 9 times, and you’ve got a full graveyard of tombstones. Then I built the church and moved in a priest to live there and tend to the grounds.

*

So, in my most recent Sims playthrough, I found this girl that I really wanted my Sim to marry. Problem is she already had a husband, so rather than just doing the (relatively) normal thing and just increasing the relationship and convincing her to break up with him, I instead became best friends with her husband, convinced him to move in with me, and then drowned him in a pool so I could marry his wife.

Then I moved in with his wife (who lived in a HUGE mansion) and killed the rest of her family because I didn’t feel like taking care of the other Sims that she lived with but I still wanted the house

And much more.

Theoretically, it ties to some of my arguments in my Without a Goal chapter about open and expressive games: anything truly expressive can also express things we find offensive and/or transgressive.

… the reason why goal-less games can easily become steeped in controversy. The wide range of player actions – what makes the game expressive – also makes it likely that the player can express something that offends someone.

Dan Archer’s project Ferguson Firsthand was rejected from the App Store because … as often is the case, Apple is unclear, but they’ll know it when they see it.

You can get it on Google Play instead.

Is Apple Evil, ignorant, or just culturally conservative?

–

It is hard to imagine a conversation more central to video game history than this:  Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka explaining the design of Super Mario Bros world 1-1.

Somewhat tangentially (but tied to the type of pan-narrativism that I used to go up against when writing about games), there is an ongoing discussion about whether we constitute our identities through narratives what we make about ourselves, or not.

Galen Strawson covers it well, The Dangerous Idea that Life is a Story. Here is Jeremy Bruner quoted:

In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives”.

Strawson argues that it may well be that many people really do conceive their lives as having narrative form, episodes, arcs, but that this is not universal.

I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths – even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here. They’re not universal human truths even if they’re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way. At best: I doubt that what they say is an accurate description even of themselves.

[…] it does seem that there are some deeply Narrative types among us, where to be Narrative with a capital ‘N’ is (here I offer a definition) to be naturally disposed to experience or conceive of one’s life, one’s existence in time, oneself, in a narrative way, as having the form of a story, or perhaps a collection of stories, and – in some manner – to live in and through this conception. The popularity of the narrativist view is prima facie evidence that there are such people.

Perhaps. But many of us aren’t Narrative in this sense. We’re naturally – deeply – non-Narrative. We’re anti-Narrative by fundamental constitution. It’s not just that the deliverances of memory are, for us, hopelessly piecemeal and disordered, even when we’re trying to remember a temporally extended sequence of events. The point is more general. It concerns all parts of life, life’s ‘great shambles’, in the American novelist Henry James’s expression. This seems a much better characterisation of the large-scale structure of human existence as we find it. Life simply never assumes a story-like shape for us. And neither, from a moral point of view, should it.

Are you the narrative type? I am not. I have already been an avid reader of novels, but never conceived my own life that way.