NYT has a nice piece (with some great quotes) about children learning how to be good parents by playing The Sims [reg req'd].
Some video games let players battle aliens or quarterback a pro football team; The Sims drops the player into an even more fantastic environment: suburban family life. Each Sim, as the characters are known, is different — one might be an old man, one might be a young girl; one is motivated primarily by money, for instance, while another may want popularity — and it's up to the player to tend to those needs. As in real life, there are no points in The Sims and you can't "win." You just try to find happiness as best you can.
And though video game players are often stereotyped as grunged-out, desensitized slackers, it is the nation's middle-class schoolchildren, particularly girls, who have helped make The Sims one of the world's premier game franchises, selling more than 60 million copies globally since its introduction in 2000.
They don't touch much on the apparently universal impulse to also use The Sims as a way to explore the more sadistic side of domestic life. I'm thinking here of Spork walling off all the exits of a Sims kitchen inhabited by a character with extremely disorganized and careless traits in an attempt to get him to start a kitchen fire. (It eventually worked.) Not that The Sims is unique in its availability as a way of working out issues with your dark side (a link that's one of my most-viewed images on Flickr).
[via slashdot]
Posted by johndanseven at May 7, 2006 12:11 PM