Category Archives: games

Happy Sim Hermeticism

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Acclaimed author, artist and athlete Hermes Trismegistus in the library, where he teaches the townspeople valuable skills to improve their work and their neighborhood. What?

We are talking about The Sims 3, the “people simulator” from Electronic Arts. With far more detail than the previous simulator, and with improved artificial intelligence, the small people inside the computer go about their lives no longer just as a family, but as a community. And in the small town of Riverview, numerous computer-generated people (“townies”) live their simulated lives in their simulated homes, go to their simulated jobs and come home with simulated money to pay their simulated bills.

Enter Hermes Trismegistus (loosely based on the Hellenic deity of books and wisdom, which again may be based on one or more historical figures of extraordinary accomplishment.) In the game, he is a playable character, controlled by me rather than by the computer. He is also artistic, athletic, good and a genius bookworm. In other words, he is as near to the perfect man as the world he lives in allows. And with my daily guidance, he gets even better.

His first focus is on gardening, allowing him to grow the coveted Lifefruit while he is still young.  Later he becomes able to make Ambrosia, which has the ability to reset the age of a sim to the beginning of its current life phase. Now effectively immortal, Hermes has studied a wide range of subjects as well as improved his body to amazing strength and health. So far, so good. It may sound like a male Mary Sue (for those of you unfamiliar with literary concepts, this is a too-good-to-be-true character that usually represents the author in poorly written fiction, especially fan fiction.)  But there is a twist to this character.

On workdays, Hermes goes to the library, where he writes non-fiction books. After work hours, he talks to townspeople who come to the library, brightening their days. He asks them about their career, then if they need a skill for that career, he will tutor them for free.  For instance he will teach writing to a journalist, gardening to an agricultural scientist, or logic to a police detective. On weekends, he will go to the gym and train with those of a more physical ambition.

As a result of the teachings of Hermes, more and more of the townsfolk are successful in their work. They advance in their career repeatedly and find job security, higher income and less stressful work. As their economy improves, they become able to move to more expensive homes that have been empty before.  Families that have been forced to live with friends or relatives get their own homes, and families that lived in overcrowded houses have room to have children.  Slowly, year by year, the whole town flowers and becomes more prosperous, thanks to the tireless work of one man.

By all means try this at home. ^_^

Bookshelves of happiness

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In the computer game The Sims 2, in the Seasons expansion, there is a new career called Education. When reaching the higher levels of this career, the simulated person gets a free bookshelf. But this is not just any old bookshelf. It allows the reader to learn any skill, even those not usually of a bookish nature, at double speed.

In the Sim story I am currently writing, the bookshelf falls into the hands of a newlywed couple, both of which are Knowledge sims. That is to say, their main aspiration in life is knowledge and skills. They constantly want to improve their skills, and because this bookshelf lets them do that quickly, they are constantly in Platinum mood, the highest happiness for a sim.

With the FreeTime expansion, the game got another feature: Lifetime happiness. As long as the sims are happy, they very slowly accumulate lifetime happiness. Over time this lets them gain certain benefits, like needing a little less sleep or being content alone for longer. Eventually the lifetime meter reaches its maximum, and the sim from now on is naturally happy all the time for the rest of his or her life.

By the time I took this picture, Jenny (the sim in the picture) had achieved this “permaplat” – permanent platinum mood – of which I have written occasionally in the past. There were a number of things that contributed to that, including her recent marriage, but the final push came from the bookshelf.

In other news, Ryuho Okawa has now written more than 600 books (used to be more than 500). Hermes Trismegistus supposedly wrote several thousand books, covering virtually all knowledge in the ancient world, so his reincarnation definitely has the work cut out for him. (Only a few books by Hermes are preserved from antiquity, and what I have seen from them is pretty cryptic.)

In other news, I bought my first Kindle e-book on Friday. I don’t much like Amazon’s policy of pricing the virtually costless Kindle books higher than paper books. It is insulting and morally wrong, and the trees would almost certainly vote against it. But being able to read on my mobile phone when I don’t carry with me other books is definitely worth ruffling some principles over. The book I bought was Tao Te Ching, the short compilation of the wisdom of Tao, attributed to Lao-Tzu. English translations of his works are generally more like interpretations, since a vast gap in time and culture and language separate the texts. This one is supposed to be particularly faithful to the text, as testified by actual Chinese readers.

I am not a sim, but I am still trying to build my own bookshelf of happiness. I don’t expect whoever inherits my books to gain much joy from them though. Even for humans, it depends on your aspiration. Books of timeless wisdom is not for everyone, more is the pity. And even for us who aspire to knowledge and insight, not everyone finds the same texts easy or joyful to read. So it takes some experimenting, even if you know others who have found lifelong happiness in their reading. Still, it is certainly worth a try, to build your own bookshelf of lifelong happiness.

Good Endings

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Not all love stories have happy endings, and not all frogs are princes. Well, perhaps deep inside, but it would require divine intervention in some cases!

It has gradually become clearer to me that my JulNoWriMo novel is in fact like a single play-through of a ren-ai game (dating sim or visual novel of romantic nature).

When playing such a game, you get to know a number of imaginary people of the preferred gender, and based on your choices, their relationship with you will rise or fall. At some point you will need to show preference for one of them over the other – and it needs to be realistic in terms of your personal statistics –  in order to get a “good ending”.  Depending on the maturity of the game, the depiction of a good outcome may vary, but that is somewhat beyond today’s lesson.

What I want to achieve is to write a novel that may or may not lead to a “good ending”, but that at least conveys the personalities of the girls so well that the reader in his or her imagination is able to go down the other paths to reach a “good ending” for their favorite girl without compromising her personality. It is a safe bet that I won’t get anywhere near a completion in July. Probably not ever, if I know myself, which I increasingly do.  But there is always a small chance.

One of the most unlikely inspirations for my writing is the book The Laws of Courage by Ryuho Okawa, the would be world savior from Japan. (Or Atlantis, or Venus, depending on your time horizon.) Despite the occasional (well meant?) blasphemy, he is a really interesting person. And he truly writes like a god – more exactly Hermes, the god of speed. A couple years older than me, he has already written over 500 books!  Only about 15 of these are available in English from Amazon.com though. This is the latest of them, though a new one is supposed to be released later this year.

The Laws of Courage is written mostly for the young reader, although there is also a chapter about how to keep the good part of being young – a “hungry” spirit – later in life. Even simpler than some of his other books, it speaks directly to the concerns of young people in the midst of making choices for their lives. As such, it gives me some good idea for my own writing.

His ultimate advice for living life like a roaring fire of courage, is to imagine your death.  What do you want to have achieved when you die? How do you want to be remembered? What kind of person do you want to be when you lay down the workbook of your life? In its naked essence, courage means to be ready to die.

(Needless to say, I don’t have a lot of courage.  Although a couple weeks ago I was lying on my bed, thinking about how the floor of this old house might collapse under the weight of my double bed, and suddenly I realized that unexpectedly I was not afraid of death. I am sure this is not permanent. When I get severely ill, I will probably feel fear again. To some degree I think this is biological. What I no longer felt was the deep conviction that upon leaving this world, I would surely go to Hell.  Maybe I will and have only been deluded by the writings of the Antichrist.  But then again, something has begun to change deep inside me.  I am more consciously thinking of how I can actually be a blessing, rather than how I can rig things so I won’t be punished.)

Perhaps the nature of love, even divine love, is  to go down the path to the Good Ending for the other person. Which, with pleasant irony, is the one that does not end.

Dating sims revisited

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A little known fact? People who play dating sims descend from molluscs.

As my July novel slowly, slowly unfolds, more and more of the girls become likable.  I am not very surprised, since girls tend to be likable in real life as well. My research (watching anime, reading manga and trolling forums) has shown me that the ideal format for my story would probably not be a novel or a screenplay or a movie, but a computer game.  More exactly a “dating sim”.  Now, I am used to playing The Sims, and both Sims1 and Sims2 had dating expansions: Hot Date for Sim1, and NightLife for Sims 2. There is no such thing for Sims3, which is a shame, since I find dating in that game hard to do. My sims usually end up adopting some random kid when they approach the latter part of their adult life. -_-

Anyway, it turns out that dating sims are not actually about The Sims, but is a genre that is very popular in Japan but very unpopular in the west.  In such a game, you play a boy or (in fewer games) a girl, living through a specific time of their life where they have the opportunity to meet a number of different people.  The goal is to form a romantic relationship with a person of the opposite sex (or, in extreme rare games, of the same sex).  The games differ in that some of them offer an ending depicting sexual intercourse, while others do not. There are often released two different version of the same game, where the non-explicit version has more of the milder content.

I think this is a great idea.  It saves people from experimenting on each other. On the down side, the reproductive rate in Japan is really low. The country will be almost empty in a few generations unless something changes. Hopefully the production of robot catgirls will eventually be high enough to replace the falling population.  (That was a joke.)

Anyway, I’ve tried out one of the few dating sims in English. Well, supposedly there are more of them, but this is an innocent one and you don’t play it online so they are not gathering information about you. It is vaguely recommended for people who are curious about the genre.  The game is called “Summer Session”. It can be run on Windows, Mac or Linux. The graphics look dated, as it were, but that probably means it runs on pretty much any old machine that you can get it installed on.

I’ve played through it a couple times. It is kind of neat that you can learn from your mistakes so you make new mistakes next time.  ^_^  Unfortunately in real life you can’t go back and do it over like that, so that’s why we need to listen to the guidance of Heaven. Incidentally, Heaven says to not get too absorbed in such games, but then that’s just common sense.

I am pretty confident that my writing is better anyway.  Although it won’t have multiple endings. Probably.

Sims 3 bug: Schools are parks

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After installing Sims 3: Ambitions, all my schools became parks.

Since I have been stupid enough to waste time on this, I should post this so others can find it with Google. Perhaps they can get away with less work and lost time than I. After all, that is what I would have wanted someone else to do to me. And they tried, too, but mine was a particularly hard case.

I am not sure if it happened as soon as I upgraded, or sometime later. I am not sure if the two mods played a role (I have Awesomemod and Twallan’s StoryProgression mod).  But in any case, it affected all my schools, in all my neighborhoods. The schools became parks. You could go visit them, but you could not take painting courses. Worse, children and teens could not go to school. The school bus would still come, but the kids did not take it.  If I sent them to school, they would just walk around there like a park, which it was marked as on the map too.  There was no other option to go to school. I used Awesomemod’s Supreme Commander and it tried to send them to school as well, but they dropped the attempt without going anywhere.  Unsurprisingly, their grades were dropped to F.  If this continued, most of them would grow up insane or otherwise mentally deformed.

I have fixed the problem, but it was pretty drastic.  I read that you could fix it by going into neighborhood edit mode (one of the choices in the F5 menu) and save the school to the community bin, then delete it and put the copy back.  This did not work for me, though it has for others.  I recommend backing up your saved games before you try anyway – when I bulldozed the school and then the flat land it was built on, it became impossible to place anything there at all.

I also tried saving the school from Riverview and using that instead, as someone else had succeeded with. Did not work for me.

Eventually I backed up the whole My Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3 folder to another disk, uninstalled both the expansion and the base game, and installed them again.  Now the schools were back.  On the other hand, Riverview was gone.

I tried to download it again from the launcher. It opened the web page in Internet Explorer, but when I clicked “download again” nothing happened. I closed the launcher, and now when I clicked “download again”, the launcher opened again and downloaded the neighborhood. It did not installed though, but quit with an error message.

The solution turned out to be downloading it from within the game. Again using the F5 menu, I used the game’s download manager while I was playing a home in another neighborhood. This worked.  Now I can load my old save games and the schools are there as well.

I hope this was useful to some poor gamer.  It is not exactly the kind of thing I usually write about these days, I guess.

Diving into 2D worlds

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“As if I don’t do enough of this in real life! AAAARRGH!”

One thing that has not changed from The Sims 2 to The Sims 3 is that if I play it for too long, I get upset.  There is not discernible reason for this. It is just a slow simmering discontent that gradually grows toward boiling anger. In so far as I can find features in the game to irritate me, they are not in proportion to the feelings, which anyway seem to come from within and grow independent of the actual playstyle.  (Except for making sure to take long breaks regularly.)

It has been this way for me for a long time, although I am not sure how long. I think it has increased gradually over the last few years, I did not notice it before. It is not just these games.  If I immerse myself in one particular 2-dimensional world for long, I will start feeling discontent.

You may remember that I think of the universe as being layered, or rather having a gradient. As you move upward, it becomes harder and more timeless. (For instance the laws of mathematics must necessarily be at least as old as the universe itself, and have not changed at all in these eons.) As we move downward, the world becomes soft and malleable, but also temporary and less real. Think of a daydream, for instance.  You can do pretty much anything you set your mind to in a daydream, but it disappears more easily than fog before the morning sun.

Lower worlds are the worlds we create, higher worlds are the worlds that create us.

When I dive into lower world for a long time, there is a kind of suffering. Even if I have fun and want to play just five minutes more, there is at the same time a growing discontent inside me. I feel that I do not belong here, it is not right. This is not so much a feeling of guilt – I do this on my own time, and there is no one waiting for me – but more a feeling of loss, I guess you could call it. Or perhaps I am just reading that into it because I know it is true. But it is certainly a feeling of being misplaced.

Interestingly, this feeling is not noticeable if I only visit each world briefly. It is as if I need to immerse myself in them for it to happen. I liken this to diving. If you dive into the sea, an element where you don’t belong, it may be pure fun at first, but you cannot breathe there, so you will start to suffer, and this suffering will increase faster and faster until it is unbearable.  My immersion in lower worlds is a much slower process, as it can take an hour or two before it becomes distinctly unpleasant.  But eventually it becomes worse and worse, and I have to get out of there.

You may have seen YouTube clips of young people who go berserk in front of their computer, but this seems to be when they play competitive games, particularly games in which their characters kill each other.  But I feel this mounting frustration even from the very peaceful, cute and charming Sim games, loved by women and children.  Actually it sometimes takes longer when I play City of Heroes, if I team up with other superheroes. Their players are after all people from the third dimension, so there is a kind of influx of reality from there.

There are people who are known as “otaku”, a Japanese word for geeks of 2-dimensional worlds like games, comics and cartoons. In English this is not a very negative word, it just says that they enjoy Japanese serial arts. But in Japan where the concept arose, it means people who have drowned in the lower worlds. They are no longer able to live meaningfully in the 3-dimensional world.  In my paradigm, you may say they have lost so much mental substance, becoming adapted to the softer world of fantasy, so this ordinary world is too hard for them, to sharp, too unyielding, too demanding.

Conversely there are those who have adapted to higher worlds, but these are few and we don’t hear much about them. To them this so-called real world is like a fog and the people in it like shadows, except for their spirit or inner light. All these familiar forms are only temporary, and cannot make the heart content.  For we were made to be adequate to the ultimate reality, the Light, the Alpha and Omega, Infinity and Eternity. The universe itself is not enough to satisfy us.  This is true, but it is not obvious as we start out.  Even now, it is not exactly a problem for me. Living in the ordinary world does not constrain me the way diving into lower worlds does.  But if I live till I am 120, I will likely find this world gradually more constraining.  Right now I feel like I could enjoy it for millennia, but if I keep growing, there may well come a day when I shall rejoice when exiting this world as well.  That is not to say that I’ll never start another game of physical existence – that is something I don’t know right now.  For now, this one is enough for me, and I feel like I have only recently begun to understand it.

Sims 3 Ambitions – first look

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Somewhere in the Sim equivalent of Louisiana, in a small town in the swamps, where most of the roads are dirt roads and most days are foggy days, lives an eccentric inventor in a small shack. He lives off his garden, makes vegetarian food, uses his legs instead of a car, scrounges parts from the junkyard for his newest inventions, and tries to live a sustainable life for the planet.

No other personal computer game has created a legacy quite like The Sims. The original game in 2000 was quickly followed by numerous expansion pack, before The Sims 2 in 2005 made a big leap in both world detail and realism, and again was followed by expansion packs each spring and fall that greatly deepened the gameplay.  The Sims 3 in 2009 was less of a dramatic shift, but preserved many of the favorite activities from its predecessor, and contained a surprising level of detail in gameplay. Still, there were many white spots on the gameplay map, and it was expected that there would once again come many expansion packs.  Sims 3: Ambitions is the second major expansion to this game.

To be honest, I did not buy the previous expansion, The Sims 3: World Adventures. I bought the vacation expansions for The Sims and The Sims 2, and I found both of them forgettable.  I had two sims go on vacation once in The Sims 2, I may have had two or three vacations in the original game. Following the same trend, I would have had zero vacations in this game, and that was how I felt when I read about other people’s experience with it too.

Ambitions however is in my native Norwegian named Drømmejobben, meaning The Dream Job. That seems a lot more interesting to me. Your attitude toward vacation and job may vary – actually, it almost certainly does. I avoid vacations like the plague in real life as well, and I have every intention to go to work until I am 70, Light willing.  So there is some pretty heavy bias here…

The expansion actually only provides a fairly small number of new careers, but they really stand out from the old jobs.  In The Sims 3, you could follow your sims to their workplace but then they went in the door and left you outside. You could give them vague guidelines, like “work hard”, “slack off and have fun”, “meet new people”, “suck up to the boss” etc.  But there were just half a dozen or so instructions, and they were quite generic. In this expansion, the old jobs are still the same, except for doctor.  The new jobs however have a different character.  Here you get tasks you can complete to improve your job rating, and they are not necessarily in an office or some such.  As a firefighter you will visit homes and try to save your fellow sims from fire.  As a ghost hunter you will try to clean out haunted houses. As a detective you will also spend a lot of time in the field. As an architect you will mess around with other people’s homes, and as a stylist you will change their looks.  So it is a completely different gameplay.

In fact, it reminds me a bit of Sims 2: Open for Business, which was probably my favorite expansion in that generation, closely followed by Sims 2: FreeTime. As a matter of fact, Ambitions also has a couple more hobbies as well: Sculpture and invention. In addition, you can now register your hobbies as a profession, and sell your works at a local consignment store.  Not just sculptures and inventions, but also paintings or produce, from the hobbies that were included in the original Sims 3.

So far I have only had the opportunity to test one of the new hobbies, invention. My sim will dig through piles in the junkyards for parts, then make inventions at the workbench at home.  I am not sure if there are public workbenches. Probably, but I have not seen them yet. Most will probably want it at home anyway, if for no other reason than to have a shower nearby when your inventor’s clothes catch fire.  Also, if you have a painter in the family, you can decorate your home with masterworks and get quite powerful bonus moodlets from the beauty.

While you have enough scrap in your inventory, your workbench will have an “invent” option. Using this will improve your new Invention skill, and occasionally pop out a new invention. At first these are frequent but not particularly valuable, small toys and widgets. At higher levels, inventions are few and far between, but each is more substantial. The miner can dig up metals, gems and old objects from your lawn, and may even open a hole to an underground realm where your sim may have adventures. Or that is what my sim wishes to use it for, at least. I have not actually tried this. The time machine… well, we’ll come to that. And the robot is supposedly the final fruit of your invention, much as it was in Open for Business.

One difference from Open for Business is that the workbench is not fun. In the previous generation of the game, crafting was one of the greatest sources of fun around, but very tiring.  Now, it is neither.  It is just work.  I suppose this makes some sense since invention is now a profession and an alternative to clocking in at the office.

You can also read books on invention, and even improve your skill by getting an opportunity (random quest). However, this will not actually create the inventions. You will still need to use the Invent option, but it will take shorter time if you already have the skill.

So, the time machine. I recommend saving before you use any high-end invention, by the way. First my sim went into the past. After watching the teaser video, I had expected my sim actually loading a different landscape and going on some adventure like in the previous expansion, World Adventures. However, there was only a string of text messages.  One of these was how my sim rescued a child, and then a child popped out of the time machine ahead of my sim. It looked very much like my sim would have done as a grade schooler, but had a different personality. And then the game crashed, and my computer spent a couple minutes with just the background picture while recovering. Your computer may vary – mine is pretty fast. When I loaded the game and did it again, a completely different story unfolded, and my sim came back having lost some stuff but gained a lifefruit. It seems you can have a number of adventures in the past and future, and I look forward to it.

I assumed that learning about robots was one of those adventures, because even after having maxed his invention skill and made one of every invention, my sim still does not have that option. However, it seems instead that the Palladium opportunity arc may be the trigger, judging from some of the text there.  I have no idea whether my frequent time travels were necessary to get that started, but probably not.

Before closing this “first look”, I want to mention that there are a couple new personality traits. My sim is Eccentric and Eco-Friendly.  Eccentric sims make discoveries faster, both the discovery and the actual product. It is basically the career-boosting skill for inventors, much like Artistic is for painters and Green Thumb for gardeners etc  in the unexpanded Sims 3.  In contrast, Eco-Friendly is a genuinely new personality type. They get negative mood from driving alone, but positive mood from carpooling or biking. They take short showers and eat organic food. And they feel good when they can use a clothesline instead of a dryer.

Oh, that’s right. Sims can now wash their clothes. If there is a washing machine or hamper on the lot, sims will drop their clothes when they go to bed or shower.  Over time these clothes will begin to stink. If you wash and dry them, however, your sims will get bonus mood from clean clothes and fresh bedsheets.  This is mainly of interest if your sims have not already topped their mood meter:  If you have a positive mood, you get more lifetime happiness points, which can be used to buy various objects or upgrades of your sims. If you are already maxed, laundry is just a chore, just like in real life. The sims on the lots you don’t play certainly seems to think so as well, because after a while their floors are covered with stinking heaps of clothes when you visit them.

In all fairness, I am not sure if this is an artifact of the two behavior mods I have installed, the Awesomemod and Twallan’s StoryProgression, but probably not.  Both Pescado and Twallan are quite good at what they do, and it is more likely that they will eventually fix the problem than that they caused it. Awesomemod in particular is pretty much essential if you want to play The Sims 3, since it fixes a wide range of problems. Electronic Arts tends to just dump their games to the market when they decide the bugs are not bad enough for many players to return their games, or so it seems to me.

So, is the expansion worth buying?  It may be early to say, but it does not have any game-stopping bugs that I can see, and it does add some more variation to the game.  If money is really scarce, you may want to think twice about it, and if you rarely have time to play anyway, you may want to wait until you have played most of the content you already have. Otherwise, it seems like a worthy addition to the series.

Hectic game calms the heart

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In the foreground Itlandsen the Peacebringer.  Does playing a superhero improve your physical body?  My tentative experience so far is, yes, slightly. This seems unlikely, but what is the alternative?

It happened again. I came home from work and almost immediately hopped on the exercise bike. I stopped after a few minutes though, because my pulse was almost 20 beats above my norm for the warm-up. This is usually a sign that the body is busy fighting an infection, although it also happens the day after a particularly hard exercise or physical work.

So I got off the bike and also cancelled the long walk I was planning afterwards. I made a light dinner, read and wrote a little, and logged on City of Heroes, the superheroic online multiplayer game. I logged on with my Peacebringer character, as is good and proper, since this is an archetype whose powers are all based on light.  ^_^ It is also very team-friendly. My character can transform into a giant space lobster that can draw enemy fire away from more vulnerable team mates. I joined a team with 4 other random players, we spent two hours saving the imaginary city from imaginary evil cyborgs.

After this I checked my pulse again, and it was back to normal. Now, doing this task force is pretty hectic, since I am not responsible only for myself so I cannot take breaks or slow down. Despite this, my body had somehow regenerated during the evening. OK, perhaps it was the dinner rather than the game, but that is not much more credible. (I was not so hungry as to be anxious or anything, I am not really prone to hunger weakness etc, I eat when my stomach gnaws or occasionally because I have good leftovers.) And this is the second time I notice this, although the first time I was duoing at a more relaxed pace. More testing is in order!

(Oh, and I spent a long time looking for the earlier entry about the same topic. I did not find it, but I read a whole lot of other interesting entries. Well, interesting to me. I sure have written a lot!)

Still alive & loving it

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I admit that I was more than a little worried about the rapid onset throat pain, but today it is hurting less.  I stayed home from work yesterday and today, drinking soup and doing some meditation.  If this is what we here in Norway call “3 days throat illness”, it should end tomorrow.  But even if not, I will be happy if it continues to withdraw at the current pace.

My vocal cords are still feeling kind of sandy, and I have been automatically trying to clear them a lot today.  It is almost impossible not to, it is like a reflex. Hopefully this won’t do too much damage.

I have also spent the last two days reading through my enormous Sims 2 archives, more exactly the Micropolis Prosperity Challenge.  I have returned to the game a little after that.  It may sound strange, but when I felt really ill and I thought back at my recent life to see if there were things that were not tinged with any regret, I saw this among them.  I feel that I truly got across some of my metaphysics and many of the values that I keep and that have contributed to my own happiness and that of many others.

Micropolis (meaning “very small town”) is a story, made in collaboration by me and the little people in the computer, about a few families who have lost loved ones and all they owned in a natural disaster.  Uneducated, friendless and mired in debt, they start building a new community under the guidance of a guardian angel that shows them how to realize their own inner potential to build an utopia on earth. By helping each other, learning useful skills and communing with their guardian angel, they make progress against seemingly impossible odds.  (This was all written before I had heard of Happy Science, by the way. ^_^)

Rereading it from the start, I was amazed to see how some of the things I said on the first pages were realized later in the game, long after I had written it, and without any prompting from me. The little computer people went off and did it by themselves, as if they had really heard my voice.  Or as if I had inadvertently seen their future.  Or as if someone above either of us had played us both according to a plan neither of us could see…

If I am treated like I have treated my sims, I am fairly optimistic about my life and, to some extent, even my afterlife.  And in some ways, it really looks that way. I know I joked that I treated them like I wanted to be treated myself, except they were not allowed to eat snacks.  And behold, I had to reduce my favorite snack intake due to the “fat poisoning” illness.  Well, I still snack, but rarely on snacks, if you know what I mean.  And I make more meals, just like my sims.  So it seems to work both ways…

And like the Sims of Micropolis, I have had years of amazing happiness.  That time still lasts.  Even now, I love my life.  I am not only afraid of death, although there is still a worry that I may have to pay for my idle years and for the weaknesses I hid in the dark.  But if I were to spend my afterlife with the Voice that taught me how to find happiness, I can stand an eternity of that. For now, however, I know from experience that I can have this happiness in the current life. And I am not eager to give that up.

Double XP long-weekend

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2009-10-04 15:13:26

Dagslys, my bright/bright tanker.  Until the recent update, this build was only available as dark/dark.  I think this suits me much better. Hmm, reminds me of what Sigurd Bratlie once said:  If people had a visible halo in real life, that reflected their secret life, they would be far more pious when alone.

City of Heroes occasionally have special events, and one recurring event is “double XP weekend”.  As the name implies, experience points (and influence, the currency of superheroes) are doubled at that time.  Also, former players are invited to come back for the weekend and play the game for free.  This fall, due to some North American holiday, Monday is also part of the weekend.

For the first time in its history, City of Heroes now has a competitor within the same genre. More than that, the competing game Champions Online is made by some of the same people who made CoH.  So a number of things have been done to make the game more inviting, including loyalty bonuses to people who stay subscribers during this season.  I mean, over and above the veteran rewards for people who have subscribed for a certain number of months. Some of these vet rewards are quite nifty, while others are more or less useless, at least for most of us.

Actually, games are generally useless for most of us.  I was speaking relatively, as in “more useless than usual” or “useless even in the context of the game”. Games are after all lower worlds, even compared to the ordinary world that most of us grow up in.  The only thing you can take with you from them is your experiences, and (in the case of online games) the occasional friendship.  Of course, it seems likely that we won’t have anything more when we leave this world either, so the difference may be less than most think.

Be that as it may, I spent some hours in the game this weekend.  I made a couple new characters and took advantage of the flood of fellow new characters to team up quite a bit.  Since I play at a time of the day when there are fewer players (because I live in Europe and most in the USA), teaming up can be difficult on ordinary days.  Special events see a lot more people, and so are easier for team-based characters.