Category Archives: games

Ingress (the Niantic Project)

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Screenshot Ingress.com/intel

While the game is played on an Android phone or tablet, the PC can be used for planning. Here is a map of the southern tip of Norway, which I mostly have to myself.

Ingress is a game which blends with real life. You use your Android phone (although there is an unofficial version for Apple, the game developers are actually working for Google). While the Ingress app is running, your phone is called a “scanner” and displays a map of the terrain around you, but without text. It mostly displays the roads … and Portals and XM.

XM is “exotic matter”, a kind of fog or energy that enters our world from Elsewhere, mostly through portals but also where people spend a lot of time. Portals are places where XM leaks into our world, and are typically sculptures, unusual architecture, or other outdoors permanent art. You can submit pictures of such things with your scanner to get them evaluated as possible portals. After a while you may see XM start accumulating rapidly around them, or perhaps not. Read the guidelines carefully.

The scanner absorbs XM until it runs full. The capacity increases as you level up. The highest level is 8, which also happens to be the number of “resonators” you can have on one portal. Resonators are virtual gadgets placed around the portal, claiming it for your faction. They must be recharged, as they lose 15% of their maximum power each day. Like you, the resonators have levels, and you cannot place resonators higher than your level.

At higher levels, you can no longer place many resonators at your maximum level. For this reason, you will need allies if you want to make high-level portals. The range of a portal increases exponentially with level, so you need this high-level portal to make long-range links. If your faction’s links make geometric patterns (usually triangles, but it is also possible to make more complex patterns of straight lines) the area enclosed will take the color of your faction, blue for the Resistance and green for the Enlightenment. Roughly speaking, the Enlightenment welcomes the ingression of XM into our reality, believing it will spur human creativity (since it associates with creative structures). The Resistance prefer to keep unknown extradimensional entities outside, thank you very much.

The range at which you can access a portal is just under 40 meters / yards. It is possible to access some of them from a car if the traffic allows, but they have to be in pedestrian-friendly locations, so the game encourages people to get out and about on their feet. Bikes are also common.

The way to level up is to use XM to perform certain actions, which give you action points (AP), serving the same function as experience points (XP) in other roleplaying games. These actions can be claiming neutral portals by placing resonators – you get points for each resonator and a bonus for the final one – and for creating links and fields. Or you can get AP by destroying resonators, links and fields on portals claimed by the opposite faction. There is also a small amount of AP to gain from recharging resonators, either when they lose their daily 15% or when they are attacked by the other faction. If you own a portal, you will be alerted if it is attacked. You need a portal key to defend it from a distance, though, and even then you suffer a penalty depending on the distance.

You hack portals to get keys, resonators, xmp (bursters used for attack) and some other virtual gadgets. You generally get more stuff from portals belonging to your faction, but you get AP for hacking opponent portals. These also tend to drain much more of your XM when you hack them. Unlike recharging, hacking can only be done locally. By default you can hack four times every four hours, but there is a cooldown of 5 minutes as well so you can’t just chain hack a portal and then move on to the next. You have to either wait or wander back and forth between portals.

In other roleplaying games, you sit in a chair while your avatar moves around doing stuff, leveling up and getting stronger. In Ingress, you are the avatar. You are the one moving around on the map, leveling up, getting stronger, meeting people and either befriending them or competing with them. (Relationship between factions can be tense in some places, but generally it is understood that having opponents is good for your progress, since there is no AP from hacking your own portals and only a tiny drip from recharging them.)

Level 1: You watch the first video and is amused by them saying “this is not a game”, because it is totally a game. But the backstory is halfway cool, and it is a new and different type of game so you want to try it. You are led through a series of easy sample missions. If there is no nearby portal, a temporary portal appears so you can learn to use your scanner. You feel incredibly self-conscious walking around staring at your scanner.

Level 2: You notice that there always seem to be people staring at their cell phones, could they possibly be agents of the opposition? Your scanner can hold a bit more XM now. You wander around your town, noticing sculptures or buildings that did not interest you before. Perhaps you drive to a neighboring town or city and check out these as well. If the weather is too bad, you stay indoors though.

Level 3: You have submitted your own portals and probably had some of them accepted. You know where all the portals in your town is, and probably in the city where you work as well. You no longer need to have your nose in your scanner when navigating around the town, you have been to each spot often enough to know the way.

Level 4: You are thinking differently. Is it the XM? Probably not, but you find yourself getting up earlier in the morning so you can hack those portals before work. You stay in town for a while after you clock out so you can hack them again. You have bought new jogging shoes, or fixed up your old bike. Oh, and you ordered an extra battery pack for your phone.

Level 5: You have met and befriended other agents from your faction, and know the names on your scanner’s Comm channel so well that you can spot a newcomer or visitor. You have joined the Google+ communities, first the open and then the secret ones. You marvel at the high-level players and their intricate plans.

Level 6: You bought a portable battery charger or a second mobile phone or tablet because the battery lasts longer that way and you don’t want to risk having to change batteries in the middle of a heated battle over an important portal. You are biking everywhere, or if walking, you are walking fast. You regularly visit nearby towns to get portal keys, either by hacking or exchanging keys with local agents there.

Level 7: There is no mistaking it: The XM has changed you. Your stamina is greatly increased. You can cover long distances in a loping gait, and you find your way even in the night. Weather no longer affects you. You have at least one portal near your home or near your workplace, quite possibly both. You recognize all members of both factions in your area on sight. Newbies are in awe of you, as you travel from city to city taking down opponent portals so they can claim them for your faction. Then you upgrade their portal so it becomes harder to take down, but you let them gain the action points of linking the portals together locally. Your mind is working on a larger scale now.

Level 8: You are One of Those. You are trusted in the most secret of the secret communities on Google+, on a state level or perhaps, one day, even higher. You take part in daring plans to link together cities across the entire continent, swiftly and precisely. Travel for work or vacation means gathering keys, and your family knows better than to try to dissuade you. You recruit new members and teach them the ropes, but you don’t just recruit any warm body. You know what kind of agent to look for. The goal now is nothing less than world domination. Your doctor is amazed by your physical perfection, but you don’t tell him that it is caused by a mysterious energy from a parallel dimension. The humans will soon enough come to know…

The Sims 2: A post-singularity world

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Screenshot Sims 2

Refrigeration and teleportation – The Sims 3 seems to be stuck in the 1990es, but with some fantastical elements. Could that happen in our future?

I have been writing a bit on my Sims 2 fanfic lately. And as usual I use the word “fanfic” very lightly. “Inspired by The Sims 2” may be more correct. But it amuses me that in my fiction worldbuilding, I have explained some of the differences between The Sims 2 and the real world with one single explanation: The technological singularity.

The concept of the technological singularity, or simply “the Singularity” among futurists, was first named by science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge, but has since gained mainstream acceptance not least thanks to Ray Kurzweil (inventor, futurist and eccentric genius, currently working with Google). Kurzweil delivers a credible defense for his hypothesis that the accumulation of information complexity increases exponentially. He sees Moore’s Law as just one phase of a much longer process, starting at the beginning of single-celled life if not before. If we plot this on a graph, we will see a line that is almost flat for billions of years, then rising slowly, then more rapidly, until a few years from now it turns vertical and goes through the roof. This point is the singularity – the time when the accumulation of information is so fast that humans as we know them will not be able to follow it.

There are basically two ideas about how the singularity will come to be: Either we develop artificial intelligences with the ability to improve themselves, and they leave us in the dust; or, we improve ourselves (most likely by merging with computer systems) beyond anything today imaginable as human. One version of the latter was described by Vinge in his novels: Human minds became connected electrotelepathically into superminds where humans (and their machines) were all nodes working seamlessly together.

***

Now back to my fiction. There, sometime in the 21st century, the Singularity has already come and gone. Steadily more fantastic inventions were made, some of which are still around. The Singularity multi-mind attracted most of the bright, creative and curious people in the world. For a while, more and more people flocked to it, and its power increased exponentially. But at some point the distance became too large: The Singularity was beyond human understanding, a “weakly godlike superintelligence” as the futurists call it, and those who were outside were not the most adventurous souls of mankind. And so the Singularity developed on its own. It fixed the climate, restored extinct species, re-knitted the web of life, reclaimed deserts. From a shining city in orbit, the Singularity looked at its work and presumably saw that it was good.

Then, on the night of Passover, they left. This event is when the new era began: AS, After Singularity. Some call it the Rapture of the Nerds, but technically most of them were already gone before that. Nobody knows what happened. Suddenly, the City in the Sky shone like many suns, and then it was gone. Some think it left for another planet or another solar system or another galaxy. Some think it traveled in time, or to another dimension. Some think it ascended to a higher plane. Some think it will come back one day. Some think it realized that life is meaningless and blew itself to atoms.

The dullards inherited the Earth: The dimwitted, the conformist, the fearful, the unimaginative and uninspired. Homo Sapiens Mundanis has locked itself in an idealized, endless 1990es where progress is both impossible and unwanted. For almost a century, life has repeated itself like this, the remnant of mankind slowly growing back in a world just beyond their comprehension, quietly maintained by vaguely humanoid robots and semi-intelligent machines. But a tiny glimmer of change is beginning: The nano-witchards consider themselves the Heirs of the Ascended, and they intend to change everything, again.

This backstory explains many of the anomalies of The Sims 2 as relics of the Singularity or the time just before it, when technology was indistinguishable from magic. Here are some of the weirdness from The Sims 2 and its expansion packs that fall in this category:

-Robots more intelligent than the sims: These vaguely humanoid robots became plentiful during the last years before the Singularity, and did all the hard work. They can repair themselves, or failing that, each other, and are still good as new generations later. They can also produce the kits needed to create more robots, but seem to have no will to actually produce new robots themselves and take over the world.

-Aliens and saucers. The green aliens with big black eyes are not actually from another planet, although they live there now. They are a faction that parted ways with the Singularity after they had reached near-magic technology but before the final integration into a common mind. They occasionally decide to improve the gene pool of the earthlings by making men pregnant with little green babies. Why men? Nobody knows. It is uncertain whether there are female “aliens”, certainly no one has seen any.

-Werewolves, vampires, bigfoot and plantsims: Results of genetic experiments in the run-up to the Singularity. With the possible exception of Bigfoot, they are the result of highly advanced viruses that can transform humans into alternate forms. The reason for this added diversity is lost with the Singularity Exodus, but a mechanism was put in place to make the mutations reversible.

-Djinns: Djinns are holograms, created by the artificial intelligence inside the lamps. They fulfill wishes, but only three in the same area, then they need to be moved. These lamps are examples of nanotechnology, indistinguishable from magic. The resurrect-o-tron is another example, which can return a dead person to life, but not always perfectly. The djinn can also do this, and the two artifacts are probably from the same time, the last year of the Old Era.

-The Gypsies: The people known as the Gypsies are ordinary humans but are following instructions from the Singularity and are provided for by the nanomagic they serve. They distribute the lamps and use another relic from the end of the Old Era, the crystal balls that are interfaces to an information technology far superior to any that has existed before or since.

-Witches: The final gift of the Singularity was the Wand, the Cauldron and the Spellbook. A nanotechnology truly indistinguishable from magic, witchery can perform a wide range of functions, including creating copies of the artifacts themselves. Witches / wizards (known in my story collectively as witchards) do not actually understand the “magic” they use, but are convinced that by spreading the use of it, they will usher in a golden age where humans will once again regain their former intellect and creativity.

So there you have The Sims 2. Electric equipment that doesn’t need cables, toilets that don’t need plumbing, houses that raise themselves, the occasional robot, witch or vampire; but nobody realizes that the real 1990es weren’t like that, because nobody remembers that time anymore except from old TV series.

Neverwinter is no City of Heroes

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Screenshot Neverwinter

Grim and gritty, not a place I would like to spend my afterlife.

I was planning to write about the new Neverwinter MMO for a week or two, much as I did with City of Heroes from the same studio exactly 9 years ago. But the truth is that Neverwinter is no City of Heroes, and I probably am not quite the same person I was back then, either.

That said, I could probably still easier write another entry about City of Heroes, even though it closed down 5 months ago. (It feels more like a year and a half, but then I have a strange sense of time.)

As for Neverwinter, I am making a habit of logging in several times a day to have my 3 characters pray, give orders to their henchmen, and if necessary send their pets or followers on training. I’ve run some quests and hunted some bandits and orcs, but I don’t see this game becoming a lifestyle. Your lifestyle may vary.

Neverwinter MMORPG

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Screenshot Neverwinter MMORPG - Protectors Enclave

I think this is the prettiest part of the game I have seen so far. Not much to write home about, but reasonably well rendered … just kind of gritty.

The new massive multiplayer online role playing game Neverwinter will be available to the “freeloaders” (free to download, free to play) on April 30, but I am already in. The reason is that I bought a second-tier “founder’s pack”.

In a perfect world, games would be free, and this is as close as you are likely to get. What I mean by that cryptic statement is that you can play the whole game, including endgame content, without paying a dime (if you have a computer and internet access, at least). But obviously someone is paying. In this case, I am one of them. Paying customers get some goodies in the game which makes it a little easier and more colorful. And some of us paid in advance, helping to foot the bill of getting the game to the market. As a thank-you, we got in on the game a little earlier.

Neverwinter is a medieval-style sword and sorcery game, unlike the two other games I have played from Cryptic Studios, the superhero games Champions Online and my favorite MMO ever, City of Heroes. Like other medieval games, Neverwinter tends to have the players all look pretty much alike at the start, except for variations from race, sex and class. I haven’t seen the high-level areas, but so far it looks like people continue to look pretty much the same, the weapons and armor found by questing aren’t all that different looking. The style is on the gritty side, and people are not particularly good-looking. The women all have well developed breasts though, although the armor can reduce the visual impact in some cases, thankfully. I suppose prioritizing breasts over beauty is a hint as to who they expect to be their typical customers.

Despite this initial impression, I have to say the game is surprisingly good. The game mechanics and lore are based on the original Dungeons & Dragons role-playing system, the first in the world of its kind, and a mainstay of paper, pencil and dice role playing for many years. I actually had some source books and stuff for this myself, many years ago, shortly before the Internet came to Norway. It is still viable.

The saving throw, to keep to the terminology, is the wide range of lore accumulated over the pen and paper years. There are innumerable books set in the same game world and at time in the same city, and the copyright holders are actively consulted in making the game. This makes for an immersive, integrated world where all the threads come together. And then there is my excuse for supporting the game in the first place: The Foundry.

The Foundry is a set of developer tools given to users to make their own quests. These quests are then made available in much the same way as the quests created by the developers themselves. Users vote for the quests, and can also flag them for inspection if they contain illegal or indecent content. A similar system existed in City of Heroes, but it is actually even better integrated in this game. You can play only Foundry missions for as long as you like, and get the same kind of half-randomized encounters and loot that you will get in the native quests. In theory you should be able to play all the way to level 60 this way, and some people will probably do.

Unfortunately for their hope of trapping me in their game, the interface is very mouse-heavy. The two main attacks for every class are bound to the left and right mouse button, and you also use to mouse to choose the direction you look and move. As a result, I can only play a fairly short time before my right arm starts hurting again. It has never completely recovered from the repetitive stress injury some years ago, and probably never will, barring divine intervention or nanotechnology.

But on the other hand, as it were, there is crafting and leadership. These skills can be performed through a web interface, including on my smartphone. You can also use the web portal to check your inventory or access the auction house, and guild members can also use it for guild activities, whatever those may bet. This can be done in a rather low-stress manner, including tapping on my smartphone screen, which avoids the cramping from constantly having to hold on to the mouse.

The leadership skill is lumped together with crafting. You assemble a virtual team of mercenaries which you assign to various tasks, like guarding a caravan or exploring the terrain. Each task has a set duration and gives a certain outcome: Leadership XP, pretty much always. Sometimes also character XP, and/or coins, astral diamonds, maps or chests of random goodies. The goodie chests, coins and diamonds go into your inventory. You can actually level up by using XP from your little mercenary team, but if you have the opportunity, you can level up much faster by praying as well.

Oh yes. There are various small gods in the game, and Invocation (available at level 11) let you get various goodies from them once an hour. There is no set praying hour, the 1 hour limit is just a minimum. You need to find an altar or campfire, but these are pretty common (and there are portable altars to be found as well). Sometimes you get just a combat buff (which expires after you’ve been online a certain amount of time), other times special coins, astral diamonds (used for various special shopping) and even a decent amount of XP. So in theory again, you could level up and become rich simply by praying. I am sure some Americans find this appealing. I find it amusing.

So basically there are numerous ways to level up your character and get stuff without playing through the main quests at all. You can pray, you can craft or send your imaginary mercenaries around, or if you deign to fight, you can do so using player-made content only (including your own).

On the off chance that you go fighting, you will have a pet to assist you from the start if you are a Founder like me. Otherwise you gain a companion at level 16, which can be of any class of your choosing. Again, you may have your companion do most of the fighting, but in that case they will level up and you not so much. (You still get the XP for finishing the quest, at least.)

I could see myself spending months trying these fringe activities, just because I can. But preferably those that don’t require frantic mousing. No matter how powerful I become in a 2-dimensional world, it is not worth destroying my body in the 3-dimensional world. And my soul probably won’t thrive on enormous amounts of this, either. It’s not really something I think I will miss having dedicated my life to, when that life is over. Your life may vary.

But a quite well-crafted game it is, so if you’re planning to play a lot of MMORPG, this is well worth a try for free.

Unlimited games

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Screenshot anime Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai NEXT

“There sure are a lot of games in this world.” There sure are! Hindus even claim that the world is God’s game (lila). With most of us not being God, the closest we come to that feeling may be computer games. For better or for worse.

I don’t like computer games where you win and then it’s over.

The best part of games like Civilization or Master of Magic is when the enemy is reduced to 1 city that I keep on the map so the game won’t end, while I transform the planet into a utopia. But even these games come to a natural end. At some point all technologies (or magics) are researched, and every square of the map is gainfully used. At that point, the game no longer merits my interest. It is not perfection I enjoy, but growth.

Even better are games which are for all purposes unlimited, or only limited by the human lifespan. (I suppose someone could inherit them, but I doubt there will be many volunteers.) The games that come to mind are simulators from Maxis. I am afraid Sim City is not among them, certainly not in its latest version. But the game Spore is the star example: The imaginary galaxy has thousands of stars, most of them with at least a couple planets. I’ve seen someone claim 50 000 planets (or was it stars) – the point is, there are more than you could possibly colonize in your lifetime, so the game is basically unlimited. It is also unlimited in that you can add your own creations, and the possible combinations there are also in the millions. Not only your own – the game will automatically load some of the worlds with creatures made by your friends and strangers. So this game is for all purposes unlimited.

A less obvious example is The Sims 2. Each neighborhood in this game can have up to 999 shopping districts or downtowns or both. (I judge this from the structure of the filenames, as far as I know it has never been tested.) You can only see one suburb at a time, but they are all part of the same neighborhood: If you run a shop in a shopping district, sims from the various suburbs will show up as customers. If you play a family in the main neighborhood or in one of the suburbs, sims from the other suburbs will randomly walk by. If you go downtown on a date, you will see sims from other suburbs come and go. So over time, theoretically you could have tens of thousands of sims who all knew each other. But usually the game crashes or people lose interest before it comes that far.

Role playing games are more limited, but here you have many different paths you may take. There are various classes or archetypes in such a game, and usually you can choose different specializations even within each class. In a massive multiplayer online RPG you can make teams with an almost unlimited variation of different classes and specializations. I rather enjoyed this in City of Heroes, which allowed many different combinations of archetypes to be viable, not just the standard formula from early medieval RPGs. For instance, perhaps you did not have a healer on the team, but you had two forcefield defenders. Two layers of force fields would make you hard to hit, so you would not need all that healing. The game had many such alternative routes, which made teams different and unique. Still, not exactly the same as the unlimited building games.

***

I think it is natural to want unlimited growth, but of course it is not really found in games. In this case, it is really all in our minds. Although our lifespan is limited, we desire to see the growth of individuals, families, neighborhoods, cities, empires, even worlds without end.

Well, some of us do. Others prefer games of endless killing, war and destruction – or at least to pull up the ladder while the sims are swimming. I guess there is some truth to the old proverb that you can learn more about a man from watching him play for and hour than hearing him talk for a year. (Although it is pretty certain that it wasn’t Plato who said that, no matter how many people attribute it to him. It is first seen in the early 20th century.)

 

Back in the real world?

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Screenshot anime Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai Next

“I’ll just escape to the 2D world and console my broken heart.” But the 2D world is not just for escaping anymore – it is invading the “real” world on a broad front, or at least mine.

The Sims 3: University Life is fun and all, but perhaps it did not really deserve four entries. Then again it seems harmless, and does not require lots of special training and strange thinking. The Sims games are a great way to connect to people.

Back in the real world, I will gladly admit that I have mixed feelings about my own scarcity of higher education. I only took two winters of tertiary education. It was a lot of fun, but I was broke and living on my own. My parents were also poor and could not really have helped out much. Student loans were available, but the truth is that I had (and have) no ambitions of career in this world. I enjoyed learning just to learn, but I had no interest in competing and using my elbows to get ahead in the world. As such, I would not fit in too well with the type of people who took higher education in Norway in the early 1980es. It was still some years before college became a natural part of young people’s lives.

If I were suddenly to become rich, I might enroll at a college or university just for the fun of it, but at my age it has no monetary value at all. I would not be finished with a Master of anything until I was 57 or 58, and with the lower bound on retirement age now at 62, no employer would even consider me. We lack qualified workers of many kinds, especially engineers, but the best one can hope for when over 50 is working for a temp agency. I have every intention to work until 75 (the current upper bound on the flexible retirement age) unless some dire illness strikes me down. Which is certainly possible, but what I mean is, I have no intention to ever retire. I intend to work until I die or become disabled, whichever comes first. Work is love. Work is service to God and country and humanity. It is what we were born to do. But learning, learning is fun.

Luckily, unlike my sims, I can study online, and even for free. I can learn math at the Khan Academy, languages at Duolingo and Livemocha, all for free. There are also several traditional universities that offer online lectures and courses, some of these for free as well. I haven’t looked into that yet.

(Livemocha, despite its random name, is a website that helps arrange community-based language learning online. You study some small piece of the language with their course, then practice it with real people who already speak it. Or that is what it looks like from the description. I hear good things about it – it has a lot more languages than Duolingo, for instance – but I would not impose on real people unless there was some dire need. And since I am trying to learn to read, not to speak Japanese, it is anyway not what I am looking for. But it sounds awesome for neurotypicals, who love to do all kinds of things together with real people.)

When not playing The Sims 3, I find myself “playing” with French on Duolingo. It is quite a bit of fun, actually. Between the two, I am even lagging behind on my favorite anime. There are several decent series this year, and I am a couple weeks behind on most of them. What is the world coming to, when learning a random language is more fun than watching anime?

And of course, by now we have to wonder what I meant by “real” world. I suppose studying is more real than watching my sims study, kind of, but I am still listening to a robot voice on the Internet. Between studying French on the Internet and Japanese on my smartphone, playing games and watching anime, there isn’t much that is “real” in the way my grandmother would have meant “real”. But at least i eat real food (noodles are real food, yes?) and sleep in a real bed! Long may that last.

Sims 3 university, 4: Juice, bonfires, comics & sexting

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Screenshot Sims 3 University Life

“Vo gerbits!” The school cheer has returned!

Much like in the supposedly real world (if such a concept is even applicable to university life) the academic progress is not the only thing on most students’ minds. This is good, since if you take a light course load, you have all evening to explore the campus and surrounding area, meet interesting people and send them text messages of varying content.

(On a related note, I recommend buying a better bed as soon as you can afford to, since sleeping better means more waking time to have fun. The “meditative trance sleep” lifetime happiness reward also helps with this, but you may not have the life experience for that as a young adult. A sleep elixir from the chemistry set (Generations expansion) can cut down your sleep to a couple hours, whereas the Energy Drink from Mixology (Late Night expansion) can keep you running for much longer while tired.)

The students tend to at first fall into three distinct categories: Nerds, jocks and rebels. As a rule of thumb, the nerds tend to study science, the jocks sports, and the rebels art. But this is not absolute, and certainly not a requirement for your sims. Your status with each group depends partly on befriending and spending time with its members, but there are also activities that can gain status in each group. For instance, I discovered by accident that reading comics will give you crazy high status with the nerds. The first half a dozen comics I read gained me a reputation level each. I am not sure what the corresponding actions are for the other groups.

The jocks in particular are generous in inviting people to their bonfire parties, so this is a good chance to spend time with them. There is usually a keg of “juice” present, and getting “juiced” at the party will give you bonus rep with the jocks. Kissing, making out and having woohoo (sim sex) during the parties also appear as opportunities to gain reputation with them. Stereotypes? What stereotypes?

The rebels live on the edge of the law or just outside. Tagging walls, painting streets, inciting protests and selling exam cheats all bring the acclaim of the rebels. A less dangerous (but nauseating) opportunity is to root through dumpsters. This will occasionally appear as an opportunity, so wait until then. You must know some rebels first, but they are not hard to spot. (For one thing, the caste of a sim appears if you hold your mouse pointer over them…)

Over time some non-player characters gain levels in two of the social groups (or “castes”), while over the course of a generation there appears more and more locals who don’t belong to any group at all. I am not sure if the castes die out eventually when the playable sims ignore them, but there seems to be a marked reduction. Then again this could be a side effect of the StoryProgression mod that I use, which causes students to have more normal family lives, falling in love and marrying and having children. You’d think their children would pick up the social group of their parents, but it does not seem like it.

Gaining lots of influence in a group can give you new opportunities, in extreme cases unlock a new career. A high reputation can also give you an added personality trait. Unfortunately you cannot pick this – it is either the group trait or a random trait. (In contrast to the extra trait you get from completing your first major, you can choose that freely.)

Intertwined with this social life is another form of social life: Social Networking over the smartphone. Your trusty old cell phone has been upgraded to a smartphone, and there are a number of new options. At first these are pretty limited, but after surfing the Net for a while you unlock the first level of the Social Networking skill. There are also books to buy (or borrow at the library) which let you improve fairly rapidly in the skill. I find it ironic that these are physical books. On the bright side, if you (the player) have shelled out the 500 sim points for a MultiTab tablet, you can read e-books on it. And of course you can improve the skill by use.

From the start you can surf the net, text people you know and stream video. Soon blogging becomes available, and once you get blog followers you can beg them for help financially or academically. Followers are easily lost again, though. Later on there are more features, like the SimFinder app that lets you find a potential friend or date based on their personality trait, gender and age. Unfortunately, it seems this feature is local, so while on campus you won’t find people in your hometown or the other way around, much less the three foreign countries. I guess technology dictates this limit. You cannot even send text messages to your friends back home, although strangely you can still call them.

Most of the new Social Networking skills seem to be added for realism and have relatively little influence on your life, although the SimFinder is really handy if you are looking for that Special Someone with a particular personality. Of course, the ideal person may not exist, but you should come a lot closer than trial and error. And there is a mysterious power for the accomplished Networkers, to alter the relationship between other sims.

While social networking is not particularly tied to campus, college sports are performed in the sports hall and out of sight. These are very exhausting, so I recommend going there fully rested if you want to get home without falling asleep. On the bright side, they give you rapid advancement in the jock group, as can be expected. For a more controllable (and visual) sport, try the flying disc (basically a Frisbee). It can be started and stopped at any time, and while it is exhausting and makes you sweaty, it is also more fun to watch than the outside of a sports hall. And you can break it off at any time and get a shower before you collapse in bed. Not least, you can take it with you home from Uni and play with family and friends.

The kicky bag / hockey sack from The Sims 2 makes its return, more colorful than ever and just as fun. Sporty sims are likely to play with it on their own. Like the discs, you can snag a couple of them for free at orientation to bring home to your family after each semester.

Things to bring with you to college:
-A deathflower, if someone in your family can grow them. The grills and bonfires can easily get out of control, and it may take a while for the firesim to get there.
-A week’s supply of Sleep Elixir from the chemistry set (Generations expansion) if someone in your family has the skill to make them.
-Relevant skill books your family may possess. It seems like learning skills is faster in University generally, and skills related to your major is the most powerful form of studying.

Have a nice trip, and don’t stay up too late the night before finals!

Sims 3: University, 3 – classes and study

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Screenshot Sims 3 University Life - sleepy students

Luckily morning classes are fairly rare…

Now that your sim is in the new and exciting world of Higher Education, it is time to attend class, study hard and make sure to graduate with the highest grade. After all, your future income depends on your success! Luckily, in The Sims 3, you have all the time in the world, or very nearly so. Your sim does not age while in university, and if you studied diligently in your youth and then picked the lightest course load, you should be able to breeze through the semester.

Each semester is one week, or nearly so. You arrive on Sunday, and go home late on Saturday. However, the study progress bar is only active from your first class on Monday to after your final exam on Friday (typically at noon). This is the time range in which it makes sense to study.

When you arrive at Uni, your first day will be spent getting settled and going to orientation. Your academic progress bar will not be visible until your first class, on the second day. Classes usually begin at noon, but some classes begin at 8 and some at 16 (4 PM). If you have taken on the challenge of a double course load, classes will not collide, but there won’t be much time to recharge between them. Pretty much run from one to the other. (This is where having bought the MultiTab gadget comes in handy, as starting to listen to a Tabcast gives an instant joy boost. Craziness drink from the Mixology skill (Late Night expansion) will also keep you from crashing your fun bar by working hard for two lectures in a row.)

Now, assuming you started with a normal course load, you should be fine no matter what. Since last we spoke, I have sent an almost completely unskilled Sim to Uni, and he still pretty much breezed through it. The academic bar starts at half full, and sinks very slowly as the hours pass and your sim begins to forget. But even listening normally during lectures will be enough for a passing grade and then some. If you actually read in a textbook occasionally, so much the better. You can also read on your smartphone for a quick boost. Each major also has its own special skill object (like a sketchbook for art) which you get for free when you arrive, together with textbooks. I don’t think even Norway coddles its students that much!

Perhaps the best way to increase your grades is to improve the relevant skills. When you do the aptitude test, you can see which skills belong to which major. Some are obvious, like painting and guitar for Art. Some not so much, like Mixology for Business. But raising your skills will now automatically improve your grades, and pretty fast too. In fact, you may want to keep your sim in check if they love raising their skills, so you don’t use up all this skilling in one semester. If you know your sim is crazy about a skill, this is one of the few times it might be an idea to take a double course load, especially if this is a skill that you can raise by having fun, like painting and guitar.

My recommended study activities, in order:
-Classes. You are only allowed to skip one, and not the final exam on Friday.
-Skilling, because you will need those skills in your job.
-The dedicated skill object. Even if your skill is maxed, using this will still raise your grades.
-Textbooks or smartphone.
-Study groups, a bit of a hassle for the player to organize.

Perhaps it is just because I am new to the expansion, but I found double course load to be the upper limit. You can pile on even more courses, but that just sounds foolhardy. After all, you don’t age while studying, so you can safely return to learn more another week. And there are many other things to do on campus. More about that next time, hopefully!

Sims 3: University Life, 2 – preparations

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Screenshot Sims 3

If you want to get the most out of your higher education, you should make sure to study while you are a teen. Although it is not necessary to take it to extremes…

Unlike in The Sims 2, you can no longer send teenagers to the university: You have to wait until they become young adults. And even then, it may be a good idea to wait a bit, or at least not take it all at once. You can now stagger your semesters throughout your sim’s life, and there are benefits and drawbacks to consider.

But before you get that far, be aware that your simulated children can still prepare for college by increasing their skills and getting good grades. In fact, if you are really nuts about college, you may want to pick the right traits for their scholarships. Yes, personality traits now influence what scholarships you get. Want to study arts? You may want the artistic trait, or the virtuoso or even natural cook. The scientific studies call for handiness, and of course if you want something sports related you want to be athletic. In practice, these traits won’t be necessary unless you go to college really early and are broke. Skills alone should give you both scholarships and study credits (so you don’t start with an empty study bar).

The requirements are not so bad. I started with a teenager in a new neighborhood, and after a few years as a young adult she got more scholarships than she needed for tuition. In fact, she came home from Uni with more money than she had before she enrolled. She hadn’t maxed all the relevant skills either, but she had made a decent progress during her teen years.  (I have bought the official MultiTab gadget, which helps quite a bit with learning and fun; but on the other hand, sims born in-game can begin learning skills early on.)

Children as well as teens and adults can now get a bonus moodlet from having studied enough. There are new ways of studying too, which we’ll hopefully get back to next time.

Before enrolling in college, make sure to take the aptitude test. It is necessary to get scholarships and study credit. But you can also take it just to see what you need to work more on. It gives a detailed breakdown of your strengths and weaknesses for each major. The test is part of the university package you get from the Llama mascot shortly after the game starts with the new expansion. It is probably a bad idea to delete this.

The benefit of going to Uni right away is that you will jump into level 4 of your first job, if the degree is relevant for the job. But even if you get your degree after you have started working, you should be promoted accordingly (I have not tested that, but the game says so) and you will definitely advance faster at higher levels (this I have tested.)

Note that you can return to Uni later for another major if you decide to change your career later in life – or if you just enjoy streaking, juice parties and unethical experiments on plants, sims and combinations of the two.

How long time you want to spend on campus is largely up to you. You can take one or two semesters at a time, then you must return home. But you can enroll again at once, although you should probably consider going through your inventory and see if there is something you can leave at home.

Time does not pass on your home lot while you are away. (It uses the same mechanics as World Adventures, for those who have that vacation-oriented expansion.) It is possible to send one sim from a household to university and let others stay behind. Since there is a drive from your home to the point of departure, you will need to get a babysitter if you leave small children behind. But your family does not age while you are away.

On the other hand, the people in University town do age while you are home. Or perhaps that is the work of the Story Progression mod? I don’t think so, though. It makes sense that they should age with you. They didn’t do that in The Sims 2, though. Then again, nobody did, not even your neighbors.

I recommend starting with the minimum course load the first time. It is surprisingly hard even for a genius with maxed mixology skills to max the study bar with double course load, while it is quite easy with just one. And there are plenty of things to spend your time on. But try with 1 semester and a minimum number of study credits the first time, and increase later if it seems too easy.

As for the things to do in college, we shall hopefully get back to them next time.

Sims 3: University Life, overview

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Screenshot Sims 3 University Life - jogging female student

Run – don’t walk – to buy the new expansion pack for The Sims 3! OK, perhaps not, but it is a backpackload of fun.

I have to admit that University was my favorite expansion for The Sims 2, but I know this is not a universal view. So I may be biased, but hey, it is my site and my review, so. Let me say it from the start: Sims 3 University Life is my new favorite. It has pretty much all the things that made the original cool, only more of everything. It does not add quite as much to the game, in terms of careers and advantages, but still plenty enough that your sims might want to go to university even if you had no other reasons. I hope to convince you that there are plenty of reasons.

So you did not play The Sims 2: University? What’s this all about?

The Sims 3 is a “life simulator” game. Like the two previous games, it lets small imaginary people go about their lives in your computer, and you can either watch them, help them or hinder them. For each version, the sims (the simulated people) have become more intelligent and more complex. Hopefully you already have The Sims 3, since it is a requirement for all the expansion packs; this is the 9th.

The purpose of going to university in the world of the sims is much the same as in the real world: Broaden your outlook on life and become a better, wiser person. Get a better paid job. Find a cute person to share your future with, or a lot of cute persons to share your present with. Get away from mom and the neighbors and experiment with things that would give them a heart attack. Meet people who share your interests. Overcome fears and insecurities. Have fun, lots and lots of fun. Any one of these, or several of them, may seems a compelling reason to go to university.

In the real world, higher education is becoming painfully expensive, at least if you don’t live here in Norway where most of it is tax-financed (and much of the tax is on the oil industry). As usual, Sim Country is more like Norway. There is a tuition fee, but is rather moderate. If you have decent skills before you go, you could easily get more in scholarship than you pay for a semester. Be sure to take the aptitude test first to get the scholarship.

What is new from The Sims 2: University?

Much like the base game itself, University Life has expanded the details. But there are also some fundamental differences.

-University is now for adults. No more sending teens to college. All adults, even elders, can attend. In fact, it may be easier to study if you have some work experience. Skills and work experience contribute toward scholarships and study credit. Be sure to take the aptitude test before enrolling, to get these bonuses.

-You can take several majors, one after another. As a result, you can spend a considerable time in college if you want to catch them all, or if you just want to live half a century longer. (You still don’t age while in University.)

-You stay in University for one or two semesters, then return to your hometown. You need to enroll again for the next year. This breaks up the stay at Uni, lets you exchange things in your inventory at home, and allows you to stagger your University experience throughout your adult life. But if you want to return to Uni immediately, you can just enroll again. Oh, and you can also work on several  majors before you complete any of them, if you for some reason feel the urge.

(This may in part be an effect of using the same engine for University as for the vacation expansion, World Adventures. You even need to “call someone abroad” when you want to speak to your dormies from home. University really is a different country! I knew it!)

-New studying. All use of skill objects that fit your major will contribute to your final score. for instance, as an arts student you will gain study credit for sketching, painting or playing the guitar. You can also read relevant books and even study on your smartphone, or do group study, but the fun and easy way is to do what you probably want to do anyway, use skill objects. Each major gives the student a portable skill object as you start, so there is no excuse not to. But you can still use other relevant skill objects.

-New social groups: There are now 3 “castes” or social groups: Nerds, jocks and rebels. The first two should be familiar to most, but rebels are mostly art students living on the edge of the law: Painting on walls and parking lots, instigating protests, and selling cheat sheets for the exams. Fame within a social group can give benefits, included an extra personality trait. (Unfortunately you cannot pick this trait – it is either random or typical of the social group.) It is also possible to unlock one of three extra careers this way.

-There are fewer majors, and no careers that are unlocked by study alone. You just start at a higher level and advance faster in the relevant career.

-Extra personality trait when you graduate successfully! And you get to pick this one! Yess!

-Missing: Extra want slots. Sorely missed. You can never have too many of those.

-Possibly missing: Secret society. Then again, with it being secret, I may just not have found it.

-Possibly missing: Getting good grades by socializing the teachers. They seem to play much less of a role this time. But again, I may be mistaken, since I don’t play overly social sims.

-Dorms are more homelike and less prison-like. There are bedrooms with one bed, two beds and a double bed. You can assign beds to playables and non-playables alike, and program doors to allow a list of specific sims.

-Sims now have smartphones! Social networking is a new skill, and sims can surf the Internet, blog and unlock new apps as they grow more skilled.