Category Archives: games

“Lifefruit for elders”

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Sim Eating lifefruit

My self-sim eating a lifefruit. There is a deeper meaning to this, if you want there to be.

There is a reason I have categorized this entry as both “games” and “philosophy”. This happens occasionally with me, and you may be curious as to how that happens.

In the computer game The Sims 3, there is a plant called Lifefruit. It is a narrow bush that produces two fruits every few days (depending on the quality and care). When an adult eats one fruit, they become one day younger. Since the default lifespan for a sim is something like 80 days, that’s a pretty big deal. It is particularly the fertile years that could need an extension – teen age is unnaturally long but the adult years are short if you want more than a couple kids, not to mention a career. (In recent updates of the game, you can set the length of individual age groups, which helps with this problem.)

Sims with the “Good” trait can receive lifetime happiness by donating to good causes, and one of the causes I have supported the most is “Lifefruit for elders”. It just seemed like the right thing to do, you know?

Sims with a high gardening skill (level 7 and up) can grow this plant from special seeds that can be found occasionally. It can not be bought. Once in a blue moon you will get a request from an elderly sim (one of the computer-controlled ones) who feels that they are nearing the end of their life, and wants to buy a lifefruit from you. They pay handsomely for it and their your relationship with them goes way up. For as long as it lasts…

I’ve played the game off and on since it came out, but only just recently did I actually play an elder with a lifefruit garden. It turns out that once you have passed the age marker from adult to elder, lifefruit no longer has any effect. The exception is toward the end of your years as an elder – it will then age you several days, taking you to the brink of death.

***

From this we can learn that meaning well is not the same as doing well, although it usually helps. Sometimes you need knowledge and wisdom along with your love. In real life there is no lifefruit, of course, but it is still possible to donate to causes which may do more harm than good, or at least considerable harm along with their good. NGOs (non-government organizations) are some of the most obscure groups on the planet, frequently being tax-exempt and having no audits and a leadership based on the leaders choosing people they like for the highest positions, including the next leaders. Where your money ends up is generally pretty foggy. And even when the intentions of all involved are pure, we know that meddling in cultures strikingly different form your own can have disastrous side effects.

***

Another lesson from the lifefruit is that you cannot always save up something for later. There are things that belong in one life phase but not in another. It is a well known fact that people often have grand plans for traveling the world when they retire; but when they actually do so, many no longer have the health and the energy and the people with whom they wanted to travel. What once was the dream of their life may end up a nightmare and may even, in a few cases, be the end of them.

On a thankfully much smaller level, I have mentioned before that since 2005 I can no longer eat fatty foods except in tiny quantities: For instance, chocolate about the size of my thumb in one workday. If I had known this in my younger years, you can bet that I would have eaten more chocolate. Well, even more chocolate, I mean. (While not quite as potent as the imaginary lifefruit, chocolate has many health benefits – it increases fat burning and makes exercise more effective, balances sex hormones, improves mood, and contains antioxidants that supposedly reduce the risk of cancer slightly and slows aging.)  So dear younger reader: Eat your chocolate while you can, with a grateful heart.

The Sims Freeplay Android

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Here’s how it looks on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, except it looks sharper. Apologies for the lack of professional photo equipment.

For those who cannot get enough of The Sims, there is now a new and better Sims game for Android. And it is completely free, well if you don’t have connection charges (it connects to a server occasionally). Oh, and if you are patient and not too impulsive. But it can be free. It is for me. Then again, I don’t drink.

There are certain minimum requirements, and the game will not install without them. I would recommend a tablet or a really big screen, honestly, because there is a lot of detail and you would have to zoom in quite a bit on a small screen. Luckily, you can zoom in and out and rotate with the usual controls – the tutorial should also show you this.

The Sims Freeplay can be downloaded for free from Google Play (formerly known as Android Market). It gets you started right away with a tutorial which continues far into the game, giving you ever new goals. Goals again give you some kind of reward when fulfilled. However, some of the goals also require some expense (in-game, not on your credit card) to fulfill.

Already in the tutorial you will learn about the “Lifestyle Points”, which you get from time to time by fulfilling goals or leveling up. (Yes, the game has experience points and levels like a role playing game.) These Lifestyle Points can be used to hurry a project. For instance, each time you add a building to your town, it will not only be more expensive than last time, but also take more time. By throwing in LPs, you can finish immediately. If you run out of them, you can buy them for real dollars through the game interface. The developers probably hope that people will either lend the tablet to their kids without warning them, or else playing when drunk. Warning: these things are expensive.

What you will NOT be harassed to do is recruit your friends. There is no friend requirement whatsoever to play the game, although you can in the most recent versions of the game log into Facebook (of all places – why not Google+? Android is a Google product, you guys). Once there, you can supposedly do social things on a houseboat in the game. The YouTube trailer seems to imply that the social activity largely consists in your sims wiggling their butt. Or perhaps that’s just what I remember. I don’t have any Facebook friends who play the game, to the best of my knowledge, so apart from a small daily gift the social boat does nothing for me. If you are my Facebook friend and want to wiggle your simulated butt to tinny electronic music in this game, I’ll try to help; but I’m not really a social person.

What you can do without friends however is built small homes for your sims, create more or less random sims (small computer people) and dress them up, and direct them around their homes doing various things. Like using the toilet or gardening. Pretty much every interaction will give XP, which helps you level up. The game as a whole levels up, not the individual sim. Also, all of the households share the same money, unlike in the normal Sims game. So you can earn money in one house and spend it in another.

The easy way to earn money is buying a garden plot and grow vegetables. At least in the early levels of the game, the income depends on how much you are willing to click. The vegetables that take a half hour to grow give more money than the ones that take five minutes to grow, but they don’t give six times more. If you can be bothered to click six times as often, you can get noticeably more profit. I assume that after a few dozen clicks you will have second thoughts, though, unless you have an extremely boring life otherwise. (There is even a 30-second vegetable, if you are extremely trigger-happy. It is also free to plant, which is nice if you have somehow wasted all your virtual money. Not that I would know, would I?)

Once you have built a workplace in town, you can send your sims off to work and earn money and XP that way. This also has the benefit that they will rise in their career over time, earning more and more money and XP per hour. Be warned however that everything in this game takes real time. For instance, I built the science building, which gives a pretty nice pay. It so happens that I can send my sims off right before I clock in at my own workplace, and they will finish around the time I arrive on my own bus home! Most people start earlier in real life than I do, however, and unless they think playing this game at work is OK, there is no point in having a science building: You cannot program your sims to do some action in the future, and they have no free will worth talking of. So you need to access the game in the hour before their virtual workplace opens, to send them there. They will go home on their own though.

Don’t despair if you don’t find any workplace with suitable working hours (although there probably is one – each workplace has different hours). After a few levels you will unlock vegetables with a roughly work-like time span, like 10 hours, which should keep them occupied all through your workday if you are European. Americans may want the 12 hour option, from what I hear. Poor folks. I wonder if we should boycott products made with unpaid overtime. It is kind of like slavery, isn’t it?

The sims, to get back on track, certainly don’t require much attention for their own needs. For those of us used to the original Sims games, it is amazing that the small computer people can go a whole day without needing to visit the toilet. They can also go a long time without eating. But over time their need bars do fall, and you should check them from time to time. The sims will get XP from filling their needs too, after all.

One element from the original games is that more expensive objects take less time to fulfill needs. So if you sleep in a more expensive bed, you can sleep an hour less and be just as rested. In addition, you get more XP for using expensive objects. So that is an encouragement to earn more simoleons (the sims currency). Simoleons are also needed to buy houses for new sims. The new sims can help earn money, but at some point the cost of getting a new sim house is more than the new sim can earn in quite some time.

Your first household comes with a free dog. You can buy dogs for your other households if you want to. They will once a minute or so find a place where something is buried on the lot. Click on them and they will dig up money, or occasionally some other treasure. Supposedly they can even find Lifestyle Points. I generally have enough other hobbies to not watch over an imaginary dog every minute. Your hobbies may vary, as may your attitude to dogs.

In the end, I don’t see myself sticking with this game. The reason is that time cannot be frozen. If you leave the sims alone for a day, their status bars (hunger, bladder, energy etc) will have declined quite a bit. At this speed, they should starve to death over the course of a long weekend or so. I don’t really want to play a game that I can’t put away for a week or a month to concentrate on other interests. I haven’t yet let it alone long enough to say whether the sims die a slow and agonizing death or just get really grumpy, but I dislike this situation on principle.

Apart from that, it seems a pretty harmless game. If you want to hide from reality in an imaginary world, this seems a good place to do so.

 

Sims 3 Showtime review

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Greetings! Magnus the Magus returns to amaze and amuse you all! The Sims 3 Showtime expansion, not so much. Though it is not bad – just bare.

Showtime is the sixth expansion pack for The Sims 3, and came out in March this year. I recommend waiting until you get it for half price, because it has only half as much content as the earlier expansion packs.

The expansion has one unique feature, though. If you feel you need this, there is only one way to get it: The “Simport”. With this new feature, you can send your performer sim to a friend’s computer and have him perform at a stage there, then return home with unique awards and rewards. In fact, you can have a tour of four friends before returning home. I am sure this is cute if you have friends who also play The Sims 3 and are not afraid to admit it. It is pretty limited though, and it is not obvious why you or your friends would want to play a performer sim in the first place.

The name of the game, “Showtime”, is a pun on the ability to show off your sim, but also refers to the show business careers that come with the pack, all three and a half of them. Wait, wasn’t show business the point of that earlier expansion, Late Night? Yes, and the three new self-employed careers or “professions” could have been included in Late Night except they use the self-employment game mechanics from Ambitions. So the self-employment system is basically duplicated in this pack, but with far fewer careers than in Ambitions. Thus the “half content at full price” accusation, which seems quite exact to me.

That said, the new careers are definitely new and original. You can rise to stardom as an acrobat, a singer or a magician. (No points for guessing which one I picked for my self-sim!) You are free to perform for tips in parks and street corners, and this will give you valuable work experience. Singers can also deliver sing-o-grams, which is amusing but (once in a blue moon) can set your sim on fire fatally. Then again, the other two careers are not entirely safe either.

In all fairness, the careers are pretty good, with great flexibility, the ability to design your own scene layout with various affordable lights and effects, and a genuine sense of accomplishment when the high-society arenas start asking you instead of the other way around. The income at level 10 is definitely something to write home about, even a single performance a week can feed a large family in luxury. It is up to you whether you want to control your sim on the scene or let them do what they want, but as usual they are not the brightest candles on the candelabra so you can generally maximize their career by giving a helping hand.

Still – 3 careers plus the ability to moonlight as a DJ? Not a full expansion pack. There are no new across-the-board gameplay improvements either, except the ability to post to your sim wall (like Facebook wall) if you are logged in. I don’t log in, as I don’t use The Sims 3 as a Facebook replacement, and I doubt many outside EA’s test lab do. Anyway, this dubious ability is added to your game for free regardless of whether you buy the expansion, if you run the game updater after March this year.

There is one more thing, though: The genie. The Dusty Old Lamp from Sims 2: Freetime is back, and this time the genie can be socialized with and supposedly even married. So the game expansion at least upholds the tradition of adding one more “supernatural” sim type in each expansion. If you have a thing for genies (perhaps as the result of a certain old TV series) this may tip the scales.

Overall though, I get the impression that EA’s creative team died or retired barely halfway through the production of this expansion, and the bosses decided to honor their memory by publishing the expansion with only the three finished and one unfinished career.

 

The Sims 3: MultiTab 6000, the SimPad.

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Disturbingly realistic, except my self-sim is some years younger than me in this picture.

Earlier this month, while I was busy complaining that Sims 3 doesn’t have tablets (what decade are we in people?), Electronic Arts were busy making their first tablet for Sims available. (They are also making The Sims available on real-world tablets, supposedly, although I can’t get that to work. Perhaps when Samsung rolls out Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) here in Norway too.)

I am pleased. The MultiTab 6000 is a big deal for my sims. It costs them a §750, which is pretty affordable once you have a job. Unfortunately it also costs you – the player – a few dollars, since you have to buy it first from the Sims store. It is currently for sale as part of a set with some furniture for 1500 sim points, but will supposedly be available separately for 500 sim points at some time. All owners of the game get 1000 sim points for starters, so if you’ve not bought anything else in their store, you should eventually be able to get this one for free.  You only have to buy it once, of course, no matter how many of them your sims buy.

And I strongly recommend giving one to each sim family member in school age or above. Especially school age. With a tablet, sim children and teens will do their homework faster and have lots of fun doing it. This is sensational: Normally doing homework is a big fun drain, unless they have an adult to help them with homework, in which case it goes much faster and is less stressing. But the MultiTab is the only way they can actually have fun doing homework. That and it won’t take all evening even if dad is not home. Finally school kids will have time for something beyond homework and regaining their fun. Highly recommended!

Both children, teens and adults can also listen to “tabcasts” (a word play on “podcast”). Listening to these will build skills, even while doing other things. A sim can for instance learn charisma while running on a treadmill, or book writing while painting. In other words, you can actually learn two skills at the same time. This is essential if you are cruel enough to use the default lifespan, a mere 90 sim days. Being able to dual-learn skills can mean the difference between reaching your lifetime want or not. At the longer lifespan of 190 days this is less critical, but still nifty. Unfortunately the skills are only a subset of all available skills, and some of them are pretty eclectic, if I may say so: Photography and nectar making depend on having the World Adventures expansion, for instance.

The MultiTab also comes with social games. As the name implies, these fulfill both social and fun, and pretty fast too. Especially the fun bar zooms toward full at a faster pace than almost anything else you can get your sims to do. (Although I am pretty sure fussball beats it – the small model football game that you operate by hand.) Unlike many other fun activities, the sims automatically stop playing social games when their fun hits maximum.

The MultiTab also doubles as an ebook reader. You can buy books directly from it without visiting the bookstore, although strangely you need to have a bookstore in your neighborhood for this to work. Any book you have in your backpack or your bookshelves at home will also automatically be readable on the tablet, no matter where in the neighborhood you are. (I am not sure yet if it also remembers your home library while you are on vacation – but you cannot use it to buy books abroad. You have to buy those in hard copy.)  Unfortunately for bookworm sims who have a want to read X number of books, the sim is as likely to reread a book as to read a new one, even if you have the Awesomemod which normally keeps them from rereading books unless told to.

Unlike the computer (and my real-world Galaxy Tab), the MultiTab does not support meeting and befriending new people through chat. Also, unlike the real-world thing, it does not support finding potential dates in the area. (Not that I would do such a thing, being an Unflirty Loner after all. Just saying.) These two glaring exceptions make the item less attractive for what we in The Sims 2 used to call “Popularity Sims” and “Romance Sims” respectively.  It is mainly a hit for “Knowledge Sims” and “Family Sims”, the latter because of their numerous children. “Fortune Sims” can benefit from the faster skilling to boost their career somewhat.

So is it worth $5? Probably, if you habitually spend money to buy games in the first place. But it also depends on your play style, what you focus on when “simming”. If you play mostly to enjoy the sims socializing and romancing, having drama and making your own soap opera, there is little to gain from the MultiTab 6000. Likewise if you play the game to escape to a simpler world of gardening, fishing, and playing with your pets. But if your sims are pursuing knowledge or a career, and have their home full of children, the Tab makes a big difference for the better.

And of course, if you are a Genius Computer Whiz Bookworm who also happens to be an Unflirty Loner, and you want to play your self-sim, the Tab is mandatory. Take my word for it. ^_^

If we were sims…

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See the old man in the background? This is right before the end, before his life flashes before his eyes. He has a lot of memories that are unlike mine, such as marrying and raising kids. And throwing eggs and stink bombs. Well, I think I got the better deal… but actually I hope it is a bit early to sum up yet.

As you can see from my personal journal, my health challenges are not over yet. Of course there are others who are worse off than me, but they are not me, and that makes a difference from my perspective. And my friends and relatives generally don’t blog or write a journal, which one can understand since they know about mine. You know, it is possible to write something less embarrassing than this if you want. -_-

Some time ago I wrote about the YouTube trailer for The Sims 3 Generations. The part that really got to me was the ending, where the camera zooms in on the old man in the park and we see his life pass before his eyes in a jumble, and then stop at one particular moment of his life. I am in no hurry at all to test the whole “life flashes before your eyes” part, I assure you. But if that movie had been about me, what would those pictures have been and what would that final picture be? I believe that unlike him, my pictures would mostly have been of me alone or more rarely with groups of people, although Supergirl (or Superwoman as she wanted me to write) would probably also have featured in some of them, and probably a couple other girls. But mostly me and a computer, or me and a book, I guess. And I think the last one might have been of me in my grandfather’s rocking chair the day I read the tract by Elias Aslaksen about the way to react, and realized that I had free will, regardless of what people did around me. But I don’t know for sure, and I am in no hurry to test it.

If we were sims – I would have wanted to be played by someone like me. That may be a very small thing indeed to boast of in recounting my life, but I generally treat my sims the way I would have wanted to be treated if someone up there played me. Well, I guess I might have wanted a little more freedom… but my sims get to play if their fun motive is low, eat if they are hungry (and frequently their favorite food, at that) while at the same time I nudge them to work toward their long-term goals when the opportunity exists. They live long, happy lives and generally achieve permaplat (in Sims 2), roughly corresponding to an unshakable mind in this world, well before they pass on.

There is no mention in the Holy Scriptures of treating our Sims the way we want to be treated, so I don’t know how much it matters. But I think it does, if we play games like that at all. And they are indeed a way to wisdom, if you don’t lose yourself in them. In the higher speed of time in these simpler worlds, the consequences of choices play out much faster than in our world. And some of us also consider the possibility that there are levels of reality higher than this one, higher dimensions not made of the same elements, from which greater minds than ours may watch us but we may not watch them. But it is probably not quite the same.

There are scientists who say that this world, which we consider 3-dimensional, may actually be a hologram. Others again say that it seems not to be divisible endlessly, but that there are minimum measures of everything, such as the Planck length and perhaps even a Planck time, similar to the clock ticks of a computer… But then, each era has cast the universe in the perceptions of its own age. Perhaps if we begin to understand the universe, it will change again … like a new expansion … or perhaps it is our minds that need to expand?

Fooled by an old trick

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Hero?

My main character of the weekend, Color of Reverence. No points for seeing a theme here.

No, I did not bite on a Nigeria scam. It is much more trivial than that, barely noticeable. But I need to learn from small things. Despite my lofty aspirations, I still make mistakes. And as St Teresa says, God preserve us from excusing ourselves with “I am no saint”. (She admits in her Way of Perfection that she used to say that before. Of course, by the time she wrote this, she probably already was a saint…)

Me, I am not a saint (except in the most generic sense, as synonym for God’s people, if even that.) Nor am I a hero, but I play one on the Internet. And that’s where I made my mistake, which I think may be instructive for others too.

I joined the online superhero game City of Heroes during its closed beta, a great honor in my view, and played it probably literally every week for about 7 years. Usually more than once a week too. No exception for vacations (but then I don’t actually travel during my vacations, I write). It is only the last year or perhaps even less that the game has begun to gradually fade from my life, like so many other things do eventually.

It is a good game, too. I don’t mean just in value of production, but in production of value. You take on the role of a hero with slightly superhuman powers, and defeat criminals, protect the innocent (and sometimes the not quite innocent, when they need it) and gradually grow more powerful and famous over the course of this practice. So it kind of reinforces traditional values.  In the words of one of the scripted bystanders on the streets of Paragon City: “Forget those postmodernist deconstructionists! Itland is a real hero, plain and simple.” OK, the “simple” part may not be my favorite, but still.

Now as my life is moving toward its final exam (not that I am in the least hurry!!), I find a little less time for gaming than I used to. And that means my visits to City of Heroes have been quite irregular and mostly short. This suits me: When I play the same game for too long, I become kind of immersed in it and it begins to invade my real life with flashback moments and such distractions. And generally a feeling of emptiness after hours of playing. I don’t want that to happen.

But this weekend was double XP weekend, in which the rewards of virtue are doubled – both the experience points and the influence. So this makes it easy to make rapid progress on a character. I took advantage of this and played a lot this weekend.

I did not ask myself seriously why I would want to make rapid progress in a game I now only play sporadically. It is not like I actually need to do that. The fact that there was a reward took precedence over the fact that I did not need the reward.

This is really the same motivation that makes a lot of women go wild when there are sales. If things are on sale, they temporarily forget that they don’t actually need (and perhaps not even want) the thing. “But it was on sale!”

A voice in my head says something similar exists for sexual temptations. Perhaps it is a general human trait. Certainly it combines with greed to make a good scam. The typical Nigeria scam is based on the notion that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Once you start getting one each week, they are a lot less tempting. ^_^

So I ask my heart to learn from this mistake, although it would have been better to learn without mistake. At least you can learn from mine!

CoH Issue 22: “Death Incarnate”

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Issue 22 - Death Incarnate is live!

By all means log in for double XP weekend 16/3 – 18/3, but you should probably stay away from the new content unless you have boundless optimism.

“Death Incarnate.” Not really a name that fits my mood at the moment. And not only the name. Most of the new content in this expansion to City of Heroes is set in a redesigned zone (“Dark Astoria”) which is now actually dark, with a reddish glow, and themed on death and madness.  The in-game lore is that the recent conflicts have wakened an ancient death god from the banished pantheon, who was buried under Dark Astoria. Feelings of guilt, hopelessness, despair and madness emanate to the surface, attracting monsters and villains that enjoy such an ambiance. It is up to the Incarnates – the high level VIP heroes – to try to hold back the darkness and if possible reverse it.

It is a worthy cause, by all means, and I don’t mean that the world’s mightiest heroes should fight kittens in a flowerbed. It’s just that the whole zone and all instances in it is so pervaded by this hellish atmosphere, it really isn’t something just anyone should immerse themselves in for hours each day.

And there is a reason why people my do just that: Dark Astoria is the first and so far only solo Incarnate content. This is a feature I requested almost as soon as I heard about the Incarnate system, which was released near the end of 2010.

City of Heroes had long suffered a reputation for being light on end-game content, compared to other online RPGs. Many players simply parked their level 50 character and made a new, since there are hundreds if not thousands of possible combinations of powers. After the Invention system went live, some people started doing repeatable high-level missions to gather recipes and ingredients for crafting, but it was only with the Incarnate system that a true challenge arrived for high-level heroes and villains.

In the original lore of the game, the arch-hero Statesman and his villain opponent Recluse were the only known Incarnates. They had found the Well of the Furies, and by drinking of it they were imbued with powers comparable to the ancient Greek pantheon.  The event also, as we later learned, unlocked the superpowers latent in scattered individuals around the world, causing this world to branch off from worlds (like ours) without superheroes and supervillains.

In Issue 19, we learn that the Well is actually more of a metaphysical thing. The physical Well of the Furies is gone, but myriad Shards (and later Threads) from it are scattered around the world. Through a special trial, a hero (or villain) can become attuned to the universal Well and begin to randomly find shards when overcoming high-level enemies or completing certain trials. Other rewards related to this also appear, but mainly in trials that are set for large groups of very powerful heroes. Through these, the hero can unlock powerful new abilities. But without taking part in these large-scale trials, the progress was painfully slow and limited to the first of the abilities, the Alpha ability.

With Issue 22, it is possible to unlock and fill all known Incarnate slots through soloing or smaller groups. It is still quite a bit slower than the massive trials, though. And that is why people will have to spend months in this evil twisted zone if they for some reason prefer to go it alone (perhaps because their computers cannot handle massive battles, or they live in a time zone where there are few players).

Or they could just log off and spend their time in prayer and fasting, which would be less depressing.

The Incarnate content up till now has pretty much exclusively been related to the war between Primal Earth and its evil twin, where Statesman has become ruler of the world and is trying to take over the multiverse. So I had expected any solo content to be more of that, more sci-fi. But I guess people who like the whole Lovecraft thing with elder gods, madness and tentacles will appreciate the opportunity. I am not one of those.

Even so, I have run Itland the were-porcupine through a number of missions. It is a little tougher than the usual content, and there is clearly put some serious work into making missions and dialog that fits with the atmosphere. Too bad the atmosphere is one of decay, tentacles and suicides.

 

Cute hiragana practice game

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Darugo’s Hiragana Practice.

There are three versions of this game: One on the web (for free), one without sound for Android phones and tablets (also free), and one with sound also for Android (cheap). I have downloaded and tested the free version for Android. So far it works flawlessly on my Samsung Galaxy Note, which is something in between a phone and a tablet. I can imagine it being hard to draw on a small phone or a bigger tablet, but on large phones and the Note it works quite well.

The game lets you choose any of the hiragana (Japanese letters that stand for a syllable instead of a letter, such as “ha” or “chi”. Some syllables are just one letter, namely vowels and the letter “n”.) Once you have chosen one such letter, the program demonstrates how to draw it. Each letter is drawn in a particular sequence. Even if you make the final result look just right, it is supposedly considered a severe breach of etiquette to draw the parts in the wrong order. With calligraphy, an educated person can see this at a glance, so children are drilled to get it right.

After the demonstration, you get to trace the letter with your finger (or a pen, in the case of Galaxy Note) as long as you want. The program shows your lines in a different color than the outline of the letter, so you can see whether they match. You erase it between each time. When you feel confident enough to draw it, you get a blank page to draw it on. Well, more like a grid, but without letters. The program then checks that it falls within acceptable bounds. You can repeat this as well.

There is also an example word for each sign, with a cute childlike drawing. This is presented as the “backside of the card” so you don’t look at it while you are drawing. If you have the paid version of the app, you can hear the word spoken by a real Japanese girl. Or so it is said. I would not know. With there still being millions of Japanese girls, it does not seem impossible to get one to speak a few dozen words.

And this, dear reader, is where things get weird. This is a super cute app, and eminently suited for children in both its presentation and its basic task. It seems extremely child-friendly. But outside of Japan there are probably very few children who feel the need to draw hiragana, or even read them. Which makes me wonder if the app – or at least the one with sound – is aimed at some kind of pervert who gets ticklish all over at the sight of severely underage kids dancing and waving and saying cute things in genuine Japanese. There are rumored to be weirdos like that. Well, I suppose this is one of the more harmless things you can do if you have this mind defect. As long as it does not cause you to capture real Japanese girls and force them to draw hiragana. (Not counting school teachers, who are paid to do this.)

Not enough Sims 2!

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When sims have permanent platinum mood – an unshakable mind – growing older is a cause for happiness. They will spend their elder years calmly and eventually pass on without fear.

It would seem a safe bet that people won’t regret on their deathbed that they have played too little The Sims 2. But once again it seems I am the exception to the rule. Although it is a bit early to say, I hope! But I already regret, and repent, not having played The Sims 2 as much as I should.

Well, not the game in general, but a particular project that takes up a large part of my separate Sims game journal. “Micropolis” (not to be confused with the game of the same name, which I heard of quite a bit later) is a simulated neighborhood in which I act as the guardian angel, inspiring my little computer people to achieve their goals and help each other create a Utopia by building their own inner strength and the ties of love and friendship.

Starting in the near future (sometime between now and 2050) six families come to a deserted farming village in the foothills of a mountain chain. All of them have lost loved ones and everything they owned in the great hurricane that destroyed their hometown. Starting from nothing, with a modest amount of borrowed money, they begin to create a new life for themselves and their children. This is the start of the story of Micropolis.

I play with stricter rules than those that are built into the game. The Near Future is seen as a time in which the economy in particular is harsh: It is hard to get any job without college education, which costs quite a bit of money. Houses are expensive and there are no subsidies, interest rates are high, and property taxes are increased fourfold. For people without jobs, without skills and without friends, the challenge seems almost insurmountable.

Over more than 50 years, we follow the small band of refugees through snapshots of their lives and their conversations with their guardian angel. Together they seek to combine their immediate needs and wants with their long-term aspirations and the greater plans for the whole society. They fish their own fish, grow their own vegetables, and gradually acquire useful skills and begin to climb out of debt. They raise children who eventually go to college, sometimes taking childhood friends or high school sweethearts with them. The children come home and get jobs or start shops. The small cluster of tiny homes becomes a village. Later large apartment buildings begin to appear, and the nearest neighborhoods also take part in the growth. They face new challengers: Climate chaos and mutating viruses. But through it all they continue to thrive under the constant guidance of their guardian angel.

More than money, the true wealth of Micropolis is its people, their skills and generosity, their friendships and love, their families and hospitality. It is these that makes Micropolis a small Utopia, a place anyone except the hardcore liberal would love to live.

I wish I had continued to write it, because it expresses my view of life very well and in a manner I think most people can understand if they have the spare time (it is a very long story). But I got distracted by other shiny things. And most of all, my laziness caused me to give it up. Writing the story itself was not so onerous, but due to the length of the story it became necessary to provide background summaries for all the families and eventually all of the sims. Keeping these info pages up to date was quite a bit of work compared to what you see of them, so I got fed up. I regret that now.

Many people these days (and probably in the past as well) do not understand well the concept of guardian and guiding spirits. The independent thoughts from their subconscious torture them, mock them or drive them to do reckless or outright damaging things.  That is not how it should be. I hope that my fiction can illustrate the kind of world I live in, which is basically the exact opposite. Long may it last.

Beautiful ordinary lives

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Couple with children in strollers

The Simerican dream.

This may surprise some, but perhaps not those who have read my ongoing autobiography. See, I came across this promotional video on YouTube, for the expansion pack The Sims 3: Generations that I have written about recently. Naturally I watched it in full-screen mode on my biggest monitor.

“Live life to the fullest” Sims 3 Generations trailer / YouTube.

By the end, where his life flashes before his eyes, tears were rolling down my cheeks. Not tears of sadness, really, or at least mostly not. It’s just that the little movie so beautifully sums up the life of 4-dimensional humans. What you probably call “ordinary people”, those who don’t live a purpose-driven life or have a mission on Earth or anything like that. You and me, we are to some degree outside of this: We have a detachment, like someone who act in a play and know it is a play. We can get impatient with ordinary people and they may always remain the eggs they threw long ago.  We don’t see the beauty of the merely human life because we only see bits and pieces of it.

So that’s what happened. Watching this, I suddenly saw the beauty of ordinary human life when seen as a whole.

There is a widespread belief that when you die, you see your life flash before your eyes. I have had a concept of how this works, but not why it would be a good thing. This little movie showed me that. Because there is a hidden beauty in the four-dimensional life (some lives more than others, admittedly) which cannot be easily seen as it goes on. In a way, it is like looking at a painting from the side. No matter how masterful the painting, if you see it almost completely from the side, you cannot see what it is supposed to show. When you move to stand in front of it, suddenly the beauty of it strikes you.

It is that way with life. Seeing it as it passes slowly by is like seeing a painting from the side, or to use another metaphor, it is as if you can only see the paint brush with the color that is on it right now, and your vague memories of what colors were on it before, but the canvas is hidden to you. But the canvas, the fourth dimension, is where the picture emerges.

How beautiful humans are, and this world in which you live!

You probably won’t have the same revelation even if you watch the same movie. I am pretty sure that wasn’t what it was meant for, either. But for me, each time I watch it, my eyes are filled with tears at the beauty and brevity of human life.