Sims the New Dolls?

philgross writes "According to the New York Times, lots of girls and younger teens are abandoning their dolls for the Sims. Says one professor, "We leave most of the social work in our society to women and The Sims lets young girls, in particular, work out their desires and conflicts about those relationships." Says another, "Children generally want to create characters, but with girls we see them wanting to create a friend." Meanwhile, says Will Wright, boys will "do the same stupid thing over and over again and be happy," (and I wince looking at my vast collection of first-person shooters). The article does quote one 10-year-old boy who plays with Sims, and has learned valuable life lessons. "I learned don't leave your baby crying or people will come take your baby away."" And I learned that if you lock Sims in your upstairs torture chamber, with no tiles to sit, they eventually cry themselves to death.

Re:It's a little sad

[Jeremi]

IMHO I think games replacing dolls will take away creativity and imagination from the children. This is a step in making kids behave like robots and always do what major corporations want them to do

Here [wired.com] is an article containing lots of similar pessimistic quotations by various people, proclaiming that the downfall of youth had arrived in the form of (Novels/Movies/Telephones/Rock&Roll/Waltzing/Comic Books). I think children are a little more resilient and creative than people give them credit for.

Re:I've been wondering about that too

[Moraelin]

"A few notes about your post. You sound as if you are likely female."

I am, in fact, male. I do however try to compare various human cultures, instead of rationalizing "why my culture is right (biologically predetermined, god-given, bla, bla, bla), and yours is wrong". It's just anthropology, one of the social sciences, and the purpose is to find out what humans do, not to make little girls feel better.

And if you look at what hundreds of cultures do, world-wide, instead of idealizing your own, you start to find pretty much no common denominator. The ways humans behave, organize themselves, what they idealize, what they pose as, etc, vary _massively_ across time and space, and in some cases you can find complete opposites taken for granted by different people at different times.

The problem with most such rationalizing one's own culture is that they're a bit of a tunnel view. Everyone looks just at people from the same country, maybe even just the same town, and sees them all doing the same thing. And draws the false conclusion that that's what _all_ humans do, and obviously that's the biological/god-given/whatever way.

It's like a Japanese guy looking around him and deciding that all humans world-wide are 5.5 ft tall and have slanted eyes and black hair. That's how god or the evolution intended humans to be. There are obviously no blacks, no red-heads, no 6 ft tall swedish blonde girls, because he personally hasn't seen any in his home town. Or if he eventually sees one, he'll decree that it must be some disease ("hormonal imbalance" maybe?) that caused that poor man to be black or have red hair. Surely there can be no country or continent where that's "normal".

To get back to the point, yes, the greek culture was very different from hours, in more than one way, but that's actually the whole point: humans can be educated to view radically different things as normal. They were educated to view the females with _small_ breasts as beautiful, and, no, if you gave them the same choices, they wouldn't have chosen the same one you'd choose.

Yes, they had a bit different views on homosexuality too. That's just the point: people raised in a different culture can view different things as "normal", "repulsive", or whatever. They didn't need to find "they must have some hormone imbalance" euphemisms for "well, I find that abnormal". They just weren't educated to find that abnormal.

In fact, I'll up the ante there. Forget the greeks. IIRC, there was (is?) at least one tribe, I think in Oceania, where homosexuality and paedophilia were considered the _right_ way. The local myths was that a young man can't produce his own sperm until he's basically acquired it orally from a grown up man. Tribal customs also pretty much dictated, presumably to keep population low, that most sex happened between men.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not defending those cultures or anything. I'm just saying they exist. Nothing more. The whole point is just that it's learned behaviour. Educate a bunch of people that homosexuality is the right way, and you get 100% of a tribe's males having mostly homosexual sex.

The fact is, humans are a very programmable animal. Yes, we all have biological signals, like getting hungry or horny, but we're all very able to control them. (You don't see people humping in the streets whenever they get horny, nor shitting on the sidewalk like dogs when they felt a need to shit.) That's biology, but it doesn't really control humans that much.

What comes on top of that is a set of learned behaviours. There are thousands of little rituals in everyone's day that have nothing to do with biology. There was nothing of evolution importance that said, for example, to bring your girlfriend flowers or to wear a suit and tie to a job interview. (If anything, most animals would try to get rid of a rope around their neck, not make it a thing of pride and fashion.) You learn what clothes to wear to be fashionable, what kind of girlfriend to look for, again to be fashionable