RL University vs Sims University

[lewisb40]

I think the question may be misleading? The way I look at it, this is a game. Fantasy. Nothing about the game and it's EP's remotely favors "IRL".

Speaking of the frat/sorority system, it is all for networking and future "contacts" when you get to the top. Which in turn, once on top, you pull your brothers/sisters up with you. It's a flawed system, but once you grow up, in your future employment, you will see it's the American way!

My family (females) have a big name in the sorority circles, I always bucked the system. It did hurt me a little in my employment, but later I got back what was taken from me, jobwise. LOL! It was to teach me a lesson for going against the system.

[abaris]

MaryH, one can only imagine the American mind that can call something completely unlike a thing by the name of a thing... calling the University EP the University EP is like preparng a roasted dog and calling it turkey and dressing

You have to take a look at the target audience of the game. It's not you or me, assuming we're both adults. It's the kiddies. In Europe the game hast a rating of 12+, probably because of the woohoo option. Otherwise it would be even lower. So you can't expect any realism. If it were for adults, the game wouldn't sell enough copies for the company to survive. But on the other hand we probably wouldn't see Sims break down in tears over a cockroach or a lost fight.

[BeosBoxBoy]

abaris, I don't disagree with you about the manufacturer's target demographic, but I seriously doubt that the target demographic is solely what plays the games.  The target demographic is 14-16 year old girls.  An unknown quantity of housewives, men, college students, etc also buy and play these games, and EA/Maxis won't even admit these people exist in the customer base.

I have spent quite a considerable amount of time on the forums and BBS and it does seem that the teens stick out because they post excessively, but the adults are in the mix, so EA/Maxis really has no excuse for being so jejune in its content development.

It would behoove them to add more realism to the games to expand the target demographic, that would be business savvy... but we are discussing EA, so I guess we can count that out.

[abaris]

It would behoove them to add more realism to the games to expand the target demographic, that would be business savvy... but we are discussing EA, so I guess we can count that out.

But they - and by they I mean most every game company - will never get that. They have their highly payed makebelieve experts telling them to get them as young as they come. And by the laws of many countries that means leaving out real life as much as possible. No violence, no nudity and I'm highly surprised, that they made gay relationships possible without getting into too much trouble with certain influencial US lobbies.

Molyneux made the same mistake with his movies. And it cost him dearly. His game flopped - and rightly so. He tried a hybrid between a tycoon game and a movie maker without taking into consideration, that he was aiming for totally different audiences without being able to satisfy even one of them. The outcome was childish in both aspects of the game. And to top things Activision has imposed a modding ban, thereby ruining every chance of making the game better.

The Sims on the other hand find their audience. For once there are the modders, who have been able to change the game experience into something entirely different. Even into an adult game if you so will.

But on the other hand, total realism would be dull to the extreme. I mean, what would you do, if you had to put your Sim through a realistic uni? Attending class and being as bored as most of us were IRL? They have to make certain concessions, but I could certainly do without the childish emotions. Sims could be a wee bit tougher, even more so, since I tend to play rather mean characters.

[Benji82]

I don’t know. Would the actual university experience make for a good game? My experience was mostly a pattern of consume coffee, go to class, study, write, repeat. I had some fun too, certainly. In fact, I loved college, but studying was a lot of what I did, and watching your Sims study for 12 hours every day probably gets old pretty quick.

[BeosBoxBoy]

Benji - as I recall university consisted largely of repeating puberty's exceedingly numerous errors and not learning much from the continuing fiascoes. There was, however, some accidental learning in the classrooms and a desperate attempt to crush the weight of lost years into one day as it became obvious receiving a diploma hinged on knowing a thing or two about the topics for which one attempted a degree.

As for this whole "influence" business, all I recall is finding some ill-starred first year student in the house and enslaving him to be my fag - no not a sexual term - as far as I know there is only a vague similarity to the concept of a "plebe" in the American fraternity system.

Clubs and fraternal organisations. Hmmm. Clubs means like bars, right? I remember an exceedingly large number of nights doing the club crawl and necessary vomit breath the next morning. And I organised several multi-keg beer blasts for no other reason than to repeat the aforementioned behaviour outside the club scene. This doesn't mean there were less scholarly organisations to which I might rightly have belonged if I had spent more time thinking above the belt-line.

Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale have many such organisations, the most widely known are the The Order of Skull and Bones (formerly The Brotherhood of Death) at Yale (given a larger notoriety thanks to the film "The Good Shepherd") and the Hasty Pudding Club and The Harvard Lampoon at Harvard - the fraternities and clubs of the American universities can find rough cognates in the colleges and permanent private halls and the intra-mural clubs and organisations of the colleges and permanent private halls of Oxford and Cambridge (e.g., Cambridge Apostles at Cambridge), Juvenalorden at Uppsala University (Sweden), the Studentenverbindungen in Germany (e.g., Burschenschaften, Landsmannschaften, Corps, Turnerschaften, Sängerschaften, Catholic Corporations, Wingolf and Ferialverbindungen), and the various Corps in the Netherlands (e.g., Nijmeegse Studentenvereniging Carolus Magnus). In light of these, the EA claim that there is no parallel to fraternities and sororities in European universities is a baseless misrepresentation of the truth, if not an outright lie.

Political activism. I remember regularly defacing the photos of all politicians' photographs in printed media with a huge moustache and other acts of minor social vandalism, although nothing on so grand a scale as the hijinks committed in the film "Animal House".

Social activism. I sometimes felt strongly about things, and recall shamelessly spouting off at the pie-hole with shamelessly self-important statements that usually began with "O my working class brothers and sisters!"  One can only wonder how I manage to live with the knowledge that I was so callow, feckless, and insipid in my misspent youth.

[babyblue1387]

One thing that I think EA is missing the most is a sense of greater freedom. Moving from being a teenager in high school where everything is pretty much laid out for you, to being a college student where you make all your own choices is a big move. In the game, nothing much has changed. It would be nice to see harder grades, more consequences for staying out all night, only a slight chance of your grade being raised if you sleep with the professor, those types of things. I think it's been discussed a lot that it's usually the little touches that we find throughout gameplay that keep us coming back for more. I remember the first time I had a decent graphics card and could see the sims moving their eyes. There should also be positive consequences. If you join a frat/sorority, secret society, activist group, or major club (like accounting club, collegiate finance organization, business professionals of america) you get a boost in your career. There are all sorts of ways to make uni a little more interesting without having you watch your sims study for 12 hours.

And could someone explain to me why the sims can get scholarships if they don't have to pay for college, and just loose the money when they graduate?

[lewisb40]

To babyblue1387, the issue of scholarships and leaving the funds, that is why I use monique's bank computer. They can bank it away. LOL

Beosboxboy, I feel that college is a time to "social activism", sput out our feelings and possibly embarrass ourselves for having different thoughts on life. Remember, we are just gaining our freedom, for many, the first time and we tend to think the way our parents, family and peers did in high school. When you enter a world that is diverse and different from our experiences before college, you can either try to open your mind to what others express and learn from them, or be a bigot and close yourself from learning anything new at all.  
I was one of those students that thought I knew everything about everything, and thank the heavens that I had sense to be open minded and listened to everyone I knew opinions and lifestyles. I didn't always agree with them, but I learned not to be judgemental.
In all the above sputterings, I am saying, we learn from our " misspent youth" to make us better people in the future. Not all of us, but those with the sense to really gain from these experiences.
Okay back to the topic, thank sims god for the modders, or I would have been bored with this game a long time ago.

[Sam the T-man]

I still fail to see why they brought in those annoying NPCs that barge into your house. Before I discovered the visitor controller they drove me nuts, especially the cow mascots You get people dressing up where I am, but only for an intensive night out - they call it the Otley run, as they start in a pub on Otley Road and go through the major bars in Leeds. That's the only time I've known it, and where do you see cheerleaders in uniform outside the playing field?! :oogle:

[BeosBoxBoy]

Sadie - I find myself utterly in agreement with you.  There is something decidedly wrong with watching your student depart for class from his rented house to see some total stranger barge in, raid the refrigerator, leave 1/2 eaten bags of crisps all over the house, watch television, stop up the bog, then play some snooker - all the while the burglar alarm does nothing...

Or how about the sudden appearance of instructors that mope and lurk about in some remote portion of the house or alone in the hot tub without ever once being greeted?

I had one remain in the hot tub over-night and depart the lot only after suffering bladder failure in the kitchen while eating a bag of crisps as the residents slept.

Or how about the moronic clot of kick-baggy the young adults will autonomously begin at every instance in some critical traffic choke-point like blocking the door to the bog?  Or the way the Sims form a pile-up hanging-out directly on top of the lot teleporter?  Or the obsessive buskering if you have any musical instrument on the lot?  I am not asking for a 100% parity with real life, but for Christ's sake, you'd think the mongs at EA would have added something dealing with sport beside watching the game on the telly and the ludicrous kick-baggy thing.  They have a coach that shows up if your student starts getting low marks, so it is obviated they intended something dealing with sport, but never added it.  Instead we get the thrilling excitement of watching our young adult Sims mope about like a pack of listless emo kids at a suicide crisis centre.

Lewisb is utterly correct, thank the Sims' God for modders that fix these mind-destroying annoyances.

The defects of the University EP are beyond number.  If I didn't require it for some of the very few Maxis objects I really like, I'd not have it on my hard drive.  Quite honestly, I think the University EP was a waste of my money; compared against the game-immersion and must-have content and additions of the Nightlife and Seasons EPs, the University EP is just pathetic.

The lack of proper inter-meshing with later EPs like Open for Business, also makes the defects of the University EP rather intolerable.  No small amount of real life university students have jobs, but trying to achieve even that simple reality in the University EP is an exercise in frustration.  Your student may get a job through some craft and wile on the player's part, but then all Hell might break loose as your student won't report to work from the University neighbourhood without some serious player intervention.

And although your young adult may own a robotics crafting station, he can't seem to do much with it since the game treats servos as people and it won't allow you to have a servo on the campus lots.  I didn't try with Pets when I was testing that EP, but I suspect there are similar immersion choke-points in the coding.  I haven't heard any specific reports about University + Bon Voyage, but I'd be surprised if one could go on holiday from the university lots.

[jinyc]

Yakov, UNI students can, indeed, go on vacation (I call it "Spring Break"). The only EAxis weirdness so far between UNI and BV is one Soph student lost his extra want slots after returning to campus from vacation. Pescado fixed that snafu!

[lewisb40]

I had the same thing, but I went into the build/buy mode, then clicked back and the want slot came back. ::