Sex, Graft, and
The Sims Online
Tom McDonald has been covering games for countless magazines and
newspapers for years. He lives in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.S
ometimes I hate it when I’m right.
When I first covered The Sims Online , both in this
space and in a full review, I found it decidedly unstruc-
tured and boring. This lack of gameplay has resulted in
a family-unfriendly experience: a T-rated game where
12-year-old-girls chat with 50-year-old leather fetishists.
Even in its early days, The Sims Online was spiraling out
of control into an anarchic meat market of sex and abuse.
In the proper place—like adult video or M- or A-rated
games—such subject matters are not necessarily a prob-
lem. In The Sims , with its large audience of teens and
preteens, it’s a big problem. And it’s only gotten worse.
Over the past few months, the mainstream media has
shocked readers with sordid tales about the The Sims
Online ’s seamy underbelly, many of them driven by The
Alphaville Herald (www.alphavilleherald.com) and the
subsequent banning of its editor, Professor Peter Ludlow.
Everyone from CNN to The Daily Show to the Times of
London picked up Ludlow’s stories of rampant cyber-
prostitution, racketeering, abuse, racism, and online sex.
Electronic Arts, the games publisher, promptly bounced
Ludlow from its servers and began policing TSO , but it’s
clear the company has lost all control of its virtual world.
Adding to EA’s headache is the fact that the game is
a colossal and expensive failure. The stated goal was 1
million users; the game wound up with 80,000, a fraction
of whom play on a daily basis. And here’s the twist: It’s
not in EA’s best interest to clean up the virtual environ-
ment because without sex, the game would be dead
in the water. The thriving BDSM (bondage, dominance,
and sadomasochism) community alone has at least 500
members. If they take away brothels where people can
exchange simoleans for a little hot chat, TSO ’s economy
might collapse.
EA developed the “Red Link” as a means of curb-
ing undesirable behavior by tagging unfriendly users in
The Sims Online , but even that is backfiring. Extortion
rackets have started popping up where “griefers” (the
TSO equivalent of Player Killers, or PKers) have formed
mafias, conned newbies out of their cash, and threatened
to red link users who don’t pay up.
Now for the social context: If massively multiplayer
games allow people to be whomever or whatever they
want without limits, then does TSO prove how dysfunc-
tional we all are? Of course not. If it did, then these
issues would plague EverQuest as well. The problem lies
in the unstructured design of TSO itself, which practical-
ly paralyzes gamers with a lack of gameplay and leaves
mischief and sex as the only interesting alternatives. TSO
isn’t a game: It’s a lavish graphical chat room. It was an
ill-conceived and irresponsible undertaking, and it’s time
for EA to pull the plug.GAME THEORY BY THOMAS L. McDONALD
Quick Start
14 MAXIMUMPC APRIL 2004
Michael Davidson, senior research engineer at Florida State University’s National High
Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL), made an astonishing discovery one day while
observing the surface of a dead CPU from a Silicon Graphics server. “I discovered
Waldo,” says Davidson, “and I kept searching, and found there were about 15 doodles
on that chip.”
After Davidson examined dozens of wafers and uncovered a menagerie of
strange beasts etched into silicon, he launched the Silicon Zoo web site (http://
micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures ) with his findings. Eventually, some chip engineers started
sending the goods directly to him. To find these images—most of which are invisible
to the naked eye, he magnifies the chips to 1000x and meticulously scans the surface.
Sadly, discoveries have been infrequent in recent years, owing to both stuffier
attitudes at chip design firms and the vagaries of ever smaller chip fabrication
processes. Nonetheless, a decade after his first explorations, Davidson’s mission hasn’t
changed: “I’m trying to advance the photography of integrated circuits as an art
form.”After having been freed, Willy wound
up on the surface of an Allen-Bradley/
Rockwell node adapter integrated
circuit.According to Davidson,
Hewlett-Packard is the
career leader in spiffy
chip artwork. This cheetah
prowls an HP memory
controller.Davidson’s favorite stands out among the
Silicon Zoo’s other denizens not only because
it’s the mighty god of thunder, but because at
1.1 square millimeters, it can (barely) be seen
with the naked eye.Our personal favorite hides
on an HP PA-RISC 7000 series
microprocessor—the Stay Puft
Marshmallow Man rides again.Inside the Silicon Zoo
Be careful poking around in your PC —it’s a jungle in there
Our personal favorite hides
on an HP PA-RISC 7000 series
microprocessor—the Stay Puft
Marshmallow Man rides again.