[ozzie]

Originally Posted by Shuyin

I'd recommend playing the mod before you pay money for it, but hey... it's your money.

I guess "try before you buy" is always good advice!

Originally Posted by Shuyin

Playing around with architectural/modelling software like it was a game, does not make it a game. No matter how much you play with it
And i'm quite sure that's not what inspired Will Wright to make The Sims; he has quite a background of making simulations and after his Sim series he wanted to make a more complex simulation hence The Sims and Spore.

Well, regarding Will Wright I found the following. This is from a Gamasutra interview:

I've read that home design software was the inspiration.

WW: I was always interested in architecture, and so one of the original things that was a really inspiration for The Sims was this book, A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander. He's very much into trying to apply formula. He's a physics guy that went into architecture and was frustrated because architecture wasn't enough of a science. But at the same time, he's got a very interesting humanist side. He felt all the principles of architecture should be clearly reducible back to fundamental principles, which is what he kind of tries to do in that book.

Basically his book's interesting because it's like random access. He's got 256 patterns that are organized in these rough groups, but each pattern is really just a couple of pages. For every pattern he has some statement about humans and their needs, and human psychology. The patterns started from the very large, like how you'd place a city within a region, down to where do you put a bed in your room or a bench in your backyard.

But every single pattern starts with some observations, and from that he extrapolates design-wise, pattern-wise, that says this should always be [like this]. It might be that humans have a need for privacy, and so a house should have private areas and public areas. It's really random access rules that you can apply to any design or architecture design problem, no matter how large or small.

This from a Gamespy interview:

Wright: Well the original prototype I did in '93 was really focused on the build mode. The first thing I wanted was basically "Sim Architect" and I really enjoyed that. Even with the prototype I really enjoyed just building the different houses. That part I knew, very early on, worked for me. The home design part of the game I thought: 'I could spend hours on this.'

Then once we got to the behavioral part and we started doing the simulation there was some point in there which we went through a couple major rethinkings of how the whole thing would work. We ended up with a pretty elegant structure fairly early on, about a year into it. When I could step back and I could imagine "oh yeah this is a simple structure that we can simulate almost any object we can encounter and the Sims would use it in an appropriate manner." It wasn't on screen at that point -- it was just in my head -- but I understood we had the right approach for pushing the AI.

Okay, not that important for this discussion, but I wondered myself if I remembered correctly. I'm still not sure. Either I mixed something up or maybe he only mentioned it in the one interview I just can't find anymore? At least the Gamasutra interviewer seems to remember the same thing.

Can home design software be classified as a video game? Probably not. But I remember that the one I played with had a 3D render mode where you could walk around in the building you created. It had something of a game. And if it wasn't intended as such, I really don't care. Yeah, it's not like the best game, or much of a game, but you can play around with it, create environments and walk around in the environments. You could even say it had resource management because there was a limit on how many walls you could build!
Okay, I'm being facetious, but I think the boundaries aren't, imo, as strict as you think they are. Just like with the music of John Cage.
And btw, Plan 9 from Outer Space is one of the unintentionally funniest movies ever. Doesn't change a thing that it wasn't meant to be. It still works this way, maybe only this way.

Originally Posted by Ascovel

Funny, but that's how I often choose to watch movies. Especially nowadays with all the HD detail you can analyze at your own pace.

Hm, I dunno. Clearly you can't pause a movie while it's playing in the cinema, but yes, you certainly can at home. But when you do it, the movie basically stops. You can then look at the still frame, which I also sometimes do, like when a newspaper article is being hold into the camera.
With Dear Esther you can take it at your own pace without pausing the experience, I guess.
I should play it.
But then, I should also learn.
I better shut up now.