Yvette Wohn

When you think of it in real life, breeding is a complicated thing that requires time, money, and in many cases, emotional involvement. Any effort made by human beings to fiddle with “natural” reproduction has always been a matter of hot dispute. Think surrogates, invitro fertilization, parthenogenesis, cloning….! And we’re not just talking about human beings. There are tons of discussion on animal breeding– for instance, is it right to in-breed certain species to save them from extinction? How about the breeding of dogs for pedigree? Yes, breeding is a complicated thing.

Yet, in games, we take breeding for granted. But do game developers think about moral consequences when they’re designing them? Does the decision for breeding differ when the game character is a human being versus an animal or alien? I would argue: yes.

Spawning and cross-breeding

To be fair, there are multiple levels of breeding. At the very basic level, there is the “spawning” or “cloning” you see mostly in strategic games. Click on a unit and a few second later, a unit will appear. The units are all the same, they are like mass-produced robots from a factory line. Whether it be Starcraft of Romopolis, I feel very little guilt in cranking out units because they are a part of mass production.  In these strategic games, I don’t even feel that the characters are characters- which is why I describe them as units– military-style.

I also feel very little guilt about breeding in games like Viva Pinata or Spore, even if the concept of cross-breeding is very appalling in real life. That is probably because the animals look very fictional and the purpose of the game is to evolve species… I don’t know how I’d feel if the characters looked like real animals.

Wild Tribe v. Virtual Villagers

Breeding, however, becomes a little more personal when I have to drag a character on top of another to make the two breed. Here is where I felt the morality kicking in. Let me compare two games-  Wild Tribe and Virtual Villagers. The two are extremely similar, except that one uses animals as characters and the other uses human beings. You start out on a small island with only a handful of characters, and you have to increase your population by force-mating the characters. The biggest difference between the two is that for the humans, the characters enter a hut, so you can’t see the actual mating. When the baby is born, an adult character has to take care of it full-time until it becomes a child. In Wild Tribe, however, the animals mate out in the open. Tiny cute creatures roll themselves into a cloud, and soon another tiny creature is born. There is no sense of parenthood- all tiny creatures are equals, until they develop into a giraffe, elephant, monkey, zebra, or lion. After they become an adult, they can no longer breed.

What’s interesting though, is that while I was playing both games, I didn’t think twice about breeding the animals, yet I did when breeding the humans, because of the responsibility of child-rearing that follows as well as the thought of forcing two humans to have sex. What’s funny, however, is that in Virtual Villagers, some characters are not compatible; there is no such thing in Wild Tribe.

Breeding in The Sims

By far, The Sims has the most advanced breeding mechanism that I’ve sen so far- in fact, as I play the game, I don’t even think of it as breeding early on in the game. It’s not until you realize you’re trying to make a clan that breeding becomes important. Why create a lineage? Well you discover very early on that in order to live in a very nice, big house, you have to either 1) marry someone rich or 2) inherit from your parents. Of course, you can also earn your fortune, but it’s never the same as having a house and cash to start off with. In my ideal Sim, the children don’t squander off their parents’ fortune so everyone in the neighborhood just gets richer and richer.

So in order to pass on wealth, I found myself putting characters into situations where they get pregnant or adopt children. Getting a Sim character pregnant requires a lot of effort– two characters have to work up a romantic relationship and even if they do have sex (which can only take place in the bed or the hot tub, so you have to put them in that setting) they may not produce a child. Also, like real life, acquiring a child takes time and effort, so as a game player, you know better than to get a poor single mother pregnant.

It’s fascinating that I think twice when breeding humans, but not with animals. I wonder if it is because the game makes me think of consequences in the case of human beings, or if it’s just me putting in my own thoughts into the gameplay? What if the game developers hadn’t made the differentiation between humans and animals and you could sort of drag a Sim on top of another to create a child that would not require care? Would I still think twice?

Why is the Internet so ***ing slow when it rains?

When it’s raining, I like staying indoors (gee, wonder why) eating some hot and crispy and watching TV. I watch my TV through the Internet (of course) I was terribly annoyed today because Lie to Me on Hulu was stopping to buffer every 15 seconds, and I’m not exaggerating.

At least regular web-surfing is okay, but as more of our content because reliable on Internet connection that is time-sensitive (think of streaming, online gaming, distance learning) what are we going to do about these weather problems? Will people living in tropical areas have slower Internet connection? In a future age where Internet is essential to all aspects of society-economy, politics, religion, education, etc.- is it fair that people in geographic locations with more precipitation be automatically at a disadvantage?

And it’s not just Comcast, and it’s not because high-speed internet connection in the US is not exactly high. Even in Korea, where I had 100mbps coming through on cable, there would be rainy days when the Internet just didn’t live up to expectations. The odd thing, however, is that I don’t understand why it is so. Physics is the last thing I’m good at, so forgive me if my theories are wrong, but it doesn’t make sense, because even when Internet connection would be screwy at home, PC rooms would have great connection. And when you’re in a country where Starcraft is a national pastime, that’s extremely important.

So what is it? Were the PC rooms paying for more bandwidth? And even if they were, what is it about rain that clogs up the Internet arteries? Is water the cholesterol of the Internet?

To some extent, I am sympathetic about wireless and satellite Internet because perhaps the precipitation affects the airwaves. I know light is affected by water; don’t know about how sound works, but since water is a dense physical component, I wouldn’t be surprised if precipitation warped air transmission. But I don’t understand how water would affect fiber optic cables and copper pipes. Does it affect the conductivity?Electricity travels faster when it’s wet, but what about bits?

Everything would make so much more sense if the Internet were run by hamsters. If it rains, their fur gets soggy and heavy, so they have no choice but to run slower.

Rockfree is like Rock Band online, only you’re using the keys to navigate instead of an actual instrument. While it has potential because it doesn’t have that many competitors, I don’t know if the game will become hugely successful because of two things: the broadband situation in the US and the poor graphics.

A crucial part of the game is to hit the keys in time to the music. But with Internet connection being what it is in the US, you may experience a slight lag, and that can ruin the entire experience. Hopefully, the publisher will be running a lot of servers to alleviate the problem when more users join up. A lot of flash-based games are already using this DDR-type thing with the arrows, but again, network connection has to be extremely good.

The second and MAJOR flaw of the game is that the graphics suck. The avatars are two-dimensional and really ugly. There’s no visual pleasure.

The best thing for the publisher to do is to look at Audition. Although I really hate the avatar designs in Audition (their eyes are huge like Anime characters) Audition has done a really great thing in tying in social networking so that it is “the” social networking site to go to if your a teen or in your early twenties (it was also the best online dating place for young people). You dance together, chat together, etc. It has also done a great job in using microtransactions to pimp up your avatar- because people kids don’t mind spending a dollar or two to make their avatar look cool.

The thing is, without the social networking, a music or dance game that you play with your fingers is just not fun. The reason guitar hero is fun is because you have an actual toy guitar that you can pretend to play. It’s that element that makes the game enticing- because why would the average person be interested in meticulous rhythm? (If you’ve seen people doing karaoke, you’ll know that perfect rhythm is the last thing on people’s minds)

I would be interested to see how virtual worlds aiming for teens such as Habbo integrate this. Until now, social networking in virtual worlds has been two-dimensional (except for sex, but that’s not really a major feature of the teen VWs). Even if you’re playing games, the interface is mainly 2D. But playing games (think of what happens in the real world) should be a 3D experience, where you can see the other people and interact with them as the gaming takes place. Game developers for virtual worlds are really missing that point. If you get a 2D game (say, playing tetris against someone) in a 3D virtual world, what’s the point of going into the virtual world in the first place?

That’s why of all the games I played within Second Life, the ones I liked best were extremely interactive. The funnest ones were a game of paintball, walking through a haunted house with a couple other people, and playing checkers. The cute thing about the checkers game was that someone had actually made a 3D checker board, so there were two people playing the game, and people standing around watching and talking- you know, like real life. That totally beats playing checkers online where you can’t see your opponent or have any interaction with other people other than chat.

Last week, MTV Multiplayer had an interesting scoop about how Sony has been charging game publishers for content that users can download. According to this article, Sony started charging publishers a “network bandwidth fee” since Aug. 1 last year– 16 cents per Gigabyte. Because MTV is a publisher, the article did have a whiny tone, but it wasn’t making anything up and definitely put Sony in a tight spot.

Sony’s spokesman responded to the article saying that it still anticipates good content, but people are pointing out that the incentives for game makers to make games for the PS3 has dropped down even more because 1)Ps3 games are more difficult and pricier to make than xbox games and 2)ps3 has less users. Some blogs (Here and here) even suggested that developers avoided releasing PS3 demos because of this fee. Basically, it’s the vicious cycle theory: Xbox doesn’t charge publishers, so publishers will develop more Xbox games =>fewer ps3 games are developed=>people migrate to Xbox.

Interestingly enough, Sony announced today that it is going to make things easier for third-party developers– by lowering the price of development tools and offering technical support. Maybe it was thinking about this all along and the timing was a coincidence, or maybe it took this incident to point out its disadvantage. Who knows?

But I think this addresses a really important issue about content distribution- now that everything is digital, it’s very easy to distribute content. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Even if the distributor is willing to make the product free for marketing purposes, someone has to bear the cost of transmitting those bits. It’s interesting to see that in the game community, the end users are willing to pay, while in the news community, users are not. Is it because users wanting high-quality games have to receive them through an architecture that does not allow more flexibility? How come there isn’t a huge trend of migration from console to PC?