More Awesome Than You!

Given that novel-writing consumes a great deal of Sim time, and doesn't help with maintaining mood as painting or playing the piano does, and basically has a fairly low yield money-wise, I was thinking of maybe tweaking it a little.  However, I haven't found anything that looks tweakable.  Has anyone else, maybe? :)

I would love to see this provide FUN, in the same way as painting a masterpiece does.  Surely if a Sim enjoys writing and wants to write, they would gain pleasure from it?  I gain an enormous amount of pleasure from writing, otherwise I wouldn't do it, so it seems silly that Sims can't if they're that way inclined.  I'd also love to see some way they could give their novels a title, maybe even have them available to buy by other Sims, but we'd need an expansion pack for that.  Would be a great expansion pack actually, The Sims 2 Creativity, or maybe The Sims 2 Fame & Fortune.  They could write blockbuster novels, paint masterpieces, create new culinary delights, that sort of thing, and become famous.  I'd like that.

That's one thing I can't understand either. Why doesn't writing novels provide fun? I agree, writing is fun and seeing your work take on shape and form is very fulfilling. I do tend to obsess over my papers, but even that is fun to me. My writings do not have as wide an audience as yours Ancient (not even close), but there's nothing more elevating than people telling you they enjoyed your essays, papers, stories etc.

G.

Yeah. Writing is fun, even if you're just messing around with it. For me, anyway.

It'd make sense if a novel made more money than a painting, but it doesn't. Annoying.

I'm not sure that even necessarily applies in real life. After all, really valuable paintings are sold to people with more money than sense, but novels have to be sold in volume to peasants, and the only one getting really rich is your publisher.

Well, yeah. But I guess I'm talking game logic here.

There was something on the BBS a whlie back about sims with more memories writing more valuable novels . . . don't think it's true, but it might be interesting if it actually worked like that. Hmm.

I bet "Mrs Harry Potter" is doing quiet well.

I'm sure it would make a pretty boring read even if they did have a lot of memories. I mean, who wants to read the memoirs of a celebrity chef, helpfully entitled, "1001 Ways To Burn Cereal"?

I'd read that. After all, at least a few of them are probably applicable to things other than cereal.

Okay, bad example. I guess there's always somebody who's enough of a loser to buy anything.

I wouldn't *buy* it, just borrow it from the library. Or maybe just read it there.

I saw a news item about the author of the Potter stories. I didn't pay much attention, but I did hear the word 'millions', that I am sure of. Personally, I have never read any of those books, nor have I watched any of the movies, but I couldn't say exactly why. I'm just not attracted to either, for no apparent reason.

G.

The whole novel writing thing is kinda half-baked anyway.  Not only do you not have a working title for it while it's being written - that is unless you have the novel progress bar running, you have no idea whether you're working on a novel or not - you don't get to go and do signings if it draws a following, which for Popularity Sims is kindof the whole reason to write in the first place.  You can't, for example, write a series of books, because your novels don't have a name or a theme or anything so there's no chance of your publisher calling you up to do a sequel ;-)

Of course, by the time Maxis get around to revamping these parts of the game, it'll be time to book a skiing holiday in hell :-P

I think I would like to see some kind of mood effect for Sims who are writing, even if it's not always positive.  Writer's block is a frustrating thing, you know.

If they put those bits in the game, considering the track record, it will be the skiing holiday in hell.

As for Harry Potter, the early ones are merely decent. Starts to pick up in the later books. Sixth book is good. I don't read much fantasy, mostly because I find it tends to get rather repetitive, but I find the Harry Potter world quite interesting.

I'm the same. I have never read them either. I have seen the films and will maybe get around to reading them for something to do (when I retire one fine day). I may have seen the same thing as you on the author. It was recent and probably some show about the release of her latest book. People were lined up for ages in the book stores here the day it came out. Funny thing is, I remember our local computer store having the same problem with the release of The Sims 2.

Gad, wasn't that the most awful ep ever? Vacation and then unleashed. Neither was a bad idea, what became of that is another matter alltogether.

As for fantasy, if I feel like reading fantasy, I just read my daughter's books. She has books by such people as Douglas Adams, Ann McCaffrey and so on. I must admit that I even like her early fantasy books by someone named Avi and a series about rats that go out on quests, save their village and other such things. I forget by whom those were, something like Redsomething or other.

However, since you say they are readable I might check one of the later ones out next time I go to the library.

That's exactly what that was Stormy, the latest book-release and the lines of people waiting in line to get their books signed.

G.

Redwall. Those books are deeply silly.

Well, since she was around 10 or 12 years old when she got the books, it was good enough for her then. Yes, they are silly, but as far as children's books go, I've seen far worse, that's why I started to write my own stories for my kids. And besides, after reading a psych-book on abberant personality disorders and psychopathology, those are just the right kind of books to get the knots in your brain untied :D

G.

Yep. I listened to them on tape, whilst on a road trip. Good way to "read" fairly light books like that. Relaxing.

"Abnormal Psychology: A Guide to Misdiagnosing Your Friends"

I'm quite good at self-diagnosing when reading psychology books or articles. It's amazing the number of psychoses I discover I have.  :P

I know what you mean witch, everytime I read about something in my course I always manage to convince myself I have that disorder.

"Hmmm...ADHD...so THAT'S why I cant concentrate in class. Well, either that or the lecturer is boring me by speaking in a monotone voice that can send even a insommiac to sleep."

Oh, I do that all the time. Then I snicker at the complete ridiculousness of it. Why, if I really had that many problems, I'd have been locked up by now. Except for the fact that insane asylums aren't really good at holding people who escape calmly.

They're better than you think, only we call it 'congress' now.

Perhaps it could be both more worthwhile and more realistic -- if the amount you were payed scaled based on how many novels you'd written. The first novel could be worth almost nothing-- a few hundred, say-- but each successive novel could be worth more, as your sim builds his literary reputation. By the time you've writte 4 or 5, they could start being worth more than paintings; by the the time you've written ten, they could be worth exponentially more.

When the series started a was a co-manager in a book store. I am an avid reader, but avoided Harry Potter on principle. At some point the store started a Harry Potter Fan Club. No one wanted to host it, I got stuck with it. I read the books. They were good. I got addicted. I am now reading them to my kids as bedtime stories.  Laugh at me all you want, I am a 31 year old mother of 3 and I like Harry Potter. Of course, there is some hope for me, I haven't even bought the 6th one yet (although I will eventually, no doubt about it). :)

It seems there is quite an audience that tries their best NOT to read Harry Potter even if they don't know anything about it. I would be one.  ;)

I find painting far more entertaining than writing, as I can talk to others while doing it and not lose completly balance, but NO fun for writing is not right either.

Nowadays in the real world, a "first novel" might get you $5,000 or so.  (That is, if it sells all all.  Before  you quit your day job, keep in mind that only about 1% of all stories submitted to publishers ever see print.)

A real best-seller on a royalties contract can earn a million bucks.  Even the no-royalties house books are getting $50,000 and up.

So, I agree that the amount earned from selling a best-seller in The Sims 2 is unrealistically low.

But hey, having one skill make you an expert at writing novels, painting, and performing music isn't actually a faithul model of real life.

A real business tycoon earns billions of bucks, but takes home a puny $2100/day. At that rather pitiful rate, it would take him 1303 years to get a billion dollars. What you're forgetting to account for is the nonlinear scaling of the simolean, where realworld goods that cost < $50 tend to be horribly overpriced while amounts of cash that are immensely huge in real life are slashed by factors of thousands at the same time.

Oho!  You're right!  Simoleans seem to operate on a logarithmic scale, which almost sort of makes sense within the context of left-wing simmish philosophies.

That was a truly awesome observation, JM.

Well, if there was one career which made your Sim fabulously rich, naturally every player would jump on that one and forget about the others, unless there were comparable perks.

Then again, getting to the top of any career in The Sims 2  is ridiculously easy compared to real life.

They didn't really put too much thought into the entire "career" angle and basically recycled, and then abused horribly, the TS1 system. In TS1, you always started at the rock bottom of any career when you switched. Meaning it would take a MINIMUM of 10 days, if not more, even if you managed to get a promotion every day, which was somewhat random even on good moods. In contrast, In TS2, it takes 4 days, and you're pretty much guaranteed a promotion every day if you play the aspirational game in a well-timed manner, and it takes *1* day with Uni. This greatly trivializes the entire achievement process.

What would have been COOL is if they had, instead of making a single career "line", they had a branching career tree where you STARTED at some point(but not too high, even with an accelerated start), and the paths "branched" from there based on "chance card" style decisions, and you could wind up at a very different "top" from another sim. For instance, let's go with the military track, one I have some personal familiarity with: Instead of always becoming a General at the very end, suppose there was a branching path based on chance card decisions and outcomes that could end up with you becoming KIA, being dumped into one of the other career tracks (Criminal, Politics, and Law Enforcement seem particularly likely), or ending up still in a "military" track, but with an entirely different outcome, such as a mercenary commander. (Helpfullly represented by the icon of a gun and a sack of simoleans), all depending on factors like what decision you chose in a chance card, whether or not the decision succeeded, and even where you started in the career track. That would have been cool. As it stands, I kinda see the L10 career as basically an obligatory mark of "Was here", even if I pay little attention to anything else about it.

I don't even care about fabulously rich. Most of my families are already moderately wealthy to fabulously rich, in the sense of "I have more money than I know what to do with". A one-child policy tends to cause estate compaction that results in the fortunes of multiple families being merged ogether as people die off and fuse entirely into a single family as a result.

In sims 2, it's either recycled from Sims 1 or inanely buggy.

That branching career track thing does sound rather awesome. Especially if they actually implemented the "chance cards are affected by skills" thing that seems to have been the original idea. So a higher charisma and logic skill would steer you towards the general/political side of military, while a higher body/mechanical would steer you towards, say, the mercenary or astronaut side. Hmm. Branching tree systems usually work well in RPGs, and are fairly easy to test. If they made the different careers intertwining, more of an interconnected flowchart thing rather than a linear progression, and either get rid of "Max" jobs or just have a handful of "top jobs" that you weren't as likely to get forced out of but could leave of your own volition via chance cards or whatnot . . . Too bad they didn't implement the "switch to another job" chance card thing, or I could actually implement (parts of) that.

Anything with emergent properties is cool.

At this point, my "main" neighborhood has had just one round of elder keelage, and are in the middle of their first round of game-born sims going through college, so most of my families are semi-wealthy. They would actually seem much wealthier if I ever got around to improving their houses, since they're mostly still living in the crappy starting houses that I threw togethor for the original "Two elder parents, three adult children, one spouse, and one teenager" horribly overcrowed original houses, or in the "one couple with less than 20k because I have the no handout hack and their parents haven't keeled over yet, so their families don't have much money to send them" houses.

Well, they had that one in TS1, but you weren't exactly given any choice in the matter and it was basically a cyclical ring that was more annoying than fun: I *LIKE* the idea of a top job....what I don't like is that there's basically no variety or effort on it. It's no longer an achievement. It feels cheapened.

Yeah, those craptastical houses do have remarkable staying power, if simply by force of habit: Once you've gotten down the lifecycle routine for one, there's a certain force of habit towards staying in it.

It seems that Maxis/EA never truly mastered the if/then statement. There are an incredible number of possibilities they never explored (maybe they are saving it for Sims3?). I love the branching careers concept. It seems much more realistic, and much more interesting. You would think that Maxis would recognize that anything that varies gameplay increases playability, and therefore sales, and is something worth implementing. The game is supposed to have infinite variety. Seems like they would help this concept along. Anyway, I thought JM's career branch ideas were brilliant, too bad that such a mod (to my knowledge) is not currently possible.

Testing requirements, or, in the absence thereof, bugs also increase geometrically with the number of potential branching options.

Well, not really. It has a wide, but not infinite, variety of options that are mostly useless and thus never used, which as the side effect of compacting the number of actual options down to about a half-dozen. The problem here is that there's not enough, "Hey, this is cool!" and too much "Bleh, this is so stupid and useless, please make them stop doing it.". I mean, look at the pool table. It undoubtedly took hours, even weeks to make. They showcased it as one of the major centerpieces of Uni. And it is otherwise completely useless: Sims who should be doing something intelligence are irresistably drawn to the pool table, and sims you're trying to get to play pool develop annoying attention deficit disorders and refuse to do it.

I agree wholeheartedly. There was more they could have done, and so much they shouldn't have. It comes down to the fact that they (maybe) could have done better with more time. There were possibilities unexplored, and directions taken that should not have been. Oh, well. It's a game. I try to enjoy what is, and though I wish what could have been was, I do not dwell. Maxis will repair what they want, and ignore what they want. Repeated requests may have Some influence, but very little. I will live with it (with a few complaints) and go on with my life. The Sims are fun. They are not meant to be more than that. I wish there were more branching operations, but am willing to accept that the game is more than buggy enough and more options would have only made it more so. I want what I want, but will accept what I have.

Well, you know, like it says in my sig....

And let us not forget the money angle. Developing a game in the conept mentioned would take time, quality programming, quality employees, quality research, and quality customer support. All of which are things that cut into profit. Somehow I don't think that the EAGames corporation was willing to invest time and money into the game, since the allmighty dollar was at the forefront of their minds. Hence the rushing out of EP's at a speed that can only promise one thing: bugs.

G.

Oh dear, I spend far too much time fiddling with the houses and hardly any time playing. Every time I get a few hundred dollars, the house gets a new bit added on. My sims mostly live in interestingly shaped houses with lousy furniture and no wallpaper or carpet.  :D

Oh, don't remind me - I spent the whole of Monday night building and rebuilding the house of one of my families. When I was almost finished, I looked at it again, and suddenly realised it was big enough for 6 or 7 people to live in comfortably - and that family is a couple who probably won't be having kids :-[. I thought "Okay, I've completely wasted my evening, here...".

I think I've decided I'm going to move that couple out into a house that's more appropriate for 2 people, and use that rebuilt house for one of my huge families.

That's how my first apartment building came about. I fiddled with a house until it was far too large for the single family living there. So I went and got Inge's apartment stuff, changed things around a little, and there was my first apartment building, inclusive Landlady/Landlord (Landcouple?)

G.