Week 7 - Reconfiguration in Sims

Raessen explores three domains of participation involved in the cultural production of computer games and their participatory media cultures: interpretation, reconfiguration and construction. Review the article and give an account of one domain of participation in relation to a game of your choice (and/or suggest another domain of participation that might be considered).

 

Reconfiguration in SIMS

 

Computer games and its surrounding cultures have been marked with distinctive elements of “interconnectivity” and “participation”. In Raessens’s (2005) article on computer games, three domains of participation, namely interpretation, reconfiguration and construction, are suggested. In the following, I will be reviewing “reconfiguration” and relate it to Sims, the game which I was once addicted to then.

 

As suggested by Raessens, reconfiguration “exists in the exploration of the unknown” (2005, p. 380). Aarseth (1997) further elaborates that the gamer “is making strategic choices about alternative paths and, in the case of adventure games, alternative actions” (p. 64). In Sims and many of its refined versions and expansion packs, there are different families to choose from, of which players can invent their Sims using the predetermined criteria (E.g. Gender, skin colour, clothing, etc).  They play the game when it is in Live mode, and they can build houses and buy things for their designated characters using Build mode or Buy Mode.  The live mode is more significant in relation to reconfiguration among the three modes, because players can instruct the Sims to interact with objects. The Sims may keep a pet or accept a job offer as instructed. Also, players may instruct Sims to boost their skills through training including reading, and working out.  These lead to Sims’ development. They may get a promoted in a job, or they may fall in love with other Sims. All these illustrate “the exploration and attempt to control worlds that are unknown to the player” (Raessens 2005, p. 380), which is a distinctive feature of computer games.

Sims are exposed to different destinies (Including this awkward moment) under players' (our) hands, which are also determined by the game's predetermined database.

 

To further elaborate on Sims and its Live mode, another perspective of reconfiguration can be noticed, that the player “is invited to give form to these worlds in an active way by selecting one of the many preprogrammed possibilities in a computer game”. The choices mentioned above (i.e. Creating, instructing Sims and deciding on Sims’ actions) are all generated by the pre-set databases and lead to pre-determined possibilities (E.g. Sims may starve, cry and so on), which are not revealed to the player in advance, thus it corresponds to what Ryan (2001) suggests, that a player is “building the virtual world by selecting objects from a fixed set of system-internal possibilities” (as cited in Raessens 2005, p. 380). Therefore, from this brief analysis of Sims, we could view how computer games and their participatory media cultures exist nowadays.

 

References

Aarseth, E 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on ergodic literature, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

 

Raessens, J. 2005, ‘Computer games as participatory media culture’, Handbook of Computer Game Studies, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, pp. 373-388.