@Justpetro and @joandsarah77: The saying that "Strangers are just friends you haven't met yet" doesn't always apply! We were lucky that day given the utter lack of law enforcement then. (Friendly advisory that some perpetrators aren't strangers. Please stay safe.)


I want a quit without saving option. If there's a mod for this, I can't find it!

That it's perfectly normal to take 45 minutes to go to the bathroom... it's not at all something to be concerned about or to talk to a doctor regarding...

I've gotten a much better handle on the various tropes associated with world-building, since I don't want to JUST make buildings, I want to be able to imagine stories happening in them too (even if I almost never play out those stories in-game!) I'm also better at salesmanship (I think), since I've been able to read the 'market' that exists for downloadable lots, and figure out how to tailor certain aspects of my own creations to fit with what other people want...

A stranger is a friend you do not know, @Sketching, according to the game!

That stranger hanging around outside your house - invite him in, a friend is needed for your next promotion or you just need your social need to be topped up. The stranger will use your computer and turn on your TV and make himself at home - but he will never harm your pixel, and to get rid of him, just tell him good-bye. What does that teach?

I like that in the game. But I certainly don't like strangers hanging around my house in real life!

It's all right in-game though teaches a lesson not too applicable in real life! Get out of my hot tub, Goopy, you've been in there for days - and stop racking up my electricity bills!

Goopy may stay as long as he likes

Architecture.

No ... not particularly deep, I know, but building lots has taught me to look for details,even in plainer buildings. Sometimes, even cookie-cutter or boxy buildings in real life can have really fascinating details. I once spent days doing a staircase and lobby in one of my Uni buildings inspired by a RL one where I waited for my daughter after she finished classes. The pretty staircase fascinated me, as well as the seashell lights on the walls (it is a biological science building). I doubt I would have paid it as much notice if I didn't play the Sims. It was a great day when I actually found seashell lights for the game! My Marine Biology building is one of my favorite Uni lots, and my students visit it often, even if because of game limitations, I often don't see the staircase in full view.

Well, he does keep my skunk preoccupied...



Okay, he can stay.

I have found myself looking at roofs often, @gazania - and at finer details of houses too. The game can certainly spark an interest in something else; like architecture! And through building for Sims, I have learned a lot, not only about building techniques, but about architecture and building styles.

Before I had to build one for a competition, I did not know what a Painted Lady was! There are no Painted Ladies in my country as far as I know - I did find a guest house with that name, but it certainly does not have the looks I may have thought "pretty" when I saw similar houses being built, but that was about that. I am not familiar with other games and I don't know if there is any that allow you to build the way the Sims does. (I am not really a gamer. Just a simmer).

Thank you, @Sketching. Seems as if that hot tub is needed now

That there's only so much you can do for somebody.

You can focus on making your Sims' lives as good as you can, but sometimes their unreasonable wants simply won't roll away -- and when that happens, their aspiration levels end up dipping.

I have learned about different styles of architecture, and building/social history by looking up inspiration for building and creating towns.

Something which makes me feel a bit bittersweet - I was quite into modding and creating CC around the time that TS1 was ending and the first few years of TS2, and I used to think so wistfully and hard about working in The Sims' game studio. Like, that would have been my DREAM job. However, I assumed that this was an impossible to reach dream (because I don't live in America, because I don't have the right connections, and so on) and so I carried on with my everyday life and didn't spend too much time on learning to mod and create because it was just a side project or a hobby.

I realised years later that because of the way internet communities exploded around games and games companies began to reach out and connect with their fans on social media, if I had actually put all of that passion that I had into the coding and modding or the artistic creating (which was probably more my forte, really) - if I'd genuinely taken that seriously and put the time into it, then actually I could have had a decent chance of being contacted and asked to work on Sims 3 or 4.

I guess that taught me that hobbies aren't just dumb and worthless and that if you really want something it's actually achievable, even if you think it's not. It's probably too late for that dream for me but I hope that it's not too late in other areas for me to keep pushing for what I want.

Hobbies are not dumb and worthless. It is good to have a hobby; it is good for the mind and the soul.

It does give you an opportunity to fine tune skills, whether it is a computer game or flower arranging or gardening or attending zumba classes. (Which happen to be my other 3 hobbies, one actually at times a paying one).

When it comes to life skills, though - nothing has taught me as much as life. And perhaps working in the local music industry, where somebody will stab you in the back if you don't watch carefully at all times. And hobbies do not teach you those, neither does the Sims.

In the game, I love playing with elders. I have always found the moment when a born-in-game Sim holds his or her grandchild a very special one. I wish Sims could teach me about becoming a grandmother - I will be one in six weeks. And I am terrified.

Ah, but Sims 2 can teach you something here- when visiting, don't forget to put the baby down before you leave the lot!

(Congratulations, bu the way! :lovestruc )

And don't hire nannies for them!

Also: Congratulations @Justpetro! - from Sketching and Goopy

Thank you (And Goopy too).

I thought about that a while back - all my sim fathers seemed to take their babies to work that day - and put then down quite carefully on the pavement when they came back

First, I will have to summon the courage to pick him up, though!

Surely the game can teach you to follow common sense (buy an alarm to keep the burglar away or be alerted of him). Perhaps I'm just overlooking too much to find more meaningful, deep lessons on what can it teach the player outside of the virtual universe.

Also, there's no need to be concerned if the casual stranger you said hi to one day as he walked past your house suddenly calls your 6 year old daughter. Nothing to worry about at all, there.

It's also perfectly normal to still occasionally call the woman who delivered you a pizza that one time when you were a toddler.

ahem..do you happen to remember where you found the seashell lights. I've been keeping an eye out for those. I love the ocean, live at the ocean, and would like on the ocean if I could.

OOPSIE! sorry for the double post. I didn't notice till I had already done it. I'm leaving the thread now so I don't do that again. See you later.

@smorbie1 You can combine them and just delete the second post.

I'm trying to find them, since I thought someone would ask. Of course, I'm not coming up with anything with Googling, even though these came up easily in the past! And I'm away from my game. But I'll post the link when I do find them. I was so, so happy to see them and the creator did a great job!

That sounds like the kind of thing you'd find on Parsimonious.

"Teaching" implies an intended process, which is not how it works. The game has no life-lessons built into it that the programmers wanted people to get; or, if there are, we are under no obligation to learn what they wanted to teach. What we are taught is dependent on our teachers; what we learn is up to us.

I always got good grades. My brother, who by many standards of measurement is smarter than me, did not. I tried to explain to him that the trick was, to understand that grades don't reflect what you've learned, but how well you convince the teacher that she taught you what she set out to teach. He refused to accept this - if the teacher was teaching something he was sure was wrong, he wanted her to acknowledge her wrongness and give him credit for his rightness. This does not work.

One of the great things about fiction - and this game counts as fiction by any reasonable definition - is that it's a chance to try out different lives and approaches to life in a risk-free environment. I avoided a lot of common adolescent mistakes by absorbing a lot of teen fiction. Which freed me up to make my own personal necessary adolescent mistakes. An awful lot of what I read, however, I explicitly rejected the author's own opinion. This, I knew, was not how my life worked. This is why censorship is a bad idea generally, and a stupid one in regards to children. Nobody who hasn't talked to an individual knows what she learned from any given bit of media. What a story, game, movie, TV show means varies from person to person - because meaning is a human construct, constructed differently in every brain, interacting with experience, culture, and brain chemistry. Yet people insist on treating it as some kind of objective reality.

This is something authors, and teachers, and artists, and counselors, all have to deal with. I've had kids tell me that one of my books changed something for them, that it made them love reading or was responsible for them bringing their English grades up from D to A or something. And my response is always the same: You did that. I am proud as heck to have been part of your process, but all I did was write a story. You were the one who took something from it and put it to work in your life, and all the credit for that is yours.

Excuse me...got on a hobbyhorse there...

And indeed the shell light was on Parsimonious! I finally got into the game to find it. It wasn't the easiest to locate on the Parsimonious site.

http://parsimonious.org/furniture2/...k8-Mataine.html

Nothing's easy to locate at Parsimonious. You just page through going: "That's cute...need that...WTF?..."

For a site called Parsimonious, a lot of their items look luxurious.

I first learned that pregnant women shouldn't interact with cat litter from TS2...

Toxoplasmosis, a parasitic disease that can be shed in cat feces. It's a detail I actually didn't expect to see in TS2.