10.0: My life as a Sim, part deux

In past posts I have talked about the Sims, a great role-playing game that I love playing. But for this assignment, I decided to venture into The Sims Online. I created my Sim so that it was nothing like me. First, it was a male. Second, he was tall. I’d say that in real life, my Sim would be one good looking dude. He was muscular and clean cut, and wore great clothes. I named him “Jonas”, mostly because I love that name. But I also named him Jonas because it’s not common, like “Mike” or “Dave”.

After creating my Sim, I had to pick a city to send him to. I decided to send him to the first city on the list: “Blazing Falls” or something like that. Blazing Falls was an interesting place, and I found a house where 3 other people were located, so I decided to see what was up.

When I dropped into the house, I found that there were three girls there. Now, I know for every guy that this is a dream come true. Disguised as a hunky guy, I was very excited to interact with the girls as a member of the opposite sex. At first we did introductions, and I told them I was new to the Online experience. The girls were very nice, and welcomed me to the game. They taught me the lingo (RL=real life, SL=sim life, AFK=away from keyboard, etc.), this was very helpful. As I got to know the owner of the house (Anna) very well, she asked me to dance with her. And as the manly-man that I was, of course I accepted, and then after I asked her to dance with me. Unfortunately, following our dances, I had to go (to write this blog post), so I said my goodbyes to the three girls and left.

According to Yee and Bailenson, The Sims Online is a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE), because “multiple interactants share the same three-dimensional digital space despite occupying remote physical locations”. It turns out that two of the three girls that I met were actually from the UK, so I was chatting with an ocean between us in real life, but only a few feet between us on The Sims. Also, the reason I was so confident with the three girls is because my character (in my eyes) was very attractive and tall. These two things lead to a more outgoing and social player, according to Yee and Bailenson.