Post a Comment On: Digitally Staving Off Boredom

After a while of attempting my "semi-autonomous challenge" rules for The Sims 4, I finally figured out how the game is supposed to be fun to play.  It's one of those things that are obvious on first blush, but then you play it long enough that you lose sight of the fact:

At its heart, The Sims 4 is a collaborative storytelling engine.

Much like a child with any dollhouse, the purpose of this dollhouse is to tell stories.  The Sims 4 has some autonomous behavior to reveal the occasional emergent behavior, but it is actually quite careful to have sims do too many things on their own because, after all, you are the one telling the story, not them.

This is also why the challenge of achieving anything in the game is quite easy: if it were significantly hard to accomplish things, then it would confound your ability to use the sims you have created to tell a story.
[Image] Even with more autonomous interactions enabled, the sims tend to spend more time standing around yakking than I would like. My "semi-autonomous challenge" had revised the rules a bit of how I was going to play.  It was too annoying to watch a sim do their boring autonomous behavior, and even installing the Have Some Personality Please mod did not make the autonomy worth allowing my sim to act on their own.  (Though it did make it more challenging for sims to make friends because of the spontaneous mean interactions, and was a general emergence improvement to their basic-needs-only behaviors.)

Unfortunately, the mods are unable to decide which of the unlocked autonomous behaviors the sims will act upon, as that logic is somewhat deeper than mods are allowed to interact with.  That's too bad, I would love a mod that would encourage them autonomously act upon "whims" once basic needs are met.  Not only because whims generally suit their traits but also because they could rack up some free sim satisfaction points that way.

In my rules revision, I decided that I am allowed to issue as many orders as I wanted to my sim-of-the-day.  This meant less annoying autonomous actions and more player involvement, and the fact I am not controlling the whole household at once is autonomy enough.  I ended up with rules that looked something like this:
You can only control one sim in the household per day, all other sims must act autonomously. You must alternate evenly between the sims in the household, changing to another at midnight. If another sim acts upon your currently-controlled sim, allow for at least one full interaction to go through before interrupting.  In this way, the other sims are allowed to "run interference." The goal is to complete lifetime aspirations.  Any method of life stage day resetting or life extension is restricted to one reset per completed aspiration.  One exception is the cow plant essence, which carries a large risk, especially when sims are left to their own devices. You are allowed to have the sims help each other, but should limit controlling the other sims of your household (other than your current daily sim) as much as you can.  (I found it hard to resist giving the other sims an occasional "go away" order when they were interfering too much.) It is a pretty good ruleset for a challenge.  Difficulty can be determined via a combination of lifespan settings and the number of sims in the household.  If you have four sims in a household then you have greater than four times the challenge of a game where you can control the whole household.  This is because you can only play one of them per day, and the others would be "running interference" on their autonomy alone.
[Image] I started a new household with four sims on "long" lifespans, each with strengths and weaknesses and different lifetime aspirations, and have been playing it fairly stringently "round-robin," left to right. However, there is still the problem that The Sims 4 is, at heart, a storytelling engine.  What kind of story does this ruleset tell?
Since the perspective switches to a new character every day at midnight, while all the other characters are off doing something during the day, you can't really feel fully invested in any of the household members' stories.  If you are bored with the current character's story, you are stuck with them for an entire day, but you can look forward to moving on to a different character the next day. If you are invested in the current character's story, you are stuck having to stop their story at midnight regardless, but at least this makes it hard to get stuck in the rut of the same routine (something we are naturally prone to do when playing The Sims 4). There are definite advantages and disadvantages to this method of collaborative storytelling, but the result is a bit more disjointed than I would like.  It is further complicated by the fact that some of the settings are more conducive to this ruleset than others: a Strangerville adventure is probably best conducted by a lone sim or an entire household working in concert, not so much this round-robin challenge ruleset.

What are some alternatives? It might be better to go with a two-sim household on "normal" lifespan difficulty than a four-sim on "long" because that way you are not separated from a sim's perspective for too long.  Perhaps to pick a selection of 2-3 different sims for a given day and choose some kind of story arc objective for them to get involved in.  Some form of "story arc" method should work better in general, some major turning point before moving on to the next "chapter" of your sims' lives.

For example, perhaps you can't switch your characters until you have advanced onto the next leg of life aspiration with your current character.  There is a bit more tension behind reaching their aspiration goals because the other sims in the household are running out of time.  I like the sound of that, although I have to sort of hand-wave why the other sims are wasting time.  Perhaps sims completing their aspirations has something to do with removing a mental block for the others.  In any case, making completing a life aspiration leg a requirement to move on should make it feel a little more like a proper episodic story arc chapter.
[Image] Despite having spent over $150 (at sale price), I still do not own even half of the DLC that they put out for The Sims 4. Though I ended up splurging on even more DLC than in the last entry (Get To Work, City Living, Jungle Adventure, Movie Hangout Stuff, and Laundry Day Stuff) I am still encountering issues with enjoying The Sims 4.

The biggest issue that The Sims 4 has is that the collaborative storytelling focus is fairly weak and also very much at odds with its ability to challenge the player.  Even if the player does their best to lend their imagination to the digital dollhouse of The Sims 4, the sims are still a bunch of gibberish-speaking twits who are taken less seriously with each installment in the series.  Even if The Sims 4 was great at telling a story, gamism and narrativism are difficult to reinforce simultaneously, just as GNS theory suggests.

As for the simulationist aspect, the removal of the seamless worlds from The Sims 3 remains a strong technical weakness of The Sims 4.  I had hoped that later expansions had addressed that to some extent, this does not seem to be the case.  Some neighborhoods are more varied than others, with more activities found going on outside of the current active lot.  At least the lack of simulated worlds works largely identically in single-sim households, though it is a little jarring on immersion to see all the sims spawn as though the lot just became active on your arrival (because it has).

If removing world simulation was done to prevent the game from getting buggy then it has not worked.  The Sims 4 has a surprising number of bugs that have built up.  Things like whims not triggering on completion (removing mods helps with this, but it still happens at times) and spellcasters being unable to resume freelance writing jobs (turns out that you need to banish your familiar to work around that bug).  The good news is that there seems to be an ongoing effort to track these bugs for fixing, and updates are coming out regularly, but some of those issues are fairly major game-breakers that have still gone unaddressed for months.
[Image] The far left button is for Build/Live, the two main game modes, followed by the "manage worlds" and "gallery" buttons. Another reason to play besides story and challenge is to build.  Many players have found building interesting houses and/or interior decoration to be a vindicating reason to play The Sims 4, and if that's your cup of tea then more power to you.  In fact, I would say that the three big buttons in the upper right of the interface reveal the developer's intention of three distinct activities they think you should be playing the game for: Building or Living.

I will keep plugging away at it.  I try to set my entertainment budget at a dollar per hour of fun, and the amount I spent on the DLC has me down for another 125 or so hours until this splurge is vindicated.  For now, I think I can go a bit further down the rabbit hole and see if there is a way to better enjoy the game.