Final Draft

I do not believe that we have a final draft of who we are. When we are born we are considered to be a "blank slate" and our personality and who we are forms from the influences of genes, heredity, environment, culture, society, and our family. As we grow up all of these factors effect and help shape us into the person that we become. Some may disagree that once you get to a certain age that we have enough experienced and know enough, that we are who we are and consider that to be our final draft. I think that since we will always still be meeting new people, going to different places, having changes (expected or unexpected) in our life, experiences and learning different things that we are always being influenced by our surroundings and therefore we will be adding to or editing the draft of ourself continuously.

The Sims

When I was in fifth grade, Sims was the thing to do! The whole time I was reading this that was all I could think about. I found myself remembering my Sims and the lives I created for them. Unlike Kolsterman, I never made an exact replica of myself. I would make Sims I thought were cool or I guess you could say people I thought it would be cool to live through or control, because that is what you are doing in the game. I think it is very interesting how Kolsterman gets so into this game! I think even today if I played the Sims and created myself, I wouldn’t expect to learn something about myself. I think if I created myself it would be boring, I know what my life is like, I don’t want to live it the same way on the computer! That is why when I was younger I would make up people who had things I wish I had and created houses and scenarios I thought would be cool to live.
I do like the way Kolsterman starts off describing his Sim after he has neglected him. It made me keep reading because I wanted to know what the heck was going on! Overall this was an interesting read but the only way I can relate is that I used to love the Sims.

Billy Sim Questions

1. Klosterman almost got sucked into The Sims in a sense trying to recreate his identity. So much that it made him take a closer look at his own identity in real life.

2. Klosterman's piece reminded me of the Vanish piece because both men got frustrated about the new self they were creating. Klosterman because of the limitations of Sims and how he couldn't make a replica of himself. Whereas Ratcliff wasn't trying to duplicate himself at all, and was losing his identity in that respect.

3. I agree with this statement. Children are advancing, but they aren't using their imaginations as freely because computer games have cut and dry rules to get a score. Like a computer, they can be more focused on the outcome or score than they are on the experience.

"Billy Sim" - Group Questions

1) In this article the most interesting aspect related to identity is the fact that people are very materialistic in nature. In the game the only way to make your Sim happy is to buy him nice new expensive things.

2) This article relates to another article we read earlier in the year "All my life for sale" because of how each object a person has represents certain memories or happiness related to the object.

3) We believe that computers help to make children advanced faster. We also can see how it makes children think as computers such as not having as good as an imagination as they could if they were not always on the computer. Also, children are always using electronic forms of communication and lack interpersonal communication skills.

"Billy Sim"

1) It was interesting how Klosterman was trying to re-create himself into a Sim character and how he tried to make it just like himself.

2)Klosterman's piece could be connected to one of the other readings Vanish, how the man created a new identity for himself, wore different outfits and then had people try to track him down. While Klosterman created a new identity for himself through a character just like him that he created on the Sims.

3) We don't necessarily agree or disagree with Klostermans arguement, it just depends on how much time children are using computers and how dependent they are on using them.

Billy Sim - group answers

1. The most interesting implication is that in today's society people seem to rather live their lives online. Online, people can be whoever they want despite who they are in real life. In the writing, the author wanted to live his life through the game Sims instead of living in reality. Online you can say and do things without it actually affecting the person you are in reality.

2. We can relate Klosterman's piece of writing to Slumming, the writing we read a few weeks ago. They relate because the characters in both stories think the 'grass is greener on the other side'. People seem to think that no matter how well they have it, living another person's life must be better. Whether it's online or on the streets, people look for outlets to escape their own lives.

3. When Klosterman argues about children thinking like computer, we feel he is talking about emotions and social interaction. On computers, children don't necessarily have to express their emotions and don't get experience with face-to-face social interaction. The children of the future may find it hard to socialize publicly because we are familiarizing them too much with the usage of computers. In the real world, while technology is important for success, if you lack the social skills to interact with others and share ideas, you will not be very successful.

"Sim"ulated Reality

1. We thought the most interesting part of the reading was how philosophical he became when playing God. At first he was addicted because he could make SimChuck could do whatever he wanted but he saw how materialistic his character was and he became conflicted with the game by intertwining the reality of SimChuck with the reality of real Chuck and not seeing that sometimes a game is just a game.

2. Vanish by Evan Ratcliff was the first reading that came to mind because Evan changed his appearnce and his identity so many times trying to reinvent himself the same way Chuck was trying to reinvent himself through SimChuck.

3. In some cases, children may advance too fast depending on the uses they have for the computer, but it would be a stretch to say that children would solely think like a computer because they have the capacity to imagine, to create out of nothing whereas a computer only has the capacity to do whatever it is programmed to do.

Billy Sim

1. We don't necessarily realize who we are exactly or what it is that we have to do until it is brought to our attention. Whether through other people or, in this case, through a video game that "SIMulates" reality. He attempted to construct a character that adequately represented him in real life...but like Klosterman says, nobody truly knows himself.

2. We feel that it contrasts with "Slumming" in that Klosterman's Sim's character was only happy if Klosterman was buying things for him. His happiness was soley based off of the purchases he made. In "Slumming," these rich people already had all these nice things but they wanted to live a less luxuorious life and they took to the streets abandoning all thier possessions. They thought this would make them happier.

3. Children definitely become computer/Internet literate very quickly, which is beneficial in our technologically-centered world. However, we agree that children do think more like computers. Everything on a computer is systematic and everything is all already there. They lose imagination in a sense. Once they leave the computer and are forced to do homework on paper, write in journals, or just play with toys they do not know exactly what to do because they have been confined to following certain rules a machine creates for them.

Billy Sim - Group Questions

1. We thought that it was interesting that people in real life would like to view themselves from a different point of view and sort of live their lives through a computer. Its also interesting to see how Chuck, in reality, was someone who didnt value many material things and when he created his Sim Chuck he strived to be very rich and materialistic, therefore his real life identity was different from his simulated one.

2. We connected Klosterman's piece to the vanishing story. Like the man who tried to change his identity and lead a new life, it corresponds to the concept of the Sims game by creating a new identity and living your life in a different way.

3. We don't agree that the statement about children thinking like computers is true. Unlike being cold and rational like computers, humans still and will always have emotions and humans still act upon those emotions.

"Billy Sim" In-Class Questions

1. One thing that our group agreed was interesting with respect to identity was the idea that everyone is wrong about their own identity. It's an interesting thought that we could interpret ourselves so wrongly as to think that as we sit alone at a party, we are oxtroverts, or as we greet and speak to everyone that we could see ourselves as introverts.

2. This piece's discussion of creating virtual identities relates to Evan Ratcliff's vanishing and creating a new identity in the digital age.

3. Our group agrees that the use of technology is not making children think like computers, but rather making them lazy and to rely on computers.

Sims

When I was a kid, I loved the sims. It was fun to me being able to create someone completely new and doing whatever you could think of. At the time I took it so seriously too, remebering to spent time with of the sim's friends, going to the bathroom at regular intervials, keeping him entertained, the whole deal. Nothing else really existed outside of the game when I started playing. It was like a second life to me and I really enjoyed it at the time. And it's funny to me now how interesting I found it, when now I honestly can't get myself to play.

Reality

I played the Sims games for a short while back in my formative years. I would have to say that I agree that these games and vidoe games in general are just a waste of time and a simulated reality. It allows people to escape from the mundane tasks of their everyday activities. I think that these games allow people be who they want. This allows them to escape from who they really are.These games become so engulfing because they soon overtake and best reality. I can see the addictive potential, and it makes sense that people would spend so much time with these fake realities and identities. I think that this article really made me look at my own gaming habbits. I dont play the sims but I do play xbox and CoD. These types of games dont let you creat a reality but the anonimity of the internet allows you to be whoever you like to the people you are gaming with. I can see the appeal and I think in the future I may not look at gaming quite the same as I have in the past.

Billy Sim

The whole time, up until Klosterman spoke with Will Wright, I was frustrated reading what he had to say about video gaming and The Sims. His thought process that The Sims boiled down to materialism just aggravated me. It seemed like he was thinking into the game way harder than was necessary. This seems to be a constant with a lot of people that dislike the ideas of videogames. I remember there was lawyer in Florida named Jack Thompson who kept going at a certain game company and ended up getting disbarred because of his work. Video games are just an easy target for these types of people.

That wasn’t the only thing that bothered me about this article. Klosterman didn’t even explore the other ideas possible, he immediately assumed the worst. It took calling the creator of the game and complaining for him to open his mind to the other possibilities.

Simulated Reality

I personally have never played the original Sims game but do have experience with the SimCity game and understand the basics of the game. I remember playing the game and feeling almost sucked into it as if I was the actual mayor of the city. It gave me a chance to be someone else for however long I played. It was like I was able to escape my own reality and enter a completely new one, one that which I could control entirely. I think this was the same way that the author felt when he got hooked into the regular Sims game. The difference with Chuck was that he did not see his Sims character as similar to that of his ownself. Sim Chuck was materialistic whereas Chuck in reality did not have many belongings, not even a bed. As Chuck continued to play the game he found out that with all the items he purchased for his character, he still seemed to not be entirely happy. Even after he bought him the nicest T.V., an expensive bed, and all the furnishings for his house that he still could not bring his character out of a depression. When he talked to the creator of the game he soon realized that the Sims game concept was not entirely materialistic. That even though he bought all these things his character would not be happy. Once he found this out he decided to sell all these things and lived more like he would in reality and I think he found greater success in the game.

The Sims

I admit that I do own one of The Sim's games and that my friend Kelsey and I used to play the game and thought it was fun for a little while. After reading what Chuck Klosterman had to say about his experience playing the Sim's made me think back at all the hours that I must have spent playing the Sim's and how pointless and time wasting it really was. Chuck kind of took some of the fun out of playing the game. He said that "Clearly, video technology cages imagination, it offers interesting information to use, but it implicates that all peripheral information is irrelevant and off- limits. Computers make children advance faster, but they also make them think like computers." I somewhat disagree with him. I do not think that that video technology necessarily cages your imagination, although it may weaken it. Like when Chuck asked his niece about his Sim's character; about how he got there, if he had no job where the money came from, where he went to college, etc., and how she answered was by saying that's just the way it is. She could have used her imagination to make up a little background story about the character just like she would have about her Barbie doll. Except maybe if a parent decides to let their child play nothing but video games they may lack an active imagination, but is it technology to blame or would it be the parents fault for not limiting the time spent playing video games.

As Chuck went on playing the game he sort of became angered by the Sim character he created of himself because he had to keep him happy by buying him things and making friends. Chuck was mad because some of the materialistic things he purchased for his Sim would make him happy, but for other expensive things he bought, his Sim would become unsatisfied. Then when he bought a nice table, which was meant to impress the lady Sim that Chuck had met, he reaction was just to clap her hands excitedly. So Chuck decided to have a talk with the creator of The Sims, Will Wright, because he started to question what the purpose of life was. And basically what he said was that while playing this game people discover interesting things about themselves. Also that if by chance the game had changed a person’s perception of the world surrounding you, then the game was successful. I have never thought of the game in that way before. When I played The Sim’s I didn’t create a Sim that was just like me, I just created made up people and just had fun with the game.

Sims

I thought this was a very interesting and also a very humorous article to read. While reading it the entire time all I could think about was when I would play the game a long time ago. I did the exact opposite of what he did though. I would never to try to make the character I had anything like me. This might be because I was just a young kid and this guy was a mature adult. Nonetheless, when I played I would just try to create the best sim that I possibly could. I would try to make the house that I bought as big as possible. I would always to have the nicest and most the most expensive things that I could possibly buy. I guess in a way I was trying to make the character be as successful as I would someday like to become in life. I made my utopia in life through a Sims character. I would have an excellent job that would be a super high paying job, so that I would be able to purchase any of the luxuries that I wanted. I would put so much time and effort into the detail of my house. I would go room by room buying some of the items that looked cool to me and things that I would want in my real life. I just remember that I would always be adding and buying things to make my house bigger and more prestigious then ever. I guess the sims was my way of living my “fantasy” life.

klosterman's SIMs

I never owned any of the Sims games and I have never played them either. I suppose I had actually never really known the premise of the game until I read this article. I had no idea that the Sims was basically "a video game where you do all the things you would normally do in real life if you weren't playing a game." The game seems to me to be a mirror of our actual life and all its mundaneness (i.e. bathroom breaks and eating).
Klosterman suggests that some believe the Sims gives the gamers a view into other people's lives...the good and the bad. However, Klosterman says that for him (and he suspects many others) it was the opposite: "I don't care about anyone's peephole but my own." This made me think about my Facebook assertion that people love participating in social networks because we are informally invited to "creep" on anyone who accepts our friend request. But when I think about it, I spend way more time on Facebook "creeping" on myself. I just want to know what other people see when they interact with me so I look at my own photos and page mostly. I know how vain that sounds but I cannot in any way act as if it isn't.
Klosterman's mentioning about road construction and how it will always exist, that "there will never be a day when it's all fixed" really struck me because I have actually thought the same thing before! We are constantly doing something to expand and reach more people and see and do more things. Our whole life, as the Sims creator says, is "an ongoing strategy problem." We have to fit so much into our daily routines just so we can feel alive. But are we really living? "Even free people are eternally enslaved by the process of living." Such powerful words. Life will always inforce some sort of constraint on us, whether it be time, money, the basic need to eat, etc. there will always be something keeping us from doing something else.
My favorite part is when Klosterman grants his Sims character free will. Wouldn't it be nice if free will were that easy to obtain.

The Sims and their Electronic Pathos

In the 8th grade, I got The Sims for Christmas and never really played it much. It frustrated me to the max. All I was doing was making sure they slept, ate, went to the bathroom, showered, and looked for a job. I apparently never learned how to play The Sims correctly though because my characters kept dying on me within 20 minutes. This was no fun for me, with the exception of watching the characters interact with goofy babbling.

I thought Chuck brought up a good point when he said his niece would be a more imaginative girl when she played with her Barbies than when she played Sims. There are no limits and boundaries in the silly little scenarios you develop on your own when you're a 6 year old playing house. Growing up, I remember my mom getting a kick out of the things my sister, the neighbor kids, and I would come up with to entertain ourselves. I don't think she would've had much fun watching us sit on our butts for a couple hours staring at a screen. And this kind of goes along with the whole Facebook thing. I myself don't think in 10 years I'll look back on the thousands of hours I will have spent on fb in my life and say, "I'm so glad I made a Facebook! Sitting indoors and staring at a website was always the best choice."

While Second Life is an interesting concept because it's so elaborate, I can't believe people spend money on it. The biggest thing for me is that they hide behind it. Whatever they're doing on Second Life, they should be attempting in real life! :)

Virtual Personality

I immensely enjoyed reading this piece. It was witty and cutting while giving great insight into how people live their lives through the eyes of simulated characters. After some time, it became difficult for Chuck to differentiate between himself and SimChuck. I thought it was really amusing that he started having a nervous breakdown because he could not comprehend "the meaning of life" in relation to the Sims world. Then, to add to the headache he had created for himself, he calls the creator of the Sims, Will Wright, and they have a philosophical debate on the purpose of the Sims. From their conversation, it seems that the game teaches quite a few of its players about themselves and the selves they may not have been aware of their whole lives. Personally, I felt that Chuck learned some very important things with his own self reflection. For one thing, I think Chuck found out that trying to simulate his real world life or understand himself better using a game like the Sims, only answered a few of his questions about himself and people in general while opening up a whole new can of worms filled with more questions than he started with. I think he also learned that obsessing over and living his life through a game for hours upon hours instead of actually living for himself was slowly taking away his free will just as he had control over and eventually gave up SimChuck's free will.

Online Virtual LIfe

I feel that these online social communities are changing the way people communicate to one another. People can make themselves look anyway they want, act anyway they want, and say anything they want and their will be no consequences for it. That's why people love these games so much. You can get away with anything on sites like that. They let people be who they want to be and not who they really are. The games are addictive because people begin to like that life better their own. If you go on these sites and play for a while you will notice that you won't find one fat person or an ugly person. People will make themselves look so attractive because in real life they aren't. These online games are bad because people become so addicted and attracted to their online life that their real life does not matter anymore. This article reminds me of the movie, "Surrogates." This movie was about how people could make a body and live through that body while they sat at home and controlled it. In thus movie everybody was so attractive and didn't have any flaws. This is what these games are, they are an alternate universe that looks better then the one we live in.

Final Draft

I think we choose when we want the final draft and mission statement of our lives to be drawn up. For some, it's written years before they die. As people get older, they can sometimes become set in their ways and say, "I've tapped out, I am who I should be, and you can't teach me any new tricks." These people aren't necessarily pessimists or underachievers, but they're definitely comfortable with where they are.

For others, they aren't done working on it until the day their souls leave their bodies. They won't stop at life, and learning, and bettering themselves until they are satisfied. I would fall into this category because there's a lot I ought to and want to learn and experience before I reach self actualization, as Maslow would put it.

Final Draft

Is there a final draft of who we are? No. I believe that we are always being “revised”. People grow and change in little ways every day, whether we realize it or not. A “spelling mistake” there, an added “comma” here, sometimes deleting whole sentences. As individuals we are constantly evolving into something slightly different, doing so till the day we die. We take day to day experiences with us and add them to our “paper”, not necessarily making it better or worse but making it unique to our life. Only final draft you will have will be submitted at your death bed.

In Class 03/14

I'm interpreting this question as asking if there is some point at which we stop developing our identity or personality.  I definitely don't think that there necessarily is some stopping point like that, and I'm not sure that one ever exists absolutely for an individual.  As long as a person continues to experience things, those experiences will in some way be assimilated into that person.  Development is continuous, and I think that there is always some kind of capacity for change in everyone.  A person might be more or less comfortable or secure with their self at different points in their life, but there is always the possibility of something happening to upset that security.

Final Draft?

I don’t believe there is a final draft of who we are. I believe that we are constantly changing who we are whether it is intentional or not. For example right now I am this person, but when I have kids I don’t think I’ll be exactly the same. I’ll be a mother; I’ll be more developed as a person. In death our “final draft” will be what it is. We will no longer be living in ourselves but now living within those who knew us. And that may be a different person to each of them. To my children I will be a mother; to my husband a wife; to friends I will be who I was with them…etc. I don’t think I am the same person with everyone I meet. To professors I am a name, an ID number or a voice. To my close, best friends, I am silly, outspoken, corky and witty. To people I just meet I am quiet, polite and maybe a bit mysterious. In the end I am not just one person. I may be to some people and to myself, but I am pieces of me. There will never be a “final draft” because it is being edited every single day and will continue to be even after I am gone.

Final Draft of a Person

I don't know if there ever really can be a final draft of who we are. I think everyone starts out with a goal in mind as to the person they would like to be when it's all said in done, but I'm not sure we can ever really be what we strive to be. I'm not trying to sound cynical when I say that, because I do believe that we definitely grow into a person that we're more comfortable with as life goes on, but the experiences and lessons we learn throughout life are endless, and I think that has a lot to do with who we are. I think we are constantly being educated during our lives from the things that we see and do, and no matter how long we live we can never understand or do everything that can be done. I'm a very open-minded person, and I feel like I learn new things with each day that I live, and a lot of the things I learn change my opinions that I once believed to be fact. So to give my final answer to the question asked I would say no, there is no final draft of a person. I remember seeing something that said the peak of life is self-realization; the complete understanding of oneself, and being as young as I am now, I'm not sure I believe that can ever really be attained.