> My sims can't walk or explore in seemingly endless directions.
That isn't what open world means either. There isn't a game on the market where you can do that, though it is most of the concept of No Man's Sky. All game worlds are tightly bounded so that they can fit on your computer. The edges of the world are always obvious.
Open world is generally used to refer to a game where you are allowed to walk from any part of it to any other part. Compare Doom, where level 1 and level 2 are completely separated from each other. The only way to get from level 1 to level 2 is to beat level 1. There is no way to get from level 2 to level 1.
(Granted that Sims would never be called an open world game. The player isn't even present in the game world.)
Games with procedurally-generated worlds larger than the player could ever explore are rather common: Minecraft, one of the best-selling games in history, comes immediately to mind. Massive procgen galaxies far predate No Man's Sky as well- see the original Elite and Noctis IV.
The endless direction bit doesn't imply an endless map just more options than you can reasonably explore. You can easily spend thousands of hours in Skyrim without seeing every NPC with unique dialog and many games are much larger than that. Procedurally generated worlds like Factorio can take hours traveling in one direction just to see the border.
they predate the term, and the scale of interaction is different, but being able to explore and complete dungeons and sidequests in arbitrary orders is certainly open-world-y
Definitely. I would put the original Pokemon games in that as well. The key word here is 'seemingly'. How something 'seems' depends on context, which is related to the period, the technology (hardware and software), and the culture of how one thinks about games. I would put the comparison like this, in Zelda: A link to the past (snes), there isn't a 'right' way to proceed through the game. In fact you could proceed through the game in any number of ways, and there may be an infinite or at least intractably large number of these. In fact, you could just ignore the story component of the game and fight sprites. Same with a game like Pokemon. You don't have to fight gym bosses. You can just wander around and fight wild Pokemon and raise your Pokemon's stats.
Lets juxtapose that with another period game, Super Mario World. Super Mario World is fundamentally on rails. While there is a range of unique ways you can proceed through the world, there is a very calculable and finite number of these. The individual levels are always the same. You can't proceed freely in any direction (internal to the dimensional structure of the game). There is no 'sense of expanse' where you have to explore the game in a somewhat random way to find out whats beyond the horizon.
Open world games aren't necessarily about the size and scale of the game, but how you proceed through the game and what your 'sense' of the world is. The Sim's is fundamentally not an open world game. There is no 'sense' of openness in that, the gameplay is fundamentally on rails. There is a discrete set of ways your sim can interact with the world. Sure there is plenty of customization and uniqueness within that railed environment, but that doesn't make it an open world game.
Some older games that are open world might be Realmz on PC (early 90's DnD clone), MacSyndicate (think cyber punk meets GTA), or even Trucking USA on the Apple IIs. I think characteristic to an open world game is a sense of expanse, the ability to play it in a way that is seemingly ignorant of whatever the developers intended, and that it is 'unrailed' and you should be able to travel freely along whatever dimensional axes define the gameplay.
> I would put the original Pokemon games in that as well.
> Super Mario World is fundamentally on rails. While there is a range of unique ways you can proceed through the world, there is a very calculable and finite number of these.
The Pokemon games are also fundamentally on rails. It's true that you can walk backward from wherever you are to wherever you've been in the past, which is very common in RPGs. But at almost all times, there's only one option if you want to go forward.
Then again, as the series progresses, more and more gameplay gets hidden behind "winning" the game by beating the elite 4 and rolling the credits, and things are pretty open at that point.
admittedly I haven't play the game since the original or maybe 2(?) , but as far as I remember you need to eat, sleep, excrete, entertain yourself, all of which become harder if you don't have money or a supportive multi-sim household.
so in other words, personal-sim needs and money are hard goals , in most cases.
These goals are generally game-ending; I don't consider that a sandbox.
The Sims 3 was an open world game by most definitions. The Sims 2 and The Sims 4 can still make a case for being open world; you can explore at will, but with many loading screens.
I think 'open-ended' would be selling it short. A Halo 'combat arena' is open-ended. The Sims is absolutely an open-world game.
The simulated (game-)world is open to the player -- they are free to interact with it as much or as little as they like, in a manner of their choosing. Importantly, the simulation will proceed (in meaningful ways) with or without action by the player.
(just because a game is 'more than open-ended' doesnt make it 'open world', which is a term that already has a definition, and is not relevant to sims core gameplay)
If you say you have Aspergers on certain forums nowadays people will flame you, call you a Nazi, and mods will ban you. In these same communities, without exception, neurodiverse is totally safe and won't raise an eyebrow.
People go with what's practical.
Also "Neurodiverse" is just a group label for the "mentally disabled" as a whole, and also non-disabled people with disabled characteristics, and for disabled people who hate the word disabled because of the stigma attached to it.
Hans Aspergers worked in a Nazi hospital, cooperated with the Nazis, was a Fascist, was a Nationalist, and had various non-woke views typical of an Austrian doctor in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. I've repeatedly seen heated arguments over if Hans Asperger was actually a Nazi or not. It is almost certainly the case that he referred autistic children to a hospital where they were euthanised, and I've heard some back and forth as to if he knew/was complicit, but it's certainly a bad look for that to even be a question.
Aspergers also has another issue which is that it has frequently been portrayed in popular culture as "mild autism", and arguably that's how the diagnostic criteria read, and there has been a lot of historical emphasis on the employability of people with Aspergers specifically. This has been very controversial, as if you remember how I was talking about the killing of autistics, the Nazi's weren't killing all autistics, just the ones they felt were least useful to them. So really in a lot of ways Hans Aspergers is symbolic of the inequality in treatment amongst different autistic people. A group of people who participate in communities where users have VAST differences in their quality of life for arbitrary reasons.
In any case, there's many reasons the word "Aspergers" has become controversial, that and the fact the idea of Autism and Aspergers being discrete things fell out of scientific favor more than a decade ago. I literally have a diagnosis of Aspergers disorder, I know other people with the same diagnosis, we all avoid using the word because it's become an antiquated landmine.
I have a diagnosis too, and I've never heard about any of this, nor do I think it has much if any bearing upon the meaning of the word. People have a general understanding of it, even if specific conditions vary, which is why the word is useful to me when talking about my psyche. I think it's quite a stretch to go from this to calling someone a Nazi.
To be clear, he was the only doctor who was not a Nazi Party member in a hospital full of Nazi Party members. There has also been some counter-narrative about Hans Aspergers being a better man than he has been recently portrayed.
All the same, Hans Aspergers had many of the views common of doctors working in 1930's Austria and Germany, and many of those views are now considered socially unacceptable. Such as his love of Fascism, or his belief that child rape victims were asking for it. So generally, many people find it most uncool to be associated with such a person.
Aspergers has been on the decline for around a decade anyways because diagnostic manuals no longer consider it distinct from autism, the fascist revelations are just fuel on the fire.
Right and that’s why it’s Autism Spectrum Disorder. It’s a rather broad definition that includes a large cluster of different traits that manifest themselves in various ways within each individual. The traits of Autism and Asperger’s had a lot of overlap so it made sense to encompass it as one umbrella. Asperger’s reputation was malevolent and it colored the science in significant ways, but that wasn’t the primary driver for the change.
It’s a common misconception that the ASD spectrum is assumed to be scalar of magnitude, from “high functioning” to “severe”. In fact it refers to a spectrum, ie:
> a mapping of a range of magnitudes to a range of qualities
Definition of intersectionality: the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups
The word diverse can mean "different" (implicitly, different from "norm") which individuals certainly can be.
Other comments are saying things like woke people are redefining terms, but this is not a new usage. Wiktionary has quotes from the 1700s using it https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/diverse
It's supposed to be the counterpart to "Neurotypical". Neurotypicals are especially more neurologically typical than average, and the Neurodiverse are especially neurologically diverse. While we may all be unique, some are less unique than others.
I tend to hate woke disability jargon like this because jargon has the incredibly ironic flaw of being less accessible to people with learning disabilities, who are ESL, or who are young. Neurodiverse is one of the more common bits of jargon though, wiki has a big page on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurodiversity
I dont think that's expressed particularly well, but that's pretty much how all variable traits are. E.g. Normal height people are closer to average than abnormally tall people.
It’s just a label used to describe people with similar or overlapping developmental disorders. The word could be more concise I suppose, but then you’re just waging this tiny cultural war on words being too big.
I’m starting to think the anti-“woke” crowd are just people who get offended at any vocabulary that gains popularity after their early 20s.
No it really is specifically about jargon. Also Neurodiverse was coined in the 90s, it's pretty old now. Also within these communities, ND/NT are not very verbose, because they can be abbreviated like that.
Have you looked around in tech? There's tons of people who lack a full command of English. There are tons of "barstool conservatives". Using words like "neurodiverse" is like shooting myself in the foot before I even get started. I'm not consistent about being concise and not wordy, look at how I write in general, it's really not that accessible but it's hard to write accessibly but an easy way to do so is to avoid jargon.
I'll use these terms within these communities where necessary, but not outside of them, notice how the mere use of this word caused a shitstorm in the comments.
> Have you looked around in tech? There's tons of people who lack a full command of English.
Have _you_ looked around in tech? This argument that ND/NT are "jargon" and "difficult" for ESL people is patently absurd.
> jargon
> special words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand.
ND/NT are simple combinations of their base words that derive meaning from the most intuitive interpretation of combining them.
Looking up new words is just part of daily life for ESL. Learn some basic common words/morphemes: neuro, divergent, typical. Combine them and get a nearly self-defining new word and simple concept.
You know what's _not_ that simple? Idioms. AWS. "My dogs are barking". "You're not even wrong". Spelling e.g.: centre/center. Pronounce e.g.: thought/drought/tough.
But ESLs in tech have it hard? Yeah, when it comes to tech. Learning NT/ND is about as difficult as remembering that Burger King sells burgers.
Tech is where it's actually rough on not just ESL, but _everyone_. Everything in tech is _actually_ jargon, and sometimes it's piles of jargon built on mountains of jargon. And when it's not jargon, it's math and computer science, if you even distinguish that. ESL learners spend all day looking at AWS concepts like EC2/ECR/ECS/EBS/EFS/beanstalk/Alexa/Athena/Aurora/Corretto and they are graciously thankful NT/ND is a simple word that's not a trick word or an idiom or jargon.
The real problem anyone has with ND/NT is purely political tribalism and has nothing to with the word itself.
> I tend to hate woke disability jargon like this because jargon has the incredibly ironic flaw of being less accessible to people with learning disabilities, who are ESL, or who are young.
You must hate literally everything that's not basic English.
That gets kinda to the heart of the problem of "labels" right there. It's just a way for people to label groups of "other" to make them easier to target for fear and hatred. Everyone is different (even so-called "identical" twins), and you can group 'em together a billion billion different ways.
Pretty sure even the first version around 20 years ago had expansion discs filling the exact same role, perhaps less insidious as there weren't that many available. You could say they just copied Barbie's™ timeless upselling strategy, doesn't make it any better of course.
Just out of curiosity I checked and it costs around $840 to buy Sims 4 with all it's DLCs, just... wtf.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 94.1 ms ] threadthat's a 'diverse' definition, maybe confusing it with the concept of 'open-ended' ? (the sims is not generally considered an open-world game)
My sims can't walk or explore in seemingly endless directions.
That isn't what open world means either. There isn't a game on the market where you can do that, though it is most of the concept of No Man's Sky. All game worlds are tightly bounded so that they can fit on your computer. The edges of the world are always obvious.
Open world is generally used to refer to a game where you are allowed to walk from any part of it to any other part. Compare Doom, where level 1 and level 2 are completely separated from each other. The only way to get from level 1 to level 2 is to beat level 1. There is no way to get from level 2 to level 1.
(Granted that Sims would never be called an open world game. The player isn't even present in the game world.)
Minecraft? There's plenty of procgen games on the market that lets you do something like that.
Lets juxtapose that with another period game, Super Mario World. Super Mario World is fundamentally on rails. While there is a range of unique ways you can proceed through the world, there is a very calculable and finite number of these. The individual levels are always the same. You can't proceed freely in any direction (internal to the dimensional structure of the game). There is no 'sense of expanse' where you have to explore the game in a somewhat random way to find out whats beyond the horizon.
Open world games aren't necessarily about the size and scale of the game, but how you proceed through the game and what your 'sense' of the world is. The Sim's is fundamentally not an open world game. There is no 'sense' of openness in that, the gameplay is fundamentally on rails. There is a discrete set of ways your sim can interact with the world. Sure there is plenty of customization and uniqueness within that railed environment, but that doesn't make it an open world game.
Some older games that are open world might be Realmz on PC (early 90's DnD clone), MacSyndicate (think cyber punk meets GTA), or even Trucking USA on the Apple IIs. I think characteristic to an open world game is a sense of expanse, the ability to play it in a way that is seemingly ignorant of whatever the developers intended, and that it is 'unrailed' and you should be able to travel freely along whatever dimensional axes define the gameplay.
> Super Mario World is fundamentally on rails. While there is a range of unique ways you can proceed through the world, there is a very calculable and finite number of these.
The Pokemon games are also fundamentally on rails. It's true that you can walk backward from wherever you are to wherever you've been in the past, which is very common in RPGs. But at almost all times, there's only one option if you want to go forward.
Then again, as the series progresses, more and more gameplay gets hidden behind "winning" the game by beating the elite 4 and rolling the credits, and things are pretty open at that point.
admittedly I haven't play the game since the original or maybe 2(?) , but as far as I remember you need to eat, sleep, excrete, entertain yourself, all of which become harder if you don't have money or a supportive multi-sim household.
so in other words, personal-sim needs and money are hard goals , in most cases.
These goals are generally game-ending; I don't consider that a sandbox.
The simulated (game-)world is open to the player -- they are free to interact with it as much or as little as they like, in a manner of their choosing. Importantly, the simulation will proceed (in meaningful ways) with or without action by the player.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill
People go with what's practical.
Also "Neurodiverse" is just a group label for the "mentally disabled" as a whole, and also non-disabled people with disabled characteristics, and for disabled people who hate the word disabled because of the stigma attached to it.
...what? how? That's insane.
Aspergers also has another issue which is that it has frequently been portrayed in popular culture as "mild autism", and arguably that's how the diagnostic criteria read, and there has been a lot of historical emphasis on the employability of people with Aspergers specifically. This has been very controversial, as if you remember how I was talking about the killing of autistics, the Nazi's weren't killing all autistics, just the ones they felt were least useful to them. So really in a lot of ways Hans Aspergers is symbolic of the inequality in treatment amongst different autistic people. A group of people who participate in communities where users have VAST differences in their quality of life for arbitrary reasons.
In any case, there's many reasons the word "Aspergers" has become controversial, that and the fact the idea of Autism and Aspergers being discrete things fell out of scientific favor more than a decade ago. I literally have a diagnosis of Aspergers disorder, I know other people with the same diagnosis, we all avoid using the word because it's become an antiquated landmine.
Thanks for explaining, though.
https://time.com/5255779/asperger-syndrome-nazi-germany-hist...
All the same, Hans Aspergers had many of the views common of doctors working in 1930's Austria and Germany, and many of those views are now considered socially unacceptable. Such as his love of Fascism, or his belief that child rape victims were asking for it. So generally, many people find it most uncool to be associated with such a person.
Aspergers has been on the decline for around a decade anyways because diagnostic manuals no longer consider it distinct from autism, the fascist revelations are just fuel on the fire.
It’s a common misconception that the ASD spectrum is assumed to be scalar of magnitude, from “high functioning” to “severe”. In fact it refers to a spectrum, ie: > a mapping of a range of magnitudes to a range of qualities
Here is a good article that explains the distinction well: https://neuroclastic.com/its-a-spectrum-doesnt-mean-what-you...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intersectionality
Other comments are saying things like woke people are redefining terms, but this is not a new usage. Wiktionary has quotes from the 1700s using it https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/diverse
I tend to hate woke disability jargon like this because jargon has the incredibly ironic flaw of being less accessible to people with learning disabilities, who are ESL, or who are young. Neurodiverse is one of the more common bits of jargon though, wiki has a big page on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurodiversity
That's a tad too tautological.
It’s just a label used to describe people with similar or overlapping developmental disorders. The word could be more concise I suppose, but then you’re just waging this tiny cultural war on words being too big.
I’m starting to think the anti-“woke” crowd are just people who get offended at any vocabulary that gains popularity after their early 20s.
Have you looked around in tech? There's tons of people who lack a full command of English. There are tons of "barstool conservatives". Using words like "neurodiverse" is like shooting myself in the foot before I even get started. I'm not consistent about being concise and not wordy, look at how I write in general, it's really not that accessible but it's hard to write accessibly but an easy way to do so is to avoid jargon.
I'll use these terms within these communities where necessary, but not outside of them, notice how the mere use of this word caused a shitstorm in the comments.
Have _you_ looked around in tech? This argument that ND/NT are "jargon" and "difficult" for ESL people is patently absurd.
> jargon
> special words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand.
ND/NT are simple combinations of their base words that derive meaning from the most intuitive interpretation of combining them.
Looking up new words is just part of daily life for ESL. Learn some basic common words/morphemes: neuro, divergent, typical. Combine them and get a nearly self-defining new word and simple concept.
You know what's _not_ that simple? Idioms. AWS. "My dogs are barking". "You're not even wrong". Spelling e.g.: centre/center. Pronounce e.g.: thought/drought/tough.
But ESLs in tech have it hard? Yeah, when it comes to tech. Learning NT/ND is about as difficult as remembering that Burger King sells burgers.
Tech is where it's actually rough on not just ESL, but _everyone_. Everything in tech is _actually_ jargon, and sometimes it's piles of jargon built on mountains of jargon. And when it's not jargon, it's math and computer science, if you even distinguish that. ESL learners spend all day looking at AWS concepts like EC2/ECR/ECS/EBS/EFS/beanstalk/Alexa/Athena/Aurora/Corretto and they are graciously thankful NT/ND is a simple word that's not a trick word or an idiom or jargon.
The real problem anyone has with ND/NT is purely political tribalism and has nothing to with the word itself.
You must hate literally everything that's not basic English.
Just out of curiosity I checked and it costs around $840 to buy Sims 4 with all it's DLCs, just... wtf.