************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** If you haven't been to a Toys 'R' Us lately with an 8-year old, you might be unaware the current "in" toy is the so-called "virtual pet" (aka "Tamagotchi"). Try as I might to convince my nephew that the Lil' Shocktrooper AK47 is the only proper toy for a pepper-filled boy, he's quite hung up on acquiring a $20 keychain with a cellphone LCD screen that simulates the life cycle of a hatchling. The key to these keychain toys is resource management. Give your virtual pet the right amount of food and attention and it thrives. Give it too much of one thing and not enough of another and it sheds its container and returns to the home planet. I guess the toy's manufacturer prefers to feed kids the same sort of pap that led the Heaven's Gate cult to its doom instead of making them face the cold finality of death. The virtual pet craze may be a new thing to kids and a lot of parents but it's old hat to long-time computer users. Over a decade ago a similar product called /Little Computer People/ was produced by Activision for the Commodore 64 (C64). /Little Computer People/ featured a boy living inside a virtual house. The goal was to keep the boy happy and well fed. You could talk to him via a terminal and get him to play little ditties on the piano. If you ignored him, he got visibly depressed. If you forgot to feed him, he would crawl into bed and die. This wasn't a game intended for emotionally fragile 8 year olds. The game lives on today, sort of, via a C64 emulator you can find at www.backyard.u-net.com/c64.htm. The game itself can be downloaded at www.darkwood.demon.nl/c64menu.html. One might argue that SimCity is another adult version of the Tamagotchi. Instead of worrying about the life of one space bird, you've got to worry about the lives of thousands of "sims", citizens of your city. SimCity, one of the most popular games ever developed for the PC, actually got its start on the C64. SimCity's developer had previously worked on a C64 game called /Raid on Bungling Bay/, which involved bombing a scrolling cityscape. The developer had more fun playing with the in-house city building tool than the game itself and figured there was a great game lurking inside a mediocre shoot `em up. The grand daddy of all resource management games is an old mainframe simulation called /Hamurabi/. A word of caution to you Sumarian scholars: don't send me email telling me I misspelled "Hammurabi." The game was indeed named after the ancient law giver but programmers are notoriously bad spellers (how do you think the Macintosh computer go its name?). /Hamurabi/ requires you to manage land, people, and grain. People help grow grain. Grain can be sold to buy land. Land can be sold to buy grain. Various natural disasters and rats threaten your grain stocks. The most popular version of /Hamurabi/ was written in BASIC back in the early `70s. Owing to the ease and popularity of BASIC, it has been modified in interesting ways over the last quarter century. You can find a web version that holds true to the original at www.pwainc.com/4/hammurabi.html. An amusing revision of /Hamurabi/ is the /Neutopia Arcology Simulation/ at www-ucs.usc.edu/~karl/MTN/arcogame.htm. The arcology simulator tries to put into play the rather wacky neutopian ideals online philosopher Doctress Neutopia has described on her newsgroup alt.society.neutopia (see www.theconvergence.com/columns/kmamer/09151997/ for an overview). By assigning your population to such important roles as poet, artisan, messiah, and farmer, you hope to create a thriving, art-producing "ecocity" while dealing with the onerous task of keeping your population from starving to death. It isn't easy.