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Inventor
#51 Old 21st Aug 2014 at 4:24 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Peni Griffin
By any rational moral standard, Mrs. Crumplebottom has terrible morals. She judges, she steals, and she assaults people. But you can't retaliate, because that would corrupt your entire game installation.

Hey, when does Mrs. Crumplebottom steal? She pays for her drinks!

As for the topic, my Sims are a mixed bag, just like real life: some Sims are one-man women, one-woman men, one-man men and one-woman women; they pick one partner and dance. Some Sims are effectively asexual because they drown themselves in work, hobbies, money or whatever. And some Sims are the town bicycle. For obvious reasons, my Family Sims are faithfully monogamous and my Romance Sims like to sample from the entire smorgasbord. And I have a habit of memorizing which of my Sims are married or joined so all of my Don Juans and Femme Fatales know to keep their hands off, because even if the game doesn't enforce ironclad dedication to one's spouse, I do (whether because marriage is an earnest and deliberate commitment or because divorce sucks salty granite). Anyone else is fair game, barring age restrictions and whatnot.

As for the rest of the Aspirations, it varies from Sim to Sim, whether by my random whims or by my consideration for their personalities. One Fortune Sim might be Outgoing, so he's all about showing off his wealth by spending it on wine, women and song (and making out with anyone who accepts the espresso he buys for them). Another Fortune Sim might be Shy, so he doesn't Flirt, Kiss or WooHoo at all; he's too busy with his quest to earn a billion Simoleons (and thus forever grind the threat of poverty into dust beneath his heel) that he never takes time for interpersonal affection. One Pleasure Sim might be randomly monogamous; she has her husband and she wants to sample all the world's pleasures and share them with him, because sharing is caring (plus it makes the sweet things sweeter; no one likes to drink alone). Another Pleasure Sim might be randomly flirtatious; in her eyes, sampling all the world's pleasures includes sampling all the world's lovers, so why limit herself to just one?

As I see it, only a simple mind would make every one of his or her Sims the same. So challenge yourself with variety. Your Sims can do a bazillion things and they can be a bazillion things. Why make them uniform?
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Link Ninja
#52 Old 21st Aug 2014 at 11:46 PM
So the bottom line here on sims morality is that some people play sims the way they'd like to live and what they think is moral - some try to shake things up and have a variety of 'moral compasses' even if they wouldn't agree with doing it in real life just to have a more realisitc 'sims society'. This all goes back to fulfilling certain wants over others based on your interpretations of your sims. You fill the ones you can, or you fill the ones you deem appropriate.

Woo-hooing aside here are some other moral dilemmas in your sims wants:

Sneaking out on the Restaurant bill
Cheating at chess
Tormenting someone (child want)
Persuading another to write term paper or do homework for another sim (Young adult want)
Sneaking out at night (teen want)
Throwing water at someone

There's obviously more than that but usually 'meaner' sims get the want to torment or cheat but does mean = immoral?

There's that whole chart of lawful good, lawful chaos, lawful neutral, neutral good, chatoc neutral, true neutral, lawful evil, neutral evil, and chaotic evil - so if all your sims are falling into one or two of those top categories then you probably are just playing them in accordance to what you find morally acceptable. Always exceptions though.

Uh oh! My social bar is low - that's why I posted today.

Mad Poster
#53 Old 22nd Aug 2014 at 1:42 AM
Morals do encompass more than just sex, of course. As Charmful did lay out the other moral quandaries of the game-
Sims will get the want to see the ghost of their enemy, sometimes want to kill someone, that kind of stuff. The things that we're concerned with in our own lives really shouldn't have any bearing on a game with animated pixels who do not have any reality.

Mine? I try to let nature takes its' course, and sometimes the results are interesting to say the least. Some of my pixels don't want to get married ever, and they still enjoy woohoo. So I don't force everyone into marriage just because they've known each other in a 'biblical' way.

To do so would violate their personal beliefs and mine.
Lab Assistant
#54 Old 22nd Aug 2014 at 3:20 AM
The oddest immoral want I've had is Angela's desire to eat Lilith. I really worry about that girl. Lilith better watch her back.
Mad Poster
#55 Old 22nd Aug 2014 at 1:27 PM
How can anybody argue that "whore" is not sexist language? It is - I've heard "whore" being used about men but usually with the prefix "man whore", and the root still comes from an offensive word used to describe a woman. It's perfectly correct that "person who is sexually promiscuous" wouldn't be offensive although the meaning is similar. That's not weird, that's just how language works. Similar to how f**k is offensive whereas intercourse is not. They mean the same thing but words have connotations, it's a good idea to think carefully about the connotations of language as well as the direct meaning of it.

I just wonder what lovely nice sheltered world people live in, sometimes. Is it nice there? I want to go!

Back to sims - I don't see anything immoral about sex before marriage, at a young age, outside of a relationship, or polyamorous relationships as long as all parties are in agreement and fully aware. That's the clincher.

I use the sims as a psychology simulator...
Mad Poster
#56 Old 22nd Aug 2014 at 1:46 PM
Whore means prostitute, hooker, callgirl/boy ... It's a gender neutral word in itself.
Forum Resident
#57 Old 22nd Aug 2014 at 1:50 PM
Quote: Originally posted by telemwill
The oddest immoral want I've had is Angela's desire to eat Lilith. I really worry about that girl. Lilith better watch her back.


I believe the desire is to drink Lilith, and it relates to the cowplant producing elixer of life from eaten sims... Still, Lilith really should watch her back...
Mad Poster
#58 Old 22nd Aug 2014 at 2:11 PM
It's not a gender neutral word. Neither are the other three you mention :S http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/d...n/english/whore

Think about it - ever heard the term "female whore" "female prostitute" "female hooker"? No, or at least very very rarely, because it's taken as a given that these words refer to a person who is female. On the other hand it's more common to hear "man whore" "male prostitute" etc when talking about a man in this way than merely referring to him as a prostitute, whore or hooker, primarily because if the gender is not made obvious people would assume that the speaker is talking about a woman.

Additionally "whore" is quite widely used to mean a female version of "bastard" again in the modern sense, ie, just a general derogatory word to mean "person who I don't like". I've never heard it used in this way against a man.

The gender neutral, value neutral word is "promiscuous". There is no gender neutral word with a negative connotation because, in general, it is not considered a bad thing for a man to be promiscuous.

I use the sims as a psychology simulator...
Lab Assistant
#59 Old 22nd Aug 2014 at 3:45 PM
Quote: Originally posted by parrot999
I believe the desire is to drink Lilith, and it relates to the cowplant producing elixer of life from eaten sims... Still, Lilith really should watch her back...


OK, that makes more sense now. I think I may have to turn Angela into an evil witch.
Mad Poster
#60 Old 22nd Aug 2014 at 4:05 PM
Charmful--you're forgetting win a fight with sim. I'm not sure about argue with--arguing is not necessarily morally wrong, good grief, what are we doing in this thread if it is? But as sims seem to use it . . . I'm not sure make enemies with is necessarily wrong, either, but certainly beating someone up is! Well, maybe not, depending on circumstances. If the sim wants to beat up someone who earned it . . . anyway, there's certainly sims that use those socials to be bullies.

Interestingly, while the set-up seems to be intended to be that Tank Grunt is bullying Johnny Smith as shipped, it plays out exactly the other way around in my game most of the time.

Pics from my game: Sunbee's Simblr Sunbee's Livejournal
"English is a marvelous edged weapon if you know how to wield it." C.J. Cherryh
Link Ninja
#61 Old 22nd Aug 2014 at 6:14 PM
I agree if there's no reason except a sim denied a compliment, then wanting to win a fight (beat them up) is mean and amoral. My Sims get really offended if other Sims don't accept their compliments (autonomously)

Uh oh! My social bar is low - that's why I posted today.

Mad Poster
#62 Old 22nd Aug 2014 at 6:28 PM
In my youth the term "whore" was applied exclusively to women. The term "slut" almost so. Recently though, in a age when male sexism is no longer acceptable, some people are using these words in a gender-neutral sense. The trouble is that at the moment the meaning of these words is in a state of transition. In the long run I suspect that they will eventually become gender-neutral, but for now the weight of history still says that a "whore" is a woman. So, in a sense you're all right! Different people today use these words differently. I think that modern coinages like "man-whore" and "man-slut" are actually attempts to push the words in a gender-neutral direction, precisely because history assumed that the words applied only to females.

As I recall the word "slut" meant a messy, untidy woman who didn't keep her house clean. Keeping a clean tidy house was a woman's (especially a wife's) "duty". It didn't necessarily say anything about her sexual behaviour. I reckon a woman who lived like that might be called a slut even if she was a virgin, and a well-turned out woman with a neat and tidy house wouldn't be called a slut even if she had woohoo with twenty men a day. Today I believe that the word does imply that she's promiscuous but I don't think it did in the fairly recent past.

Both "whore" and "slut" were, and I believe still are, very negative and derogatory terms, and I wouldn't want to apply them to any of my Romance Sims, most of whom I find irresistibly likeable! When I think about it, virtually all terms to describe people with multiple sexual partners are negative. If a man is said to be promiscuous, to me that implies that the speaker thinks he is doing something that he ought not to do. Maybe Maxis coined the first really positive term for these "people" when they called them "Romance Sims"! (Though the term threw me when I first started to play: as I understand it, a Romantic doesn't think that love is for life; a Romantic always thinks that love is for ever!)

Why do I find my Romance Sims so likeable? Well, in part it's because I have Pescado's Romance Mod. That allows Romance (and Pleasure) Sims to have "open" relationships (without jealousy) if their combined Outgoing, Playful and Nice scores come to 15 or more. And, as I want some of them to have open relationships, I throw Nice points at them, especially if I also want them to be shy and serious. And the result of that is that the nicest Romance Sims are also the most promiscuous! (And of course the most promiscuous ones are also the nicest!) Now I can see the logic of that: really nice Sims won't want to poke and shove other Sims, even if they do catch them kissing their boyfriend/girlfriend, but I wonder if it's really what Pescado intended. After all, it's probably not what most parents mean when they tell their children to "Be nice"!
Undead Molten Llama
#63 Old 22nd Aug 2014 at 7:28 PM
Way back @Thax: Thank you for your kind words. I do strive to be (sort of) neutral in these sorts of situations, keeping my personal feelings mostly to myself. Frankly, I like thought-exchange discussions like this, game-related or not, and people taking "offense" generally ends such discussion, which is a shame. Discussions like this are how people come to understand other people's viewpoints and reach an understanding of different mindsets; you can't do that if you're busily taking offense at everything.

Way back @Charity re: sex is immoral if you're cheating on someone: I agree with Felicia1066 in that I'd say it's more the act of cheating itself that's immoral, not the actual act of having sex. Or rather, that the sex is the outcome of the person's immoral choice, not the thing that makes their behavior immoral in the first place. Because generally, if you're cheating on someone, by the time you get to having sex with your paramour, you've been cheating and therefore acting immorally long before the sex happens. Cheating on your partner (if they expect you to be monogamous, that is) would be hurtful to them if they should find out about it, whether or not the affair gets to the point of actually having sex.

More generally: To me, a whore is a person (of whichever gender) who is paid to have sex. It's simply a more vulgar/derogatory/judgmental term than "prostitute" or "courtesan." Since during most of history most people who were paid to have sex were female, the term is far more commonly used to refer to women, regardless of how one single person might view the term. When communicating, one needs to consider the more widespread and current usage of word, since that's more likely to be how more people will see it. As AndrewGloria said, the term is currently in a transition of sorts...but that transition has not fully happened yet and likely won't happen until those of us of a "certain age" have kicked the bucket.

So yes, it is still a sexist term in the vernacular; like others have said, if one wants to refer to a male of the species being a whore, then usually the "man-" prefix is used to make the distinction clear. Otherwise people will tend to assume that you're talking about a woman because, like I said, it's still psychologically ingrained that it's incumbent upon women to be monogamous. It's the whole "good girls don't do that" mentality, with the wider (and still more sexist) implication that women aren't "supposed" to like sex and that female sexuality is a bad thing. (Which is BS, but that's entirely another discussion. ) It's only very recently, in historical terms, that the same expectation of monogamy has been applied to men. For most of history, it was assumed that no man could possibly be faithful to one woman (Which, IMO, is frankly an insult to men), so they weren't expected to be faithful.

Anyway, to me, a person who simply enjoys sex and has sex with a lot of people is not a whore or a slut at all, whether they're male or female or whatever gender identity. They're simply...a person who likes having sex. And, IMO, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, so long as, these days, one goes about it sensibly if one is going to have a lot of partners. (i.e., engaging only in safe sex...although of course nothing is 100% guaranteed to be effective in that sense. And, as Sunbee said, people lie, so if you're going to have a lot of partners, you're wise be safe no matter what they say or don't have sex at all. This has absolutely nothing to do with "morality" and everything to do with simple common sense and self-preservation.) To use the term "whore" or "slut" to refer to a person who simply likes having sex with multiple partners, regardless of their gender, is, IMO, an insult to that person and is judgmental in the extreme. Therefore, it's not a word I'd use to refer to ANYONE, even to people who actually do get paid to have sex. "Whore" is a derogatory term and, up until perhaps very recently, always has been. IMO, people who like sex AND people who are paid to have sex do not deserve denigration.

As to other sorts of "immorality" in the game...I think a lot of it is contextual. And, of course, one does not necessarily have to use all of the "tools" at hand. (Like, I won't use a cowplant in my game. I know it's only a game, but deliberate killing bothers me.) By "contextual" I mean that whether it's in the game or in the real world, I think it's immoral to beat people up. OTOH, if a burglar invades your house, then I think you have every right to beat them up in order to defend yourself, your family, and your property. What I don't like is how, in the game, insults and such, if allowed to happen long enough, always lead to physical violence. Yes, it's cartoony and not meant to be taken seriously and all that, I know, but...I don't like it, and I don't think it's funny. It bothers me in the game just like it bothers me when watching a "Three Stooges" short, which is equally cartoony. Slapping someone, much less beating someone up, simply because they hurled a few insults at you is, IMO, all kinds of wrong. And, yes, immoral. It bothers me that, at least in American society (and I am American) open violence is seen as OK while sex is something that's all "OMG!" That would be something about my native country that I would change if I could. To me sex = good, for the most part, but violence = bad for the most part. But I'll get off that soapbox now.

Lastly: I also agree that the "Romance" aspiration is poorly-named. I agree that calling someone "romantic" doesn't conjure up an image of a person who just likes to have lots of sex whether it's with multiple partners or just the one. It conjures up an image of a misty-eyed person who idealizes love and who, therefore, usually has entirely unrealistic expectations about it. (i.e., the whole fairytale "happily ever after" thing...which generally only occurs in fairytales. ) That said, I doubt that they could have called it something more accurately descriptive without running into issues from the game-rating people. Calling it "Romance" hides its nature well, if one doesn't look too deeply at what it actually entails.

I'm mostly found on (and mostly upload to) Tumblr these days because, alas, there are only 24 hours in a day.
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