Spore Vs The Sims2

I recently bought a copy of Electronic Art's game Spore for PC. Yes I do use Windows and the reason of that is because I don't have a budget for a Mac and because if I had one I would only use it for less than its actual capacity. Spore caught my attention in 2006 when there was a huge hype around it: you can create life from the primal soup stagen, aka Abiogenesis.

The game looked to me sort of childish and very colorful, but until I finish the game I cannot make afinal statement of my experience, so I started to make my small cells which eventually developed into something bigger and from the water I switched to the mainland, then to a more organized state were tribalism and war were the main issue.

Spore has a date in years that begins since say ONE and you will eventually end up wondering the universe in the year 4 billion. It is a game of pure science, there is little room for screationism and religion, it is about you and the concept of survival of the fittest. Like Darwin said "It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the smartest, but the one that adapts better to change. ...".

Then i went back to playing The Sims 2 with my family and its troubles, where babies are born out of a stork or a magic FX and where you always strive to achieve the perfect family condition with a successful working father, a beautiful homemaker mother and two kids (usually a boy and a girl) that are the best students in school.

Through the years the gaming industry is letting those old concepts slide away in favour of newer ideas that appeals to the the public,  we ought to see The Sims 3 and all its load of new fun; bu my question still remains to where does faith or reason lies among videogame creators. 

Do you remember Black&White? That game where you play the part of a god that decides life and death of the population that you created? But isn't MAxis and EA Games all about craetionism and being God?

Like Sim City and al its sequeld, you decide the faith of a city and of its citizens, you can create and destroy with a few click of your mouse.

I had much fun choosing the destiny of my cells, from nothing to space invaders, my civilization became something I never thought, with the fun included of wiping other planets just for the sake of it!

Also when playing Civilization IV for PC, I do remember the excitement when first laying my capital and major cities while worring abou other civs expanding, a feeling of religion/science rushed into my head wondering which god would have taken my decision or if even this planet went through the same faith.

While I keep playing both game I can only understand my creations and my decision ad a virtual-god that gives life to a simulatied, yet real enough, civilization that will soon either defy the cult of continue to believe into science and theroies behind.

The spring

The weather is fair, it has been fair this year with a nice autumn, a regular winter and now the spring is making bloom all the plants, the scenario is marvelous. Today I'm on vacation for little over half a week and I missed the travel opportunities on the internet, damn!

I wanted to leave but like I said before the prices were outrageous just to stick around here in Europe. So I'm hoping to move to the seaside for this weekend to breath fresh air, I need to unplug from the city, I haven't been on vacation in over a year and working a lot got me more stressed.

It is not entirely a work related stress, but more of what's around; traffic, dealing with morons, driving among morons, talking with morons... you do the math. Getting from on place to another is taking more and more time each year that goes by, like when you have to get from your place to the highway, it will take more time than the actual trip once you enter the ramp. 

There were days where I had to drive for 20km and the whole distance takes normally 15 minutes, but the hard part it to get out of the city where the morons attack you with their sunday-driver style or other morons that are so careless that they will probably smoke while filling their tank at the gas station. You can't find a compromise, it's always about excesses, fuck!

Anyway, I wish happy Easter to every one, take care and have fun!!!

To work is to breath

Back in March I was searching for some airline deals when all the suddenly I found a cheap ticket to Tokyo. My brain was steaming, you can never find such a low price from Italy to Japan, the cheapest regular ticket has an average price of 750 Euro. The deal was with Alitalia with quite an interesting formula where you had to book the ticket before March 9th, but you could have moved your departure up until the end of June.

I was ready to take-off right away without any doubt, I would have reached for my suitcase and quickly stuffed the essential. Going to Japan isn't something that you can do every day, so I thought that it must be an awesome experience that you gotta share with one of your friends at least.

I made sure that I had a week to stay away from work, then I immediately called my buddy Nikky and he was quite surprised of my proposal to head east of the planet. He immediately said ok, but the only thing he had problems with were taking days off work, which he unfortunately couldn't take. I knew there that the Japanese option was fading because my best friend was bounded and didn't have days to spare. 

I proposed Japan to Andrea and he was half estranged and half shocked by my proposal. He asked me why Japan, and I replied that it was an opportunity to see a totally different civilization, culture, language, faces; an opportunity to see in person what's happening on the other side of Earth. Him too couldn't join me in my 'expedition' to Asia, taking days from work isn't easy anymore, and you are propelled to skip so many opportunities because in the back of your mind you keep thinking about your work, your tasks, your appointments, your comoing salary and why you can't climb the ladder.

I find mankind continuosly bounded by work and by whatever orbits around. We spend so much of our life working to buy food, pay our infinite bills and what remains in our hands it little or nothing; we work to barely arrive at the end of each month asking ourself why working so much is the only oxygen we can breath?!

How many times have you heard "Sorry, I can't I gotta work!" or "I can't take any leave from work..."? We don't even have to think when someone is asking us to take one or two days from the job, we will automatically answer that we can't because our bound to it is stronger than us.

Does work give you freedom? Is it the only source of wealth? Why do we have to work to produce more than we can spend or consume?