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Nostalgia Toward Electricity/
The Sims/
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The Mutation of a Message/
Midnight Telephone Interview/
I Love Hate Money/
2001
instructors: Bethany Johns, Susan Sellers
actors: Glen Cummings, Dawn Chan
For this book project hosted by Bethany Johns and Susan Sellers in fall 2001, everyone was required to find a published book and then reinvent it. My choice was The Sims: Prima's Official Strategy Guide (Cohen), a guide book offering tips to players of the computer game The Sims.
The Sims is a simulation game about the everyday life in a neighborhood. The player builds the protagonists and then makes their decisions affecting almost every aspect of the characters' lives--from drinking a cup of coffee to pursuing a career. As a result, the guide book includes hundreds of algorithms like "a pizza box (spoiled)" takes off "25 points" for the "room" (23) or to "tickle" someone and have him or her accepted increases "5 points" in "relationship change" (35).
I found it intriguing that the guide book relates very much to self-help books for real life. So I tried to blur the boundary between the two. The primary idea is to replace images of computer animation with images in my life.
This project also shows the tendency to use photo or video images as a dominant element in my work. During the following two years at Yale, this tendency has been so much reinforced that it even surprised me after presenting a body of work during last semester's final review.
+works cited+
Cohen, Mark. The Sims: Prima's Official Strategy Guide. Roseville: Prima Publishing, 2001.
