For many neurodiverse people, 'The Sims' has been a lifelong comfort
cnn.com
cnn.com
Just out of curiosity I checked and it costs around $840 to buy Sims 4 with all it's DLCs, just... wtf.
that'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.
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.