Simpulsion
I've been playing Sims 2 for the best part of a year now, and my neighbourhood continues to grow. The latest arrival: to Jenna and Kerr, a daughter - Servalan Stannis. To which you will either nod knowingly (quite possibly with a chuckle or a weary sigh) or just go "Huh?". If the latter, and you wish to be enlightened, go here.
Servalan's birth is significant in a couple of statistically trivial ways. First of all, she is the 50th first generation native-born resident (ie, neither parent born in the neighbourhood). There are a further second generation kids as well (at least one G1 parent), so there are 61 natives in all. Her birth also brings the population up to 122, so there's the second significance - natives now account for half the total population.
It is, more than anything, the demographics that keep me playing. Lots of lovely, lovely numbers to crunch. My long-term aim (I didn't realise quite how long-term when I started) is to end up with a fully inter-related community, so I've had to come up with ways to measure inter-relatedness and hence keep track of progress towards my goal. There is more than one way to do this, and I've found a quick way and a much slower one.
The quick method is to pull every living resident into the same clan, a clan here meaning any bunch of inter-related sims. This needn't mean that each one is directly related to every last one of the others. Children come to function as land bridges between the genetic islands, and serial relationships create complex archipelagos. One chap, a certain Vila Restal (chuckle or sigh again as you prefer), has managed to produce four kids (with four different women), none of whom he has yet to meet. The oldest has only just grown up into an adult. One of them was with a free-wheeling spirit called Mimi who already had a child courtesy of one Peter Polecat, so all of Vila's kids, and their relatives, get lumped into the Polecat clan. My current population of 122 has been reduced to 21 of these clans, and is set to shrink further. The Stannises, for example, will merge with the Mellanbys when Jenna's oldest has her baby. (And unless you had to go there, you can guess who's son she's married.)
The slow method is to try and get every living resident genetically related to every other living resident. To create, in other words, a neighbourhood of cousins, however distant. I have a formula (what spreadsheets are for) to measure this. I don't know how real sociologists do it, but I've settled for:
I = R/(P^2-P)
where I is inter-relatedness, R is the total number of relatives for each sim (a relative here being either a living descendent or the living descendent of a known ancestor), and P is simply the living population. Inter-relatedness can thus be anywhere between 0 (no inter-relatedness at all) and 1 (completely inter-related). It's riding on a real high right now, the highest it's ever been. 0.04. So I still have a little way to go.
Inter-relatedness changes with every birth, death or new arrival, and I keep obsessive track of it. With such a large population (I've no idea if it's atypically large or small for players of this game), spread over nearly forty households, it takes time to get around the whole 'hood. My method here is to play each house in turn for two days (sim time) to keep them all roughly in sync, and playing two houses a day (which takes normally 3-4 hours) means I complete a two-day circuit every three weeks or so.
So now you know why I haven't posted much lately.
[ETA] I've corrected the formula for inter-relatedness, which as originally posted was ridiculous. It simply reduced to I=R/P. The denominator should be P^2-P, not P^2/P.
Servalan's birth is significant in a couple of statistically trivial ways. First of all, she is the 50th first generation native-born resident (ie, neither parent born in the neighbourhood). There are a further second generation kids as well (at least one G1 parent), so there are 61 natives in all. Her birth also brings the population up to 122, so there's the second significance - natives now account for half the total population.
It is, more than anything, the demographics that keep me playing. Lots of lovely, lovely numbers to crunch. My long-term aim (I didn't realise quite how long-term when I started) is to end up with a fully inter-related community, so I've had to come up with ways to measure inter-relatedness and hence keep track of progress towards my goal. There is more than one way to do this, and I've found a quick way and a much slower one.
The quick method is to pull every living resident into the same clan, a clan here meaning any bunch of inter-related sims. This needn't mean that each one is directly related to every last one of the others. Children come to function as land bridges between the genetic islands, and serial relationships create complex archipelagos. One chap, a certain Vila Restal (chuckle or sigh again as you prefer), has managed to produce four kids (with four different women), none of whom he has yet to meet. The oldest has only just grown up into an adult. One of them was with a free-wheeling spirit called Mimi who already had a child courtesy of one Peter Polecat, so all of Vila's kids, and their relatives, get lumped into the Polecat clan. My current population of 122 has been reduced to 21 of these clans, and is set to shrink further. The Stannises, for example, will merge with the Mellanbys when Jenna's oldest has her baby. (And unless you had to go there, you can guess who's son she's married.)
The slow method is to try and get every living resident genetically related to every other living resident. To create, in other words, a neighbourhood of cousins, however distant. I have a formula (what spreadsheets are for) to measure this. I don't know how real sociologists do it, but I've settled for:
I = R/(P^2-P)
where I is inter-relatedness, R is the total number of relatives for each sim (a relative here being either a living descendent or the living descendent of a known ancestor), and P is simply the living population. Inter-relatedness can thus be anywhere between 0 (no inter-relatedness at all) and 1 (completely inter-related). It's riding on a real high right now, the highest it's ever been. 0.04. So I still have a little way to go.
Inter-relatedness changes with every birth, death or new arrival, and I keep obsessive track of it. With such a large population (I've no idea if it's atypically large or small for players of this game), spread over nearly forty households, it takes time to get around the whole 'hood. My method here is to play each house in turn for two days (sim time) to keep them all roughly in sync, and playing two houses a day (which takes normally 3-4 hours) means I complete a two-day circuit every three weeks or so.
So now you know why I haven't posted much lately.
[ETA] I've corrected the formula for inter-relatedness, which as originally posted was ridiculous. It simply reduced to I=R/P. The denominator should be P^2-P, not P^2/P.