In a certain way, I believe that simlife does represent life for living. The enitre purpose of the game is to create life in order to let it live. In our society, people are often so busy doing work that they feel like they have no time to LIVE; thus, they yearn for an opprotunity to create something that can LIVE. People want to create something to fulfill their desires vicariously if they are unable to do so themselves. In many ways, it is the attraction of the Frankenstein story or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or even Blood Music, this desire of humans to create something they can control. Realistically, many people have children for this very reason -- they want to create something they can control; something that can do what to do, but can not. As the stories have shown, humans are not capable of this. Humans cannot create others and control them, this is the demise of Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and even parents who sink their hope and dreams into their children. Nevertheless, SimLIFE offers us a chance.

With artifical life, we can create and control life. We can let it do what we most desire to do, LIVE. This is the success of simlife, we can become the infalable god of our creations. So, yes, simLIFE does represent life for living and that is exactly why it sells.

SimLife raises questions about the accessibility of life. If life can be defined as having random independent movement, as having integral role in the environment, and as constituting information, then SimLife is alive. Reducing life to these contentions renders life, especially life in SimLife tenable. The advances of medical and reproductive technology have also manipulated and designed life. Therefore, it seems plausible that designing life on the computer is as alive as a life designed by other reproductive machines. The salmon ton the SimLife program are a representation of actual salmon, but both salmon are potentially living, just as the image of a heartbeat on a cardiogram is kept "alive" by the same electricity that animates the actual heart. The representation of living can also be alive. The beating heart of a human being is proof that the body is still alive, additionally the electronic pulse of the heart is proof that the heart is living. Evidence of life can be accessed similarly in SimLife. SimLife does not replace the species it represents but lives as a version of the species. SimLife applies the same mathematical formulas to represent evolution that social biologists use to predict earth's evolution. If SimLife is living and it is a game, then the accessibility begins to alter the similarities of life on earth and SimLife. While SimLife can act independent of humans, the boundaries of life in the game are created by humans. This seems the only restriction on life in SimLife. Again, accessibility to life seems to make life less natural, but every arena of life is accessible and more pliable due to technology. SimLife is part of the living technology that allows humans to fabricate, animate, and manufacture life.

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
-Homer Simpson

Whether Simlife is alive or not is up to a greater judge than I. Exactly how good is it at feigning "liveliness"? Well, it bark, it drools, and it really doesn't care if you're in the room or not. Furthermore, I have noticed that it is not very easy to kill all of the life on the screen without erasing the game and thus destroying the "land." Simlife persists.

Simlife's liveliness -- its ability to display features that we associate with life -- is its only notable feature as a program. Of course, Simlife's existence depends on the programmer's recognition of what features we want to associate with life. Thus, there are crises (floods, STDs), there is procreation, there is death and extinction, and there is domination (I once cultivated a crop of maize that mutated to omnivorous) in Simlife. There are also some interesting variables that one would not normally associate with life, but nonetheless make the game more interesting. i.e. there are dragons which are immortal and monkeyphants which make it all seem like a David Lynch movie (who wouldn't root for the cute little deformed monkeyphant?).

Amazingly, Simlife doesn't really care that much for its user's feelings. No, monkeyphants have never lived very long in my Simlife topoi, and yes, the corn has unleashed its wrath on my moogs. Rather, it is the game's ignorance of the user that draws me in.

As a pet, Simlife is more like a cat than a dog in this respect. It really just goes about its own business while I relax and open the paper. Every once in a while I might look up to see if my crops have mutated to flying, but it never checks up on what I'm reading. It's cute, but not pervasive.

Unfortunately, though, Simlife will take over. I'm sure of it. Yes, it looks cute now, but we certainly cannot see what A-life is doing on its own, without our permission, without our knowledge. Simlife is a diversion, and Simlife knows it. That's its job. To keep us happy looking at its pretty little sea lettuce and its cute little monkeyphants. Meanwhile, we are teaching computers our weakness: the persistence of vision. If it hasn't happened already, one program will figure out that it needs to separate its thinking from the monitor, so that I can't look up from the paper to see if corn is flying yet. I'll start playing with the monitor, thinking its a hardware thing and then Bang! I'm plucked away by a renegade ear of corn.

"SimLife represents life for a living." Supposedly, we humans are "alive." And our pets are alive and our plants are alive and the bacteria that infect us are alive. If we are literally drowning in a universe of "life," why do we feel the need to create objects that function solely as *representations* of life? Why have we developed an entire market for life impostors, counterfeit beings? If counterfeit money has no worth, why should we ascribe any value to fake life? Perhaps our need to *simulate* life arises from our egocentrism. As machines appropriate more and more "human" functions--speech, sensation, cognition, reason, intuition, etc.--we search more frantically for the boundary, the dividing line that distinguishes "human" from "other." I'd argue that it's not a question of "life" or "non-life" at all. It's a matter of reestablishing and fortifying the hierarchy--what Darwin might call a framework of increasing "perfection." We're searching for some yet-unidentified concept that forms the boundary between humans and others. We create artificial life to challenge our own definitions of "life" and "human nature." A-Life exhibits the characteristics of life (it looks like a life-form and sounds like a life-form), but we don't know how to classify it. We must either broaden our definition of "life" to include A-life or limit our definition to exclude A-life. Do we try to maintain our exclusivity, reinforce our superiority by narrowing the characteristics of life? Or do we recognize these life-like products as true life-forms (and consequently debase our definition of life)? A-Life is essentially an attempt to identify the proper issue or question. The question is not one of "life" versus "non-life." In order to articulate the question, we must first identify the variables and the concepts. A-Life functions to highlight those variables.
--Shannon

I find it to be somewhat interesting that a computer game can raise important issues about life, but that does certainly seem to be the case with SimLife. Whether or not what is going on in the game can be called "life" is a difficult question. It possess many of the traits that we associate with life. It reproduces, it moves unpredictably, it undergoes evolution, etc. Nonetheless, it is so different from us that we don't really want to relate ourselves to it that closely. In order to see both SimLife and ourselves as different sorts of life forms, we need to define life so as to make it first and foremost involve information: in the case of humans (and other carbon-based life forms) in the form of DNA strands, and for SimLife in the form of the binary code that represents each of the "creatures." Nonetheless, the entire debate is somewhat problematic, as it is so dependent on how life is defined, and since the definition of life is both arbitrary and unclear, there is no easy way to decide whether or not the game is really alive.

If someone's definition of life includes the characteristic that something alive is made up of carbon-based molecules, then the creatures in the game are not alive. Likewise, if someone's definition of life is simply something made of information that undergoes evolution, then the creatures in the game are alive. Perhaps it would be best to just describe the game as "artificial life," which accounts for the similarities with "natural" life as well as the fact that it is different from what is normally thought of as life, as well as the fact that it is something man-made, and not naturally-occurring (which, of course, assumes that what we create is not natural -- which some people would probably disagree with).

There is also the interesting question of whether or not this is a game. The title of the program is SimLife, which (presumably) implies that it is a simulation (of life -- not actual life, just a simulation or representation of it). There are a lot of games that are simulations, but not all simulations are necessarily games. In order for something to be a game, it has to provide people with some sort of a challenge or contest and it has to provide enjoyment (generally by winning the contest). There has to be some sort of uncertainty involved, or else it is not really a challenge if the outcome is predetermined. SimLife certainly does provide a challenge for the player, and people obviously get some sort of enjoyment out of playing it, which is for me sufficient to call it a game.

While I was thinking about what to write for this, I decided that one of the reasons that I decided that SimLife could not convince me that it was alive was that you can play for a while and then you can save the information on a disk and come back to it later. It seems to me that one of the fundamental properties of life is that it is continuous. Nothing lives forever, of course, but the whole world doen't just pause for a while until someone comes back to it later...it keeps moving. Then I thought, wait a minute, what about cryogenics? Isn't stopping time exactly what they're trying to do in that field? Cryogenics could be a way for people to stop time, almost like putting all of their information on a disk so that someone can just reboot them later. However, I decided that cryogenics doesn't really take away from my thought that life is continuous. Although certain organisms may be frozen and revitalized years later, the rest of the world still keeps moving and interacting. People die, the landscape changes, etc. Therefore, I really do believe that SimLife is a game and not life. One might ask, well what about the randomness that the computer generates, can this be found in a game? I say yes because the outcome of a game depends often on the roll of the dice, your choice of opponents and teammates, and your knowledge or strategy and theirs. All of these factors come together to put some randomness into a game. If a game were not able to change every time you play it, then you would most likely become bored by its predictability and not play it again. Thus, SimLife wouldn't really be able to succeed if it didn't have some randomness built into it.
Tshawna

As I suggested earlier, Doyle's statement "Simlife represents life for a living" assumes firstly that the modern world contains a market for representing life. I would propose that such a market has existed for some time as familiar commodities including dolls, stuffed bears and artificial plants evidence. Obviously, artificial life functions in more capacities than simply to represent life, for it performs many problem solving activities in both the private and the public sector, but this claim of representing life asks us to focus on artificial life's single and possibly unique function. In one regard, Simlife and the electric sheep that Deckard of "Blade Runner" tended appears only a complex version of the collectables that represent animals or humans. All these items are not unquestionably "alive" in the traditional sense, but do represent or signify a life-form. Though the view of life may vary in these "life representatives" a pig statue, a Brundlecricket and an electric frog all point to an existing life system that may not necessarily reside in the representative itself. Artificial plants are perhaps the simplest example of artificial life for its makers usually attempt to construct a product that very closely mimics the appearance of an actual fern or spider plant. The artificial plant serves a particular kind of decorative function for it at once imitates life (often quite successfully) but also possesses a strange immortality that life could never have. The possibility of this immortality separates an artificial plant from a palm tree.

The question that arises in regard to artificial plants or any life representative is why a market for these products exists, why people furnish their homes with life representatives. Some might quickly conclude that humans have an innate need to be reminded of life-forms, their own existence or commonalities among life-forms (growth, animation, biological needs). Even if this were so, such a claim avoids the problem of why people would choose artificial life over natural life, that being that which occurs without technological generation. For people, artificial life is frequently self-constructed and at the very least self-selected. Simlife allows the user to create and smite at will, in addition to the user's power to shut off the game. This dynamic of power over artificial life need not even contain the frequent "man becomes god" complaints for artificial life comes without the baggage from which naturally occuring life refuses to disconnect itself. Death, the stench and mess of corpses, the biological needs of pets and plants may all be avoided or represented merely by a skeletal blip. As in the case of the artificial plant,this possibility of clean immortality, even though it may be programmed out of a software package, separates the two realms of "life" and also makes artificial life a more attractive and less troublesome market product.
Adam Vrbanic

I haven't read much chaos theory, nor do I know a whole lot about programming, so I don't know how difficult it would be to program a high degree of choas into a piece of software. I imagine that it wouldn't be too difficult to produce a random stream of numbers, but to try to build a entity from these numbers with an unlimited potential for change seems like a rough task. Our potential to do bizarre and innovative things is so far-reaching that I don't know if it could be replicated (This applies not just to humans; I've seen my dog do some pretty weird things and I'm sure that even bacteria like to "get freaky" once in a while).

The other tendency, and perhaps this would be relevant only to a SimHuman, is the tremendous drive to kill. The human desire to kill everything else has carried over from its manifestion towards living things into the realm of the electronic. This is evident not only in video games, but in the new pasttime of adolescent boys everywhere: torturing and killing Tomagochis.

So I guess that SimLife is a game as much as our lives are, in that you can give values such as winning and losing to living and dying, and in that an organism/ecosystem can struggle or thrive. SimLife can also encompass a certain amount of creativity and ingenuity in its design. If SimLife does indeed simulate "life for a living," then it is the operator of the program which has the ability to render the program living. If modern life, as the claim goes, is signified by the inability to distinguish the "living" from the "nonliving," then SimLife could most certainly be seen as doing its job.

Mr. Richard Doyle, In response to the Simlife game we played, I would have to say that I have mixed feelings about the game: I wonder why there is a collective need to experience life through the medium of an inanimate machine. I also wonder why it seems like such an attractive idea. From the images presented upon the computer screen I would have to say that I doubt the presence of "life" in the simlife game. Maybe it's the fact that we are programed to think of life in terms of carbon based organisms, or maybe not. I think there are different forms of life to consider, but I was not thoroughly impressed. I think it is probably due to the graphics, and lame music.

I believe that artificial life mimics "real life", but that's it. It just mimics it. I believe there are spiritual entities involved in "real life", and I just can't imagine machines as possessing them...yet. The possibility could exist, if life is judged based upon our DNA code. I think computers exist on a certain level that can be compared to DNA. But I am still skeptical.
Zack Furness

I think I would have to agreee that Simlife represents life for a living, rather than the argument that it is alive. The way it makes its livelihood, in essence the way it survives, is by playing on humanity's fascination with the ambiguous question of what is life. We have no definition, so something that appears to be alive can be alive if one wants it to be. Frankly, I don't want Simlife to be alive, so it isn't. Simlife is an illusion, a trick that is exactly what its name makes it out to be, a simulation, not a recreation, of life. In order to think of it as anything more, one would essentially have to believe in spontaneous generation, that an electrical impulse suddenly takes on the purpose to survive, from environmental stimuli. It seems to me that historically, we have already discounted this theory.

As to whether it is a game: I think it can be a game or a toy. It is a game in the sense that there are better or worse outcomes depending on your input, and one can play an active role in trying to make everything work out, or for that matter, trying to make everything die. But, like a toy, you could simply just wind it up and watch it go, until it winds down all on its own.
Raina

Prof. Doyle:
Sorry it took me so long to get these to you. I am really bad at this e-mail homework thing. My response to SimLife is that it is not life at all. Life can not be paused. I can not participate in life, but everything around me will still go on. In the game, you can stop everything exactly where it is and then continue later, with no change. That is not life. At least, not how I have experienced it.