Sdtrk: ‘Manha de Carnaval’ by Claudine Longet
Have you seen adverts for that VisitorVille thing? It looks kinda engrossing. More engrossing than it probably needs to be.
VisitorVille takes a revolutionary visual approach to web analytics. VisitorVille makes data mining simple and accurate, easily performing tasks that are impossible to accomplish using traditional (and dreadfully boring) web analytics solutions.
What makes VisitorVille unique is immediately clear: VisitorVille does not represent website visitors simply as numbers or graphs, but as real people in a real environment. You can monitor your site traffic as if you were people-watching in a big city.
Visually it’s like the Sims, wherein you have wee people representing your site’s visitors, walking round in cities that represent your site, inside buildings that represent your site’s pages. Sometimes you’ll see buses representing search engines transporting said visitors hither and yon. I gotta say, it’s pretty innovative, but for a site stat junkie like myself, it’s such a bad idea.
I used to have a copy of the first Sims game on my old computer; I had two families, the Goths, which, if I’m not mistaken, was a default name for a couple of the character archetypes, and the Montags, who I’d actually made into Goths — well, as much as the first Sims game would allow. Over the course of my playing career, I’d discovered the cheat for making as much Simoleons as you wanted, so both families had these giant ostentatious homes that had all mod cons, needless to say.
When I realised I was wasting far too much time micromanaging their lives, one day I had the Montags, who were a couple, invite the Goths, who were a couple with a preteen daughter, round for a party, or whatever Sims do. I assembled them in a room to the size of a bedroom, and removed all the doors. Then I replaced most of the walls with floor-to-ceiling windows, and on the remaining wall space, I hung that lovely clown painting that Sims tend to find unsettling. I then added a hi-fi system, which I had constantly blaring country music at an elevated volume. Eventually my Sims wanted to listen to something different, so one would occasionally walk over and change the station. After observing the Goth’s daughter change it several times, I decided to set up a fence round the stereo.
As the subjugation party continued, more and more piles of rubbish started accumulating, which made my Sims more and more unhappy, and after three Sim hours, every member of the group had soiled themselves at least once, as I’d built no bathroom. Also, since they were falling asleep standing up, I’d graciously put a coffee maker in the room to keep them awake (what, the country music wasn’t doing that by itself?), which naturally caused more ‘accidents’.
As you can well imagine, everyone’s moods were well into the red, and I began to feel sorry for them, as I realised they hadn’t eaten in several hours. So I graciously gave them a gas grill, and selected the person least capable of cooking to make barbeque for the party. Ruh-roh!
It only took two minutes for the first of the fires to start, if memory serves me right. The entire house went up in flames, but thankfully, everyone in the room burned to death long before that happened. The party, from pleasant start to immolated finish, took about three hours of my time; after which, I uninstalled the game, and haven’t played it since.
A quick whirl on Google shows I wasn’t the only sadist, which isn’t too surprising. Now I need to find those screenshots I took..
So yeah, VisitorVille! I’m quite sure it’s pyromaniac-proof, but… wouldn’t it be a tragedy if it weren’t?
