Sims family values

America's favorite computer-game family, The Sims, graces the cover of latest issue of Newsweek. The Sims is about to make the jump from the hard drive to cyberspace. "America’s hottest PC game is moving to the Net, where thousands of players will interact and live virtual lives. Is this the future of home entertainment?"

More from the cover story:

"Last year $6.35 billion worth of video- and computer games were sold at retail. An additional $196 million came from subscription fees to online games, a number that is expected to grow to $1.4 billion over the next five years, according to Jupiter Research. That’s because for many people it’s more fun to outwit, outplay and outlast a fellow human being than a computer. Since The Sims, which was released in 2000, is already the best-selling PC game ever, many are predicting that The Sims Online will shoot to the top of the online-gaming charts as well."

Also in this issue of Newsweek: @Home & @Play -- how technology is changing our lives in big and small ways.

Hooked on the Net book review

Quentin Schultze's review of Hooked on the Net appears in the September-October issue of Moody Magazine. An excerpt:
Online gaming and gambling, the “mall that never closes,” and the overwhelming popularity of downloadable music files all pose threats when they become time-consuming pastimes. These kinds of activities, says Careaga, can get us “hooked on the net.” Those who become entrenched in cyber-culture rob time from prayer, family, work, and play to get online for hours a day, day after day. Even if they stay away from “adult” sites, their lives can become desperately unbalanced. In the worst scenarios, online relationships substitute for real-life intimacy and people find themselves isolated and without accountability.

Cyberslackers, beware!

Some scary, Big Brothery news about a new product called the Activator Desk, from this news release:

CHICAGO, IL -- (INTERNET WIRE) -- 11/08/2002 -- R. Lee Heath introduces real-time desktops level productivity or activities monitoring in the new ActivatorDesk Enterprise Desktops Controller. The feature enables businesses to easily deploy "friendly" intelligent centralized monitoring and auditing of employees desktop and Internet activities and then manage lock-down policies where this will most effectively impact productivity. The product is being formally introduced in Chicago at the meeting of the Computer Security Institute (CSI) Sunday, November 10th.

Technophile: unplugged

What's it like spending a week disconnected from all our technological "necessities"? Seattle Post-Intelligencer writer Winda Benedetti tells about going cold turkey from the Internet and other digital technology.

Read all about Benedetti's adventures with a typewriter -- remember the typewriter? -- and the original Palm, the palm of her actual hand. This is how it was back when "Top Gun" was the top movie and when the Bangles had us walking like an Egyptian. This is how it was a decade and a half ago. And this is the approximate time period I've returned to for the sake of this little experiment -- a time when most of us didn't own personal computers or cell phones or digital organizers. Interesting stuff. I wonder if I could unplug for a week. I wonder if you could. Could you? Would you?

In South Korea, gaming gets deadly

A 24-year-old South Korean man died after playing computer games nonstop for 86 hours. He was found dead Tuesday at an Internet cafe in Kwangju, 260 kilometers southwest of Seoul. Quoting witnesses, police detective Oh Myong-sik in Kwangju said the man had been virtually glued to the computer since late Friday and had no decent sleep and meals.