Lord of the Sims

Feel like playing God? Plunk down fifty bucks and get The Sims 2. In minutes, you'll be creating communities of virtual people. You decide everything about them, from their facial features to their social standing and their ultimate destiny. They have no self-determination: they are puppet people and you are their puppetmaster. It's better than finding a doorway to John Malkovich's brain.

But be warned: this seemingly innocent game can bring out the sadistic streak in the nicest person.

Take my girls for example-- they are your typical sweet kids. They fawn and coo over puppies and babies and they'd never hurt a fly. Yet, they quickly discovered that you can delete the doors and windows in a Sim house so the Sim inside can't escape. Slowly the Sim starves and loses income because he can't go to work.

"Hey, what happened to your Sim?" I asked my daughter.

"Oh," she gleefully chirped, "he became a pot."

Yeah, that's right: cremation. Seems rather Nazi, if you ask me.

You can make two Sims share a house and hate each other's guts. Or you can make them fall madly in love, make "woo hoo" in the hot tub, get married, and have a baby. But if your Sims neglect their baby, Agent Smith comes from The Matrix and takes the baby to a better family. Apparently even the virtual world has no tolerance for deadbeat parents.

You can have Sim lesbians and Sim gay men, but clearly Gavin Newsom isn't the mayor of SimTown, because they can't get married. A right-wing Christian Nazi computer game, who'da thought? Oh, but intermarriage between Sims of different colors is OK. I guess that's been around long enough to be considered acceptable. As long as they're not queer.

The Sims is a PG-13 sorta game. The characters can kiss and hug, and even grope, but you never see them naked, and all procreation takes place out of view. Damn. They seriously need to make an x-rated version of this game, because I want to create a Sim Heidi Fliess and a Sim Dirk Diggler and turn them loose in SimTown.

If you're having a bad day at work, create a Sim that looks like your boss. You can fine-tune the guy right down to the length of his eyebrows. Give him an IQ of 50 and make him live in a slum and eat garbage. When he comes to your office and begs for a job, your security guards can bounce him on his ear. Yeah, you feel better now, don't you?

At first I was a little worried when so many of my daughter's Sims turned into pots.

"Didn't you want to take care of him?"

"No, he was boring and stupid. I wanted him to die."

"But you killed him!" (Images of The Bad Seed begin to root in my imagination...)

"Jeez Mom, it's just a game!"

"Yeah, I know, but..."

But...she's right. It's just a game. And I know my daughter well enough to be assured that she knows the difference between games and reality, right and wrong. And in reality she is a very good seed; really she is. I'm sure she'd never turn me into a pot or a jack-n-the-box or wish me into the cornfield.

But then I got to thinking: when you are young and have so little control over your life, maybe it's OK to play virtual God a little bit . Maybe if more kids played Sims, less of them would come to school with AK47s. Maybe. I suppose for truly unbalanced people, only psychoactive drugs make a difference.

But for the rest of us, there is Sims2. No matter your religion, you can be God and Satan all rolled into one tidy package. Don't delude yourself into thinking this is just a harmless game; you can learn a lot about yourself playing Sims. But proceed with caution: you may think this is just a fun way to pass the time, but believe me, you'll get a lot more than you bargained for.