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Playing God in The Sims 2
pgptag writes "From Daily News Tribune: 'If you could play God, would you be kind, cruel or just careless? The answer can reveal itself by the way you play "The Sims 2," the highly anticipated follow-up to the "real life" personal computer game "The Sims," which placed omnipotent players in control of the fates of digital people... What's funny is that we have a genetics feature now (which allows characters who mate to have children who share their looks and aspirations). So you can download some of the celebrities that the players have made, put them in the game and have them have kids.'"
Somethingawful recently featured an article which makes a pretty interesting read =)
http://www.transgaming.com/gamepage.php?gameid=111 7
Apparently not.
One night he actually got abducted by aliens! How cool is that?
It gets scarier than that. As anyone who's purchased the guide book knows, any male adult in the Sims 2 who is abducted by aliens will become pregnant (yes, I did say male, apparently the aliens aren't interested in impregnating women). Here's a quote from the Prima Guide:
Alien Abduction
If Sims use the Stargaze interaction with the expensive telescope (Farstar e3 Telescome) at night, there is a chance they'll be abducted by aliens. Abducted sims are returned to the lot three hours later.
If the abductee is a male adult, he always returns from the ordeal impregnated with an alien baby.
Other than the "mother" being male, alien pregnancies are identical to normal ones.
Apparently the alien children inherit none of their father's genetics except for eye color.
The speed of time is one second per second.
Now there are actual 7 day weeks, and every job (afaik) has 2 days off per week. Though exactly which days differ for each job/rank. Also you can get "vacation days" which are the number of days you can skip work without getting fired.
I don't know if you played either game, but I assumed that when you read the comments about players torturing Sims you envisaged horrific acts of physical abuse.
:-D
However, torture in The Sims is limited to the kind of torture Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, Mr Bean or Lee Evans experiences. You know: the phone rings, the toast sets on fire, the doorbell rings and the waste disposal spews week-old cabbage all over the kitchen, all at the same time. We'll call it Kitchen Sink Torture.
The Sims is a game about daily life, albeit a camp, kitschy, slapstick life. It's colourful. The people all speak in childlike babble-talk. It is in no way teaching children to enjoy torture. It's showing them that it's funny when your character tries to wash the dishes and floods the kitchen.
Kids think it's funny to 'torture' the characters because the Sims throw tantrums and stamp their feet when something goes wrong. They're not delighting in some sadistic massacre, they're laughing because the funny man tried to use the toilet and it broke. The Sims 2 sponsors Malcolm In The Middle on Sky One. They suit each other quite well, I think.
And yes, you can kill your characters, but it's very boring. The most popular method is to wall them in somewhere and starve them, but you have to put up with their (surprisingly upbeat) complaining about needing the toilet. And it's not half as fun as giving them a science kit and watching them create an evil clone which then chases them around the house. That kind of torture.
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