Won’t somebody think of the children??
My daughter’s favorite game to play is Sims 2. She loves to create the same families over and over, giving them identical appearances and names, and make insanely large houses for them, all in the same neighborhood. This leads to five identical people all visiting at one house, which is difficult to keep track of, to say the least.
She also likes to create swimming pools and make the Sims dive in repeatedly even when they really just want to lie the hell down and go to sleep. Pee on your own time, pal, you’re diving now!
But the thing she loves more than anything else is to make the little kids do “Miss Mary Mack” with each other. If kids could die in Sims 2, she would have Mary Macked some of them to death by now. This creates a problem, as they skip school to Mary Mack, they neglect their homework to Mary Mack, they don’t eat to Mary Mack. I keep having to find ways to thwart her so that I can stop the social worker from taking the kids away, which would be a bit upsetting, I think. It’s like she’s some capricious god, or that uber-powerful guy in that old Star Trek TOS episode – if you’re a geek, you know the one I mean.
Pity the poor population of Pleasantview, and their families of Starbucks employees, Madeleine replicants, Groovy Girl families, and ragged, Twilight-Zoned out kids. May God have mercy on their digital souls.