I still remember the day I learned how to kill my Sims. I recall having heard my brother complain about the Sim kids being a nuisance, as they were wasting the resources of the family, ‘eating too much’, without producing anything tangible (like money) in return. Although they had been quite nice to have at first, in a loving-couple-eventually-becoming-a-real-family sort of way, I soon learned that they were a big hassle. Sim kids were not as easy to control as the adult Sims since their interaction possibilities were much more limited. Although they were hapless, they were also short-tempered and annoyingly cheerful. The only reasonable way to deal with them was to get rid of them.

So I set off to build pools, directed my Sim kids to take a dip and then I removed the ladder, watching the little children exhaust themselves to death in the water. I ordered an irresponsible single mother to cook for her children, without teaching her how to do it first, and soon enough the whole kitchen was on fire. The first fire left behind a half-destroyed house with three dead bodies. And once I got a penchant for it, why would I have limited my destructive activities to kids only? Some Sims washed their hands too many times, turned on a light and died of electrocution. Some starved to death, or were abducted by aliens. And for some I bought a cute little pet – with the result of them getting ill and even dying from the ‘Guinea Pig Disease’ that was raising havoc among The Sims players in the early 2001.

It is evident I did not only play The Sims by looking for different ways of killing the game creatures. However, it can be argued that experimenting with the game in this way opened my eyes for the hugely varied possibilities of play. I did not only torture my little homunculi to death, but I also learned to utilise all kinds of cheats, tricks and hacks so I could create interesting scenarios in the game to amuse myself (and not all of them were that morbid). With my colleagues, I also engaged in discussions that considered various possibilities of seeing naked Sims in the game.