I'll be honest and say that I do not find this as shocking as you seem to. There are far too many horrible things really going on in the world for me to be concerned about what someone is doing in a video game. Besides, there are video games where killing people is not really detrimental to game play, and is even encouraged after a fashion (the GTA franchise, the Elder Scrolls franchise). This is not to even mention the games where the entire purpose of the game is to kill people (every warfare game you can think of).
I think a lot of the appeal of this comes from the fact that murder does not exist in the Sims' world: Sims cannot consciously kill other Sims. The only way to do this is to create a situation where death is likely to occur: you have to
create tragic accidents. This is not as easy as it sounds, and often requires a bit of skill on behalf of the player.
I am not a Sim-killer and do not go out of my way to treat my Sims bad, although I do both when it suits my purposes. The most recent example is a game I started to experiment with the practical functionality of certain traits and the ability of a teenager to survive using
exclusively these traits. The parameters were simple: buy/build modes were strictly off limits, the gym was off limits, no part time jobs and she started out with $0 in the way of funds. Since you cannot create and move a teenager into a lot, this required me to to not only create the teenager, but an adult guardian...which I killed the moment the family was placed. I then used the "familyfunds" cheat to set the household funds at 0.
I tried this with an empty lot, and intended for the teen to sleep in parks, but it became immediately apparent that she got picked up after curfew and escorted "home"
every time she was out. This required me to rethink my plan, so I created the lot shown below to avoid this to some extent:
No bathroom, no kitchen, no bed, and no entertainment (the bills were $2 lol). Just a bench to nap on so she wasn't constantly hounded by the police. She had to fulfill all her needs using her carefully selected traits: Neurotic, Inappropriate, Mooch and Friendly. These traits allowed her to instantly remove stress, bathe in the sinks of public bathrooms, beg for food and money and made it easier for her to talk to people while doing it. I also gave her the leeway to sleep and shower at a friend's house if she was invited over and managed to convince them to let her spend the night.
Was this cruel? Maybe a little. But she still survived quite well: she became an adult with about 7,000 LTH points, she graduated on the honor role, had lots of friends and even a boyfriend. She went hungry on occasion, but was never close to starving...and had even built up close to $200, despite the fact that she ate off the food truck several times a week. She eventually grew up, got a job in the music industry (rock star branch), moved into an apartment and had 2 kids. All's well that ends well.
Regardless, I won't fault someone for playing the game the way they want. I would much rather see someone killing off pixelated people to relieve their stress than to go on a shooting spree in a grocery store where living, breathing people might be harmed.
