The Evil Sims
Before I started working for Northwest Alabama Mental Health, a horrible thing happened in the town I was assigned to. A 18-year-old male was arrested for driving a stolen vehicle. He was being booked when he took the gun from the police officer and shot the three officers in the station killing them all. His statement upon being arrested for multiple murders was, “Life is just a game. Sometimes people die.”
The defense for this boy was that he played Grand Theft Auto so much he didn’t know reality from fantasy, and so when he was arrested, he thought he was playing a video game. He got the death penalty from a jury of all women.
I considered it uncanny when I read a short story that took that very idea and expanded on it.
“Continuous Manipulation” took the idea that life is just a game and showed how horrific that could be. In the story, somehow a little girl’s game of The Sims becomes reality. Her family is mimicked on the game and they then act out the game play, so much so that the family never grows older. Although this sounds wonderful, the problem arises in that the family of Sims characters are aware of the fact they aren’t changing and that things don’t seem to change.
It is something out of The Twilight Zone. You are a character in a video game that a little girl who wants the perfect family manipulates to keep everything the same, but the characters are aware. It is a form of perpetual hell. I remember a similar TZ episode from the movie, where the little boy kept everything the same with his mind. It was very similar.
Of all the stories in The New Uncanny, this bothered me the most because of the story about the kid in Fayette, but also because, I play only two computer games, The Sims and Civilization. I sometimes let my Sims die because I tire of them. Imagine if they were real people somewhere. I would be playing God with their lives and killing them just because I want to. According to “Continuous Manipulation”, life is just a game, but you never die.
