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SIMS to Symptoms.
Where’s the reality check then?
This SIMS software is big with kids. It’s bigger than those key-ring virtual pets of three years ago. It’s bigger than ‘Furbies’ to wet, wind and whack. It’s the latest craze that is turning adults crazy too.
My less than cherubic child arrived at breakfast looking at the porridge like we were trying to poison her and fell to the floor in a flood of tears proclaiming that her new ‘SIMS’ family had already had the ‘baby taken away’ by the council and ‘the wife had run off with a lesbian’. Not content with creating a family from Hell, as punishment there would be reprisals for the innocent members. She made the characters that neither looted or murdered stay up for 24 hours and starved them of food for their co-habitants disobedience.
What if she thinks she can punish are under-interactive ‘real’ family?
I thank God they caught Saddam Hussein because there are sharp instruments in my kitchen. I don’t want her getting ideas. My offspring leaves each room like a murder has been committed anyway.
Call me decrepit but I can remember getting a kite and a piece of fruit and lump it. Now with this kid’s computer culture you will be lucky to get to get the forty quid disc in the hard drive before some other brain ‘schmushing’ game comes along to dement our kids further and give them curvature of the spine into the bargain. It seems not a second before I was prising her away from ‘Cartoon network’ with the use of bribery and force. Prior to that listening to “Ey-oh” for four years, thanks to ‘Noo Noo’ and those other ‘real rabbit’ worriers.
What are these software marketeers doing? Have they got any children? I think not. What do the giant toy corporations think they are doing when they can demand more attention from our children than a platoon of draconian teachers at their own school. Have adults working all the hours that God sends to afford PC games for kids, designed to get our tangled family lives into a granny knot when in her day it was flowerpressing or making ginger preserve.
It makes me madder than a wet hen when I see my child prefer her teeth to fall out or break the Guinness book of records for motionlessness, so she can hunch over a monitor defying threats of violence from me just so she can create her own artificial chaos. Especially, when she can do all this without a computer usually, anyway. When I unplug the goggle box in protest, she becomes sloth-like in the corner with knees drawn up by their chin and nodding and dribbling with grief.
I have seen users coming off heroin with easier withdrawal symptoms.
How do software creators get permission to possess my child with every evil when I spend my life mending things that I have not broken, patting baby’s heads and picking up litter?
I blame J.K Rowling for turning a child’s imagination into a chamber of horrors.
I shat myself when I watched Snow White as a kid, but what with ‘Fluffy’ and bloody ‘Awks’ it’s now possible to miscarry in the aisles.
Wasn’t Hansel and Gretel gory enough? I watched Oliver Twist and never recovered but kids today with computer generated graphics can make ‘The Exorcist’ look like ‘Pingu’.
I thought I would provide a distraction with ‘Cluedo’ one Christmas as a board game but my kid argued that the plastic weapons should be real. Where the fiddly fuck are you going to find a leadpipe or hangmans noose at bedtime? (I dunno though!)
I understand that computer skills are important. It is the future. It’s a huge chunk of their learning now. I had an abacus and toes. I missed calculators and biros because it was nibs and ink when I was at school. But SIMS is the nearest thing to creating a terrorist faction in your kids own bedroom.
What is next step with SIMS? They have more ‘racey’ versions where they get to hump each other and anything goes? Will there be a game soon where you get to go ‘lapdancing’? What about creating your own Ann Summers party? How about how to deal and score’ drugs more effectively?
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