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Toys-R-fuss
Well, how do you like these apples?
My daughter of ten years came to breakfast one post-Christmas morning after much cajoling. Her eyes glazed and bearing a look of despair. She had a face as long as the A1 and that peculiarity when the arms distend past the knees that only seems to effect youngsters with a 'cob on' and seems to synchronise when you have to ask them to do something trivial. Like eat. The accompanying stoop of indifference and that expression that there might already be some 'damage in the attic'. You sense that all the 'chairs are not around their table' even if it is breakfast time. You know this by that look they reserve for fools and drunkards.
Since 'sparrows fart' she had been playing her "SIMS" expanded deluxe edition programme on the computer. To the un-anointed this is the computer software available to introduce children to thought interference, C.V.T and ultimate world domination. The 'Zoo Tycoon' series while a state-of-the art technological teaser was just a 'sniff of the barmaids' apron compared to the stupefying interactive wonders of this sleeping giant.
SIMS is like underage sex to them that does not include adults. Forget any other computer game. Put them out of your mind. Watch your child switch on the computer and as the evil takes hold and study carefully the expression on their face as their brains start to scramble and their eyes become like darkened rooms. This is the very first time grubby and childless software inventors really capture the imagination of our mouse-twitching minors and hold it hostage until both you and your child come off medication.
Animal magneticism. The kick is this.
You have a budget for a Zoo. You build and run it from scratch with a choice of every conceivable beast and facility. Each time you spend cash, it subtracts from a 'float' and to keep in business you have to make the customers and animals healthy and satisfied. Reminders, pop up at every turn; "The hippos aren't happy" or "The restaurant staff have gone on strike for more pay". Some warnings are flagged up during construction that might highlight the vulnerable pregnant Llama has just eaten a shrub you introduced to the habitat that is poisonous. Or the feeding times are all wrong in the monkey house and an Orang Utan has pissed over a pensioner in protest. Very complex scenarios develop. You begin to wonder what else could possibly go wrong with banged-up beasts and think about
chaining yourself to the computer in support of animal liberation.
A trifle neurotic? Unless you are a vet how are you to know from elephant excreta that it has a parasitical infection when it is a computer generated graphic? There seems a lot of expertise and clinical knowledge needed if you are to represent these cages of cartoon creatures as a blissfully unaware child player. Half the animals appear to have personality disorders, if you ask me. They want to be shot on sight. Why not book your child a tour to Huntingdon Life Sciences for a reality check? Don't get me wrong. I love animals and to prove it I always have corn-fed cape for Christmas. Yet, I am compelled towards vegetarianism after just two 'SIMS' games. No wonder vets bills are so expensive when you see what can go wrong with animals through this kind of software.
Pussy galore
I went to get my cat wormed at the local surgery. The woman said she had not seen my cat for over six months and gave me a scornful look. I replied she was 'lucky' as I hadn't seen her for much longer than that. She then listed that it had to be checked for fleas, flu, and A.I.DS. I thought they were supposed to have nine lives! I walked out with a debit card that was frayed around the edges and disappointed to read no literature at reception on how a cat manages to become H.I.V positive when I was in a monogamous, heterosexual, homosapien marriage.
That cat has enough issues. It digs holes. Craps, and then fills the hole back in again. "All cats do that !"I hear you cry ……. what! with a shovel?
My anxiety is this. My child has not the time or the inclination to feed her pet gerbils "Munch and Crunch" let alone design and run a zoo. Another thing, her cat, now 'worm-free' would be worm-food, if it wasn't for my passing conscience and refusal to be arrested by the RSPCA. Am I wrong or does a snake have a neck?
The SIMS PC game (Soul destroying Invasion of Mind controlled Sprogs) is a scarily sophisticated programme that depicts very real, but, ironically, artificial, human circumstances and relationships in every unthinkable situation possible. You build your own neighbourhood. How terrifying is that? You can even add a bit of incest for realism. Compulsory Friday night brawl down the 'Roxy' for good measure, after a shag on the bonnet of a Cortina, with a drunk-drive home?
Looking at the toolbar, the house characters are a little over indulged with 50 plus choices of clothing styles. Her structure had a swimming pool the size of 'Lake Windemere' and a metre wide plasma telly. Some crib, huh? On the downside, if you don't attend the families' every whim they behave badly and protest at you in a very spooky way. They turn to face you 'off-screen' and throw a wobbly. It's been a long time since I have had a computer generated graphic 'give me the finger' and call me a thoughtless bastard.
They can even get sick or die. They abuse and lie to each other. Just like any other regular happy family. They even shower or take a crap in front of you with the complimentary 'fuzzspot' to hide their little cartoon 'tuppence'. What's that all about? You can put your kid's head in a jar on the desk but for discretion purposes 'laying a cable' is off limits?
But what happens in the worst scenario with dysfunctional families? Let me enlarge on that. Would your child be expected to deal with unemployment? Or have to work three jobs to pay for family 'freeloaders'. Kids are plunged into this kind of 'problem-solving' when their unfinished homework is still just a warm memory.
The CD-Rom makers call it 'a powerful tool'. Damn right. Forget having a micro-chip in your neck at birth. This piece of kit can have your children flying planes into buildings during the school play interval. Last year it was 'My Little Pony', this year its "SIMS Hot date", when your pre-pubescent child discovers condoms are not strange jellyfish found on the beach.
To a child this window into simulated reality is intellectual suicide. They will learn all too soon that life is no picnic and if parents are not careful they will 'live rough' as a softer option. It will also show them that when juggling, plates fall, and parents aren't there to pick up the pieces and that the 'magic house' where they live is not real at all. They will judge their own family by SIMS criteria. That Dad shouldn't fart when he pisses, that clothes are supposed to jump up and fold themselves in mid air while they find a suitable drawer, that cable TV ignores the watershed, that nits don't really exist, that overdrafts shouldn't stop you from having anything you want when you want it, that digital camcorders should float, that doors should be slammed shut in the summer and left wide open in the winter and that to be seen in public with your parents is normal, as long as you can deny knowing them to magistrates.
Parental advisory. There is software out there to show kids how to steal cars and run over Policeman. True.
Some may call it good basic training for life. To endow the 'jam-eaters' with some 'hands-on' prowess to deal with day to day issues and tackle them in a practical way. That's a crock of shite. My daughter has already found out through SIMS, in less than an hour, she can cheat money so she doesn't have to have a secular job at any stage during the game. What is more worrying is that I have found evidence of her trying to copy my signature.
She charges for the tiniest tasks. I dare not drop a magazine to the floor because it will cost 10p to put back in the rack. Mind you, a lost remote control has got to be worth a quid, hasn't it?
I swear she could kick the eye out of a mosquito if cash was on offer.
To her horror she had 'created' a virtual family with so many dodgy personalities the 'house' ended up like 'The Osbournes' living environment, but with more neurological damage. The fully automated electronic environmental interactive software had reduced the child to a feverish mess on the floor.
What is really spooky is that the SIMS have their very own 'language'.
I was in the next room answering a call of nature and through the walls I heard what may only be described as a sound in between a Tibetan monk gargling with gravel and Dr Stephen Hawkins with a low battery. The female 'voice' resembled a dictaphone on rewind crossed with Jade (from BigBrother) , drunk, trying to talk while munching a kebab. A sort of jumbled Esperanto that only my daughter could understand. She could actually speak it.
We spent two weeks in Greece and she hardly managed the Greek greeting 'Yasoo'.
What ever happened to Guatemalan 'worry people'? You know those little matchstick families that inhabited some tribal ethnic pouch for your kid to keep under the pillow? You used to buy them from those 'save the planet' shops and the instructions promised you that if your children kept these under the pillow it would stop them worrying about homework, bullying, the need for more money and would skilfully replace parents for a while?
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 her 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 the forty quid disc in the disc 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 since 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 to work all the hours that God sends just to afford PC games for kids that are designed to get our tangled family lives into a granny knot when in granny's day it was flower pressing 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' its possible now, 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 feck 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?
When and where is it going to stop?
I put up with 'Pokemon'. Where kids will exchange cigarettes and solvents to get 'Peekatchu' who can shoot electricity out of every orifice. 'Sylvanianian' hordes where they breed behind your back and you need to perform microsurgery on a hoover bag to find the singular plastic rabbit handkerchief of which you have to buy a canal boat, airport and frickin' Twin Towers to get the set. Whole families of pretend vermin that have more furniture and cupboard space than my own house and, yes, you've guessed it, they have mice (they're own species but smaller!) in cages as pets! Complete with treadmill and fake straw. Once I ate a stair balustrade mistaking it for a pretzel.
Now, forget Barbie and Ken. They now have dolls with full genitalia. Dolls that piss everywhere and need changing.
Why stop there?
How about a 'Lactating Lindi'. Or 'Menstruating Myra' for more convincing presents for your kids? Let's introduce 'Hypochondriac Hannah' with free counsellor or 'Single Mum Molly' with her very own benefit book and social worker?
Maybe we should all watch with expectation to see our child unwrap pregnant plastic action toys giving them the means to act as a midwife every day of the week. Or until they get bored and use cutlery to perform a hysterectomy.
Boys action dolls don't have these worrying issues.
However this next part shames me.
A guy at work bought me a nude, well-endowed, clockwork, 'w*nking' man from a rude gift shop. Obtained from one of those seafront shops that are shrines to crap and vulgarity. It's hideous and tastelessly offensive.
I secreted it on top of the lounge bookshelf in the vain hope it would never need to jump into action and only to come alive in order to eject unwanted guests. Needless to say it was found in all its glory by my daughter, and for all I know, paraded at the next 'drag and brag' show in class. It has now mysteriously disappeared and all the Mothers take a look at me and then sweep their kids up into their arms when I go to collect my own child from school. The 'little fella' may have already done the rounds and regrettably the one kid we had to stay on a sleep-over that fateful night was when the kidnap took place. I was mortified to find out that both parents of my daughter's friend were solicitors looking for their first big case. So, prudence dictates that I might have take the trouble to make a trip to the CAB to find out more about legal aid. I refuse to ask my smug daughter the whereabouts of 'w*nking man' (sounds like an archaeological find) as there is no parental or political way to do so.
Playmobile look like good presents this year. They have Nordic King and Queen in the Viking boat set. With detachable capes and helmets for easy 'rape and pillage' scenes, yet how kids manage to enact that when they are so small and fiddly I don't know.
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