Meet the brutal serial killers of The Sims
Kimberley Bond
It's a game that encourages people to 'get a life' – build a house, make a Sim and fulfil their dreams. So why are so many players intent on murder?
Getty Images / WIRED
The once desirable Sunset Valley, where Hank Hankson lived a humble life with his dog Sumo, has been ripped to pieces but an unknown, malevolent, but somehow familiar force. The peaceful facade of suburbia has been destroyed – townsfolk, neighbours, and friends crushed, houses bulldozed and replaced with a series of six-storey tall hedge mazes, looming ominously over Hankson's small and rundown cottage. It's only him left.
The snow started falling when the cull began, and Hankson now finds himself trapped in a permanent blizzard. Dark figures appear on the horizon, and his worst fears are confirmed – the android clones are marching towards his home. The end is near.
This isn't a campy horror movie, or the start of the next iteration of Fallout. It's one YouTuber's take on how to play The Sims – with these bizarre scenes boasting 1.1 million views. This post-apocalyptic nightmare comes from 26-year-old Dubliner RTGame (real name Daniel), who has 2.6 million subscribers on YouTube.
Hundreds of Sims meet their maker across the 18 videos in his Sims series, with titles such as 'When you're bored in The Sims so you recreate The Hunger Games', and 'When you're bored in The Sims so you organise the Thanos Snap.' In this particular video, he replaces every residential house with a hedge maze, and moves the exact same family of eight identical Sims into each one, where many will remain trapped until they starve to death.
"I started playing The Sims around 14 years ago. That was the first and last time I tried to play it seriously," RTGame explains. "I just found it immediately more fun to just start doing more twisted things."
The Sims has far evolved from its humble beginnings in 2000, where you created characters and tended to their needs, like a slightly more demanding Tamagotchi. As the games became more advanced, The Sims provided opportunities for the lives of your characters to more closely mirror reality: they now have lifetime goals and desires, can feel disappointment and joy, and now even do their own laundry. But whether they live a rich and fulfilling life, or an existence defined by endless suffering, the Sims' destiny is entirely in your hands.
Of course many players choose not to be benevolent Gods in the Sims world – and instead aim to kill and torture as many Sims as possible. Death has hugely evolved over 21 years of gameplay; we're no longer just sticking Sims in a swimming pool and selling a ladder to watch them drown. Instead, we're watching them explode in rocket ships, choke on pufferfish or even be eaten by the 'Cowplant' – a mutant Venus flytrap with a cow head for a face.
"The Sims see you controlling a little society, but that doesn't mean you're making it better. It reminds me of Bruce Almighty, where the role of God is handed over but that doesn't necessarily mean that's strictly a good thing. It's rather therapeutic just killing Sims, and being quite an irresponsible God," RTGame says. "I feel like a kid with a magnifying glass on the small ants. It sounds quite twisted but it's quite fun to do things like that in games like The Sims to see what happens. But yes, I do have a lot of Sims blood on my hands."
He's far from alone. While many in the Sims streaming community focus their content on cutesy legacy-style playthroughs or intricate design challenges, there's an increasing interest in more boundary-pushing content. RTGame credits the popularity of his bizarre Sims series for helping him jump into streaming as a full-time career, while other YouTubers such as CallMeKevin and Plumbella count speed runs where they kill entire neighbourhoods among some of their most viewed content.
In 2017, Netherlands-based Twitch gamer and former YouTuber Mousie (real name Hannah) recorded a 13 episode Serial Killer challenge on The Sims 4, choosing to use exploits to see her character 'Penny Dreadful' murder as many Sims as possible. Her final total was 51 kills.
"When I was younger, The Sims was an escape," the 26-year-old explains over Zoom. "I would make a lot of Sims that basically resembled me and they all lived the life I wanted. But as a YouTuber, doing the same type of content again and again gets boring to watch, so I went looking for challenges that forced me to play differently."
The Serial Killer challenge was posted on The Sims Forums by user 'liliths', who explained the rules: your Sim has to lure as many Sims inside their homes as possible and kill them in the space of three weeks. Bonus points are rewarded for having children with your victims and certain methods of killing, while points are deducted for using cheats. "It was completely psychotic," Mousie laughs. "I was sat there setting it up, and it was really uncomfortable because I was like, so many Sims are going to die – I'm going to end up on a list somewhere!
"But as you get into it, you start to register you're playing a game. And you get analytical about killing your Sims. What's the best and most efficient way to kill lots of Sims? In that point in the game, I figured out it was drowning and pufferfish. Starving took too long, and fire was too unruly."
Death has always been a fundamental game mechanic in The Sims. Even casual players can be seasoned killers. A 2018 YouGov poll found that nearly half (41 per cent) of all British players of The Sims have let a Sim die while playing, while 32 per cent have gone on a killing spree in their neighbourhoods.
After her 'serial killer challenge', Mousie was left stunned at the number of comments she found from her mostly younger fanbase encouraging her to download mods that allow Sims to genuinely become mass murderers. The Extreme Violence mod, created by a Jordan-based Sims player known as 'Dramatic Gamer' can see Sims slit each other's throats, fire bullets at each other – even disembowel one another with chainsaws – was a frequent recommendation.
Despite the popularity of these mods, Lyndsay Pearson – the game's executive producer and general manager, sees them as being at odds with the values the developers team want to promote. While a life simulator, The Sims is also meant to represent an idealised version of the world we live in – a sanitised and bloodless world where gun crime, gang violence and murder aren't tangible concepts. "It's not a ratings decision to not include extreme or graphic violence – it's counter to what we believe The Sims is about," she says. "Sims can get into comical dust cloud fights; make a show of sword fighting on a movie set or freeze another Sim with a freeze ray but there is no place for graphic, physical violence in the universe we've created. Instead, we're taking the 'heaviness' of death and tried to bring a humorous twist; this is most obvious in some of those 'sillier' ways to die."
The series' off-beat attitude to death is reflected in the visits from the Grim Reaper, who comes to take your Sims away and replace them with an urn when they die. In newer Sims games, he takes lifes at a slower pace. After harvesting your Sim's soul, the cloaked figure will mooch around the house – he'll grab a pizza, watch TV, dance to music with your surviving residents – before returning to the day job. Developers have clearly had fun adding this mechanic, 'encouraging' more deaths to unlock these bizarre encounters; players who manage to befriend Grim unlock the 'Hello darkness, my old chum' reward trophy.
Each addition to series has also added more intricate ways to die. By The Sims 4, released in 2014, Sims could keel over from hysteria, expire from rage and literally die from embarrassment. They could die from overexertion from having too much sex, while for Sims in the 'Elder' stage even exercise could prove fatal.
RTGame is not particularly keen on these new forms of death. He believes it is a sign of developers pushing players to play The Sims in a more traditional route, as opposed to the more left-field style both he and his audience enjoy. "Death is a fail state on The Sims 4, rather than something that you can play around with," he says. "It feels more like a gated experience, as if developers want you to play the game in a particular way - you build a house and raise a family. But the joy of The Sims is getting your characters in these ridiculous scenarios that you have varying degrees of control. Extreme Violence, which is just so over-the-top in how it lets you kill your Sims, is the way you can get the absurdity of the old Sims back. That makes the game so much more fun."
But the developers never wanted players to view a visit from the Grim Reaper – a literal cloaked character in the game who replaces your Sim with an urn when they die – to be seen as game over. "You can choose to view death as a final moment, you can choose to try to resurrect a Sim, you can choose to play or leave a Sim as a ghost, you can even choose to start over or avoid death all together," Pearson says. "It's really about the story the player is trying to tell or the way they want to explore the game. Like many other elements of The Sims, death is one tool, of many, in the simulation to create and tell your stories."
The cartoonish animation style and dark humour is what makes in-game deaths more palatable. "I think my favourite death moment is from The Sims 2 when elder Sims die of Old Age and the Grim Reaper shows up with a lei and hula dances them away to a tropical afterlife," Pearson says of the game's characteristic light-hearted attitude towards death. "I don't know why that sticks with me but it was heart-warming and silly at the same time."
This irreverence towards death may also provide a means for people to come to terms with real-world grief. "In real life, death is such a hard thing to deal with and accept. Having a game that walks you through it in a fun, humorous way while still being a life simulation game has helped me deal with grief," Mousie says.
"Death in The Sims is not treated like a hard stop, like you've finished a good book and you feel empty afterwards. It's just a natural form of progression. Having that buffer of comedy with death has helped me accept it better in real life. And the sheer ridiculousness of the Grim Reaper and death in The Sims helps takes the sting out. Because like in The Sims, bad stuff does happen in real life, and we have to cope with it."
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