It started with the promise of an online Utopia, a virtual land of kindness and friendship, a place where human morality and values, free from the constraints of economic and social necessities, would rise through proving once and for all that we are, collectively, good.
Instead, the world of The Sims Online is now facing a nightmare scenario, crime, underage prostitution and organized crime are running rampant, Alphaville, is now open for business.
Alphaville is the equivalent of a Metropolis in the world of The Sims Online. You get to choose your appearance, your home and job but it seems that no one can escape the realities of the Real world. The promise of a Utopia was an obvious marketing trick by the game's developers and publisher's and anyone with a basic understanding of computer games and Psychology could have immediately told you that gamers would eventually use the world to vent off all the frustration, disappointment and anger they have garnered from the Real world.
It is not however, that anyone expected a perfect world to be created by the Online version of The Sims, after all, however technologically advanced, a game is still, pretty much, just that, it cannot offer the player the joy or happiness their character may feel, so eventually the novelty wears off. It is the extent of the corruption in Alphaville which is turning it from a game to a social experiment.
Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor at the University of Michigan was a Sims Online player for a long time and created the Alphaville Herald, a newspaper which aimed to chronicle life in the game and to follow the creation of political, economic and social structures within it. Instead the Herald now features interviews with Alphaville's child prostitutes, sadomasochists, members of Sims Organized Crime and members of its shadow government. The latest headline in the paper, reads: Interview with anonymous on Alphaville's bondage, discipline and sadomasochism community.
When Professor Ludlow reported the shady goings-on to the game's creators he received a cold silence and saw his accounts disappear. He now hosts his newspaper himself and is determined to impose some controls over Alphaville's downward spiral. Considering the severe nature of some of the events happening in virtual world of The Sims Online and the fact that underage gamers may be exposed to some of those, it is understandable that some form of regulation has to be implemented.
For the time being you can read the Alphaville Herald's latest edition and visit a Sims Online BDSM site by following the download tab above.
