God Game Sadism

My little brother, eleven years old with green and orange rubber bands on his braces, enjoys feeding live gazelles to Bengal tigers and packing orcas into fish tanks.  He giggles when he hears multitudes of men, women and children getting mauled to death by lions.  But most people would consider him mentally healthy.  He’s just an avid Zoo Tycoon player.

Very few of us can honestly say, “I have never gone on a mass killing spree.”  Games like the Sims series and the Tycoon series were practically made with a large red “begin the Apocalypse” button; Sim City 4 now lets you call forth volcanoes through the downtown sidewalks.  With The Sims, we think it’s cute when our Sims burn dinner, wave their arms and make worried noises, and eventually get consumed by the flames.  With RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, we think it’s fantastic when a rogue roller coaster mows down virtual people, an activity known as “peep bowling.”  The best zoos are overrun with escaped allosaurs.  For some reason, chaos can be more appealing than order.

Some of you may object to my description of virtual destructive behavior as sadism because our low-res victims cannot really feel pain.  Virtual lions chew up virtual people, but they always spit them back out onto the ground, where they will simply lie bewildered for a moment before picking themselves back up.  Still, the grotesque rag dolls flying through the air and the clouds of screams coming through your speakers really ought to register as “pain” in any normal limbic system.  Unfortunately, our mirror neurons haven’t been performing so well lately.  Fifty years after the debut of television, exploding bodies have become old hat.

Anyway, if you still don’t think that simulated people can feel pain, are you aware of the fact that you yourself are probably a simulation?  Natural disasters, dramatic tragedies of all kinds - all stemming from a technologically advanced alien God hitting the red button over and over, then making montages for Youtube with Dragonforce as ambience.