I'm in the "I never tortured my sims for fun" boat. Sure, sims die and suffer and make each other's life miserable over the course of the stories I play, but that's sims doing that to other sims. I'm strictly outside my game.
However, I did all the fun things the author mentions about Zoo Tycoon: dropping visitors into predator fish tanks, unleashing the big cats on the visitors, testing which species eats which other (sadly, hunger doesn't fill up)... So the appeal of torturing pixels is certainly there, it just doesn't manifest when I play the Sims. Maybe I percieve Zoo Tycoon as a game but the Sims as a storytelling environment? I mean, I wouldn't punish my OCs for something I had them do in a story, either. That would be silly.
