"Why Are We Sadistic Towards Our Sims?" (New Statesman article)

Im a really boring vanilla player, I cheat and so, but no killing or torturing, not since my first. I still remember that little blackhaired girl from sims1. Her in the little blacked out room, no toilet no notning, she just came at a really bad time. Then social services came, I had to abandon that game agtet that.

Getting things out via Sim torture can be very cathartic. Picture an extremely annoying sister-in-law as a Sim. Torturing and killing them off can keep you from slapping the bejeasus out of them in real life.

Morbid curiosity. Hopefully, most of us won't treat humans as we do our poor sims, but the sims at least gives us an idea of what life would be like if we *did* go to the darkside, without actually getting any blood on our hands.

Never tortured or deliberately killed a sim.

ETA: Except for the up all night challenges in Sims 1. :)

This kind of article omits mentioning the origin of the Sims franchise. It originally was centered on dark humor and the central idea to give the player the role of an evil god. It's funny to see how the Sims has become more and more innocent with time, very far from its original concept.
Honestly, who has never done anything "evil" in the Sims ? Who has never gone to edit town or manage households and culled randomly generated townies ? Who has never scared other sims, made them pee on themselves or laughed when they got attacked by bees or caught fire while cooking for the first time ? And there's nothing morally wrong with it, because it's fiction, and that's what makes it awesome : anything is possible.

There was considerably more misery in earlier games. I don't see anything in common with the current game where sims are perpetually happy, where their needs are extremely easy to refill, and where it's become much harder to die.

Not at all. Originally, you controlled everything, you could create as much misery for your sims as you wanted, you could be totally sadistic and it was part of the game's purpose, giving you this possibility. Now it's very different, the Sims has become a management game where extreme happiness is the purpose and other ways to play have become "deviant".

I guess it can be more interesting to play a sim that has no house, or only has a sleeping bag for a bed. Drowning sims in swimming pools has always been a thing for example. I remember back in the sims 1 days the guide encouraged it if you wanted to get rid of a sim!

If your sims have a beautiful mansion and money is no object, it can get boring very fast. I don't tend to kill off sims. Well I accidentally killed one yesterday in the sims 3 -(How was I meant to know the first time he tried to repair the tv he would die? )

But if people want to play that way that's not a big deal, everyone is different. I found it extremely hard to kill a sim off in the sims 4 so I've never managed it. I have thought about it though. Especially with all the CL townies that appear in Willows Creek all the darn time.

If having the right of life and death on your sims and choosing who will have a great life and who will be unhappy (or worse) doesn't equate to being an evil god as a central concept, then I don't know what this is. It just doesn't say its name in order to not make it a mature game.

I'm never, ever sadistic towards my ( own) sims. I take very good care of them and make sure they are as happy as they can be.

OTOH, I can be very sadistic to pre-made sims and game created sims. Those I can kill and torture, and starve and drown, and burn, quite easily.