Cultural Studies on 'The Sims'

That sounds a really cool idea for an essay!

Why do you play the Sims? To chill out after busy days at work and for a bit of fun and creative escapism. 
Have you perhaps even created yourself, family and acquaintances and played with them? Experimented with making a sim version of me once but can't get an accurate version without adjustable heights. Also I prefer to make up fictional characters and love making them as wacky and colourful as possible. The addition of occults with the Sims 4 really gave me some creative fun. I have been inspired with new ideas for stories for my writing and art outside of the sims from playing with my sims characters.
If you have deliberately killed Sims once (or even several times), why did you do it? I haven't done this since the Sims 2. I stopped doing it when they started making sims look and move more realistically because, for me, that killed the humour and made it more disturbing. I think I mainly did it to create a ghost or as an experiment to see if it could be done and how long it would take. Back then, I never saw my Sims as anything other than aspects of a game and felt no emotional attachment to them. I have more of a soft spot for my sims now because they help fuel my imagination for stories when I'm having a creative block. 
How did you feel about it and why? It's been a very long time since I have done this but I don't think I really felt much apart from the satisfaction of creating a ghost to haunt the lot. There were some deaths, such as starving, that I stopped doing after one go because the sound effects were disturbing to me. 
If you had the opportunity in reality to determine your own fate and that of others, as is possible in the Sims, would you do it and why (not)  It would be a very difficult choice (and it's also difficult to answer without knowing exactly what I have control of. Can I change people's bodies and my own? Can I take away people's pain or illness? And can I reverse the changes if I change my mind?) If I could control people exactly like the sims: yes to aspects such as being able to change my appearance to whatever I felt like (blue skin and pink hair one day, green hair with purple skin the next...) ; yes to being able to perform voodoo and ventrilo-fart on people who have wronged me; definite yes to being able to become a mermaid and for other merfolk to exist! (not sure about the other occults, those magical abilities might cause a bit too much destruction in the wrong hands). And absolute yes to being able to land any job without having to do an interview!

Being able to alter fate sounds very tempting but I feel there would be too much risk of the power corrupting me, even though I would use it for good in the first instance, so I'll decline. Even if I was able to alter my own fate to the life of my dreams, there could still be repercussions and consequences as a result of my intervention so I wouldn't want to take the risk.