My object, according to its description, is exactly what the Sims need! It increases their energy, comfort, hygiene, fun, and mood (with most of those being advertised as strongly changing whatever), and it decreases their hunger and bladder! Oh wait, in the code, it actually decreases the character's hygiene, social skills, and logic. It also increases the person's age as well as slightly increasing the person's fun. In other words, like most drugs, it creates a dependency cycle where the Sims "see" this drug as providing what they need whereas it actually makes them need it more.

There's actually one more surprise, too. Drugs kill, and there's a 1/50 chance that this electronic drug will electrocute your Sim.

The question you're probably asking yourselves is why would I make something so sick and twisted? Well, the idea came from two places. First of all, the first time I saw the VR helmet, which this object is based off of, I thought it looked like the drug tek from the TekWar series. Secondly, when we made "Sim Heroin" with the Joy Booth, I started wondering if it'd be possible to create a dependency cycle in this world. Turns out it is.

However, there were a bunch of things I couldn't figure out how to have this drug do. For instance, at first, I wanted to have it affect your relationship with the person standing closest to you. I found out how to get the closest person, but I couldn't figure out how to affect your relationship with that person. There is the relationship primitive, but it doesn't seem to work. Furthermore, in the code from the other interactions (eg kiss, tickle), there is some weird stuff going on to create social interactions. Well, I finally figured out what was happening in those other functions, but the problem came down to the parameters being passed in. I couldn't figure out a way to make the user absolutely start to like/hate the closest other Sim more.

After that, I decided to really mess with the Sims and make this drug randomly change the user's gender. That wasn't as interesting, though, even though it worked. Finally, I sat back and thought about what else I could make this drug do to people, and that's when I found the kill functions.

I started playing around with the kill object functions. My first goal was to try and make your Sim kill another Sim. That didn't work. Trust me, I tried really hard to create virtual drug-induced homicide. Next, I worked on getting the drug user to kill itself. I got that working, but when you just use kill object, it removes the object and still lets it exist in the world (in fact, the Sim became VERY happy, full, etc, etc when I just removed it). I looked around a bit, and I finally stumbled onto the do electrocution function. Man oh man, what a perfect way for an electronic drug user to die! I added it in, tested it, and it worked! Next, I added a random factor so that it only kills the Sim 1/50ish times, and it works!

However, if your Sim uses the drug 50 times and still doesn't get electrocuted, because it ages by a year every time it uses the drug, the Sim will still die shortly anyway! It's pretty funny because the ghost then walks around the house, and the corpse lies right in front of the drug. It's amusing to watch the other Sims interact with the ghost. Furthermore, sometimes, the Sim will mourn over the urn and then need to use the drug to get over the pain.

I also used the interactions the Sims had to tune Sim Drug. Namely, I tried it with a few values, watched it run, and changed them accordingly. What I wanted was to create an object that people would keep on coming back to, that would change their interactions with others, and that could consistently cause some other behavior. After a while, what I finally created was an object that at least one Sim (usually Mortimer, although sometimes Bella) would think of from a distance. Secondly, after using the drug, the Sims would suddenly have a desire to have contact with one another (probably because the drug decreased their social level so much, and even though it advertises that it increases it, I chose that the Sims couldn't use it consecutively). Next, after using it, the Sim would also feel dirty, and it would suddenly go and take a bath or shower.

Ironically, after letting the game run for a while, I started to see other real-lifeish things. For example, the other Sim would get hooked on the drug too. Then, if the other Sim wasn't around to comfort the user after it "felt the speed," the Sim would choose to eat.

Eventually, the Sims feel into a balance that still had them using the drug multiple times per day, perhaps even striking a balance between pushing, sleeping, bathing, talking, and eating. Then, a day or two would pass with the Sims not using the drug again, yet suddenly, one of them would rediscover it (perhaps with a little dues ex machina), and the cycle would start over. All in all, it's a rather interesting experience to see the similarities between a virtual world with drugs and the real world.