The Sims Online Hosts The Mafia

If I told you this, would you believe me? Try doing so, because it's the truth. And young people are busy killing each other at an alarming rate in this world. Do we really need something like a pseudo Mafia causing the same sorts of problems?

Right now, the online game ?The Sims Online? which is labeled a ?T for Teens? game has been overrun by several obviously Mafia named families. They are very aggressive and very obvious. Whether or not they are the real Mafia is a question which I cannot answer. But one thing they really do, even though it is to virtual and not real houses: they trash people's hard won properties. The kind of properties that people would like to build a lifetime to achieve. Beautiful, sprawling mansions you can't own in real life, the kind that are totally out of reach for the vast majority of people.

Some people have been playing The Sims Online for years. Maybe you think they're weird, maybe you think they're no one to feel sorry for. Maybe you're even rooting for the pseudo Mafia. But not me. I had real friends going on that game, and slowly but surely they began destroying our Sims houses, which were our prized possessions on that game.

I have a friend (an entirely different situation) who was screwed over for $15,000 real life dollars when he tried to sell some photographs and they were more or less taken from him. Is that a good thing to do to someone? And is it a good thing to interrupt some high tech 'decent? game involving minor adult activity and corrupt it still further? I am so tired, I don't know.

To ?green up? socially on The Sims Online at all, it forces you to do interactions that are rather similar to having sex with animals (wrestle with your dog, but you should see what it looks like if you really see it) and that is bad enough, but rather bearable. Sigmund Freud would tell you that such behavior is relatively normal, that having an orgy session involving ?heavy petting? with your own puppy, where it loves you and licks your face and you are all over each other, is fun.

But what is not fun is coming home one day to having your hard won, worked for skills or money house trashed by unknown people while your town is crawling with ?De Corleoni Territori,? ?Italian Mafia Empire,? ?The Vito Family Territory? and so forth. I am not talking Anti-Italian Defamation. I am not talking against Italians. I HAD Italian friends on the game. I am talking about a bunch of people either acting like the Mafia, or worse yet, actually being connected with them somehow and taking over a children's video game. Or were they involved in the first place, and is Maxis a Mafia held game company? Look at the names. Maxis, Mafia.

It is true the game is labeled ?T for Teens? and is connected with what looks like some harmless fake gambling. The money being exchanged seems to be Simoleans at first. Fake money you get by working at odd jobs on the game, and you also acquire skills so you can make more of the fake money. But you can also buy blocks of the money on EBay, roughly $15.00 for 1 million Simoleans. And you can buy ?rares,? which people barter and pay for, such as Mystic Trees, tigers and cheetahs. Makes it looks like you're not spending money, like the gambling is harmless. But is this what you want your teenager to be doing? For 20 hours a day, five days a week?

Okay, video addiction is bad enough, but we're talking about Organized Crime here as well. Remember a little place called Columbine High School?

And the Mafia is in and roughly controlling every town that I've visited on The Sims Online, and I've roughly checked them all over. Dan's Grove, Jolly Pines, Blazing Falls, Alphaville. The Mafia is everywhere.

I have talked to these ?Mafia? gentlemen and ladies, and visited their houses. They don't have very much to do at them but the usual Sims stuff. I'm afraid they have discovered game ?cheats? and, being bored, are using them to destroy other game players? properties. And yes, I have evidence, not hard unfortunately, that they have watched people play the game from a distance. One of them knew about something he shouldn't have known.

A lady in fun fired a game cannon at me, in private, and this Mafia guy knew that had happened. I don't think she told him about it. How did he know? She did it just for laughs, but it's not very funny that he knew about it. He couldn't have known about it unless he'd seen it happen, in all probability. And he wasn't anywhere on the property or onscreen at the time.

The same Mafia dude, who kept denying he was Mafia while dressed in an obvious game-style Mafia suit and with the name ?Riccardo?, also told me you can't trash houses unless you're a roommate or the home owner. But one of the house trashing victims had no roommates whatsoever. And she wasn't motivated to trash her own house?no insurance money is involved.

Game players on this game can be quite friendly. I made a lot of good friends doing things like making pizzas, opening up my own skills house business, doing minor gambling (legal for adults and I'm 45 years old) and in general partying. You can play high tech, beautiful looking musical instruments and feel like you're there. It's a great game for cripples like me. I can barely move sometimes in real life, and I can really move around a lot as a beautiful, young looking 20 year old. Except that I can't do it anymore. I quit the game because of the extremely heavy Mafia presence that was starting to visit my house and breathe hotly down my neck.

?Riccardo? showed up. At my house. The same day Jesse's house was trashed. It was the second house trashing since I had started playing there. Obvious Mafia guy, obviously scouting my house. Denied everything completely. This was after two of my friends? houses had been trashed. Want to know anything about terrorism? Now I know what it is. A little too thoroughly for my tastes. The Mob was making it obvious that I could be next. Why is that exactly?

?Yeah, they're just a bunch of teenagers who like to trash houses?? ?They're not the real Mafia, they're just kids.? Like the ones at Columbine?

Boredom with what the Sims had to offer, or a lack of desire to wait for the further events? We had chat rooms going, and Eminem (might be the real one from rap music) was there, helping to build a SimBall stadium. Some guy called Eminem, and he wanted to build us a ball stadium. What if the pseudo ?Mafia? decides to trash that too? Em there might have been trying to do something real and good for a change. Dunno.

And all I could do was flee. I destroyed our house before the Mafia could trash it. I simply deleted all of our characters and quit the game. Oh, yeah, I thanked them on the way out. I thanked the Mafia. I told them a mixed truth: I was spending too much time on the game anyway. I'm a professional writer, and I really want to spend the time writing. Well, I certainly have found something to write about now.

Parents, watch the video games your teenagers are playing. You might turn around and suddenly find you have a Mafia member for a teenage daughter or son, in Real Life. I know that now. You might think I'm crazy, but I'm not. A man told me recently he's been finding kids that stay all day on those games. I'm not the only ?nutty? parent here who's getting worried.

And The Sims Online is the haven for a slinking beast with no better name than the Neo Mafia: ?My New Family.? And for the last time, if you're Italian, I am not picking on you. But if you get all stressed out over what I'm saying, I'd like to know you a little less well. And do you need to be affiliated with these mysterious strangers? Are you a parent? Ma fia? Neo ma fia?

Yes, parents, that is what it means in Italian-American. My new family.

Still feel comfortable with the concept?

I don't. I pulled my daughter off what I had thought was a harmless game, where I had been restricting some of her activities due to their turning out to be of a too adult nature (I hadn't known about the gambling and the love houses, but they turned out to seem fairly harmless) and myself as well. I destroyed the skills house I had built and the store she had so carefully applied herself to and had been having some fun with for awhile. It wasn't interfering with her homework, but she did say it was getting a little boring for her. But she learned a little from running her store. What did she sell there? Mostly furniture and pets.

Maybe she was supposed to be strong-armed into giving up her money?

Yeah, pick me to death because I let my kid play it. Oh, rahs for you. I had played the offline version of the Sims, and it had seemed pretty harmless. The big deal was they let gays kiss on it. Didn't bug us much.

The timing was right for us to have quit the game. Neither one of us wanted to play it much longer. But I wonder what a game is doing out there that is stuffed with ?Mafiosi? who are real people in real life, not just characters on a screen whom you blow away with pretend guns. In The Sims Online, you are a real person in a real life situation, where you have to go to the bathroom as your character, your character can die by being mangled at work on the job and get revived by a reviver, other intriguing and exciting things can happen, and you can even get bored but solve that problem. It's a good game for people with some time on their hands. And it teaches real life values involving working for a living, getting skills and needing fun.

And I was talking to people my own age other than my husband and family for the first time in years. Real people play the characters on the game. Real people owned that property that somebody trashed. Real people suffer when it turns out that the place is under control by the Mafia.

I reported them to the FBI. I told a gentleman at an acclaimed newspaper about these strange events. The Mafia people I talked to tried to claim that I was crazy, that I was imagining things. The ?friend? I had in the Mafia tried to calm me down, told me that they are a hokey Mafia imitation that has nothing to do with the real McCoy. He sounded reasonable. But the other two of them kept going on, ?You're crazy. Nothing like that is happening.?

One of them called me a drunk, and I don't even drink. I have to take medications for my disability, they don't cloud my head, and I can't drink.

Those guys were lying to me. If so, then they are Neo Mafia. What would that mean exactly? What exactly would it mean, if they have the technology to get past the defenses in the game and tear people's houses down?

?Trust me. I'm only Italian. I'm not a Mafia member. You must be a bigot. It's because my skin is brown. Yadayadayaday.? You can be whatever skin color you want to be on TSO, and either sex for that matter.

First town on The Sims map: Dan's Grove. First thing you see when you enter there: Italian Mafia Empire. It was a little hidden, but not very. Sort of to the South. It's obviously their beachhead, the place they originally hit.

Then they simply moved out from there. And they can hide. When you go there, to Dan's Grove, you don't find very many Mafia. They seemingly moved out from there. Trouble is they can move right back there at lightning speed. That's where they trashed the two houses. Or?whatever. Yes dear, it's all twelve year old kids. And my name is Auntie Em. Maybe I was a fool for ever playing it. I assumed it was just a game, and someone was being silly.

I was wrong.

I hope the FBI does something, but God help anybody, I don't know what. They'd have to join the game to infiltrate it and gather evidence. Gosh, that would be so going overboard for them. Maybe they could just eat donuts, drink coffee, and pretend to look for terrorists instead? Or maybe half-crazed Black people and Native Americans from the sixties? You can buy money on EBay to sell on that TSO game, kids are on that game, and they are being threatened into being recruited into the I would assume mostly adult Mafia?right now?

'the real one or the virtual one?

Who knows?