I’ve been playing The Sims for a long, long time. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s basically the computer game version of real life. You control a person, called a Sim, and you live their life for them, telling them what to do and selecting their personality type, house, job, family, pets - you name it. You can use the game to make your dream life. In digital form, of course.

There have been several iterations of the Sims, and each one comes with its collection of expansion packs. These expansions let you play as vampires and werewolves, secret agents and evil spies. You can be a detective or a fireman or an astronaut or anything else you choose. The current game has so many different expansions that you could spend thousands of dollars if you purchased all of them. And I have. Although I always try to buy them when they’re on sale.

Through all the different versions of the game, and all the expansions, I’ve played as the same character, more or less. He’s basically a cooler version of me, with a nicer house and better clothes. He’s stylish and has friends, and a cat.

My Sim’s name is Jordan, just like mine, and all the neighbors in town love him. He’s easy to get along with. He’s handsome and funny and personable, and all the things that I’m not.

After so many thousands of hours playing the game, Sim-Jordan has become a beloved best friend of everyone in the game.

Considering the Sims AI, and how each character gets more intelligent the longer you play, I must have the smartest, most popular Sim in existence.

The cool thing about the game is that it constantly finds new ways to surprise you. Every time I play, something interesting happens that I wasn’t expecting.

Like today, for instance. I was playing as my usual character and he was going about his business, when I noticed that he was doing something different. Sim-Jordan was putting up scaffolding, as if he were about to work on his house, or do some sort of construction project. Then he began hauling over bricks and cement, using a wheelbarrow I had purchased as a garden decoration.

But that wheelbarrow wasn't supposed to actually work. Just like the cars in Sim-Jordan's driveway, it was just for decoration.

I watched him, fascinated, and saw that he was adding another floor onto the house I had made for him.

This made no sense, for a couple of reasons.

In The Sims there are two modes - Live Mode and Build Mode - and the characters are supposed to freeze in place whenever you switch over to Build Mode. Not only that, but the Sims are never the ones to build things or choose to redesign their house - only the person playing the game is allowed to make those decisions.

I selected my character and told him to go do something else. I didn’t want a second floor added onto my house. If I’d wanted that I would have done it myself, like I had with dozens of other houses I’d built.

“Go cook some food. You’re hungry,” I said to the computer screen. And strangely, I could have sworn he actually looked up at me and shook his little digital head.

“What the hell?”

Surely I’d just imagined that little head shake.

Sometimes the Sims were stubborn and took a few minutes to respond to commands. But they always listened eventually.

This time, though, my character didn’t listen. I hit the fast forward button, waiting for him to respond to my command. But he just kept hammering away at the construction - and pretty soon there was another floor added onto his modest house. The little sonofabitch was working quickly.

I tried to delete the new addition but the game glitched and wouldn’t let me do it. It wouldn't let me open my old save files either, as I tried desperately to undo what the digital me had done.

“Okay, fine! You want a second floor so bad, there you go! You got a second floor now. You probably screwed up my whole game, you stupid, glitchy Sim.”

I was talking to the computer screen again, and didn’t think twice about it. I did that a lot.

“Go to bed, you’re exhausted,” I told my Sim, and he actually listened to me this time.

He shuffled off to bed with his energy bar down to zero, colored bright red, and I did the same. It was 3AM and it had been a long day.

The next morning I woke up to find the computer was on. Had I forgotten to turn it off the night before? I couldn’t remember, but I always turned it off at night. It was such an ingrained habit that I didn’t even recall shutting it down.

But then I looked at the screen and saw my Sim was doing construction again.

I definitely remembered exiting the game, so how had it started up again?

Not only that, but now several other Sims were helping my character to build more levels on the house. It didn’t even look like a house now, I realized, it was more of a medium-sized skyscraper.

“What the hell are you little dicks up to?” I asked the screen, sitting down to observe.

I was no longer angry at my Sim for disobeying - now I was completely caught up in what they were doing. The whole neighborhood had come to help, I realized. And not only that, but they were dismantling their own houses and businesses to supply construction materials for the project.

Hollowed-out homes and shops could be seen on the overhead map, some of them with only the copper pipes left over, like the bones of a vermin eaten by vultures.

“This has gotta be a joke,” I said to myself, pulling out my phone.

I began to Google search for Sims news - looking for anything about the current gag the company was apparently playing on its customers. The designers of the game had a real sense of humor that sometimes bordered on obnoxious. This was different from anything they’d tried before, though. It was pretty funny, I had to admit. But at the same time I hoped they had a plan to restore my game to normal afterwards.

Some people are probably pissed off, I thought, searching Twitter and Google News, but finding nothing about the situation.

I couldn’t find anything talking about Sims building a tower and acting strangely. I tried searching for it every possible way and came up with a lot of Reddit posts and YouTube videos, but none that answered my question. I checked the game settings for “Neighborhood Stories” and tried to turn it off, but found it was already disabled. The Sims in my neighborhood should not have been doing what they were doing. It went against the game's fundamental programming.

I called EA customer service and was transferred to technical support, then back to customer service and back to technical support again, before hanging up the phone when they tried to do the same thing again.

It looked like I was on my own. Nobody knew how to fix this weird glitch I was experiencing.

I didn’t want to start a new game with a new character, but it looked like I was going to have to do just that.

Some games get really glitchy if you play for too long with the same character - I’d experienced that problem a few times before with other games - and so I began to resign myself to the fact that I would be starting from scratch, since none of my previous save files were opening now.

“I’ll give it one more night,” I said to myself, turning the computer off. “Maybe it will be back to normal again tomorrow.”

The next morning I got out of bed and went straight to the computer. This time I was positive I had turned it off.

But it was powered on again and The Sims was open, my same usual game running as if I had been playing in my sleep.

I sat down and stared numbly at the screen and tried to figure out how much progress the Sims had made on the tower they were building. Everyone in town was working on the project, it looked like. And I saw someone accidentally slip and fall from great heights and go plunging down from the top, screaming as they plummeted, and landing on the ground with a wet, goopy splat! The other Sims didn’t even take a second look at the body, they just kept working.

Except for a small crowd of them who were not working. Instead, they were assembled in a throng around a stage on ground level.

At the bottom of the tower, I saw my character was there, standing at a pulpit. He was dressed in a purple robe and speaking in Simlish - the language of the Sims. He held a book in the air and spoke in a pious tone of voice to a large crowd which had assembled all around him. He gesticulated and spoke in deep, rumbling, run-on sentences, like a Pentecostal preacher.

A banner was hanging above the doorway of the huge tower, the building that had once been my Sim’s house, and I couldn’t help but wonder what that banner said, written in Simlish as it was.

“Stairway to Heaven,” maybe?

I’d been raised Catholic and all the old Bible stories were still in the back of my mind, along with that good old Catholic guilt, which tormented me occasionally.

The Tower of Babble was one of those stories I remembered learning in church. It was an old testament story - from back when God was angry and vengeful. For those who might not know - it was when all of the early people of the earth started building a giant tower, hoping to reach heaven, but then God became upset and smashed it to pieces. The people who had built the tower suddenly began to speak in different languages after that and couldn’t understand each other anymore. Hence, the Tower of “Babble.”

I wondered if the Sims were building their own Tower of Babble, and were trying to reach me - their god. The one who was responsible for bringing them into existence, but also responsible for all their suffering and pain. I thought back to all the times I’d killed Sims for fun, feeding them to my cow plants and letting them get struck by lightning. I’d electrocuted them and drowned them, had them eaten by piranhas and set on fire. All for my own selfish entertainment.

Did they consider me their god? Or their devil?

Laughing at the absurd thought, I decided the whole thing really must have been a prank, or a trick that EA was playing on some of its customers. Maybe I was going to win some sort of prize, and that was why the customer service people on the phone were being so mysterious and pretending not to know what was causing the bug.

I sat back and watched with a smile on my face as the scene played out in front of me. I tried not to consider those terrible, paranoid thoughts again. Those were the thoughts of people who they locked up in padded rooms, not the thoughts of sane people.

My game characters weren't coming to life. They weren't building a tower so they could come and get me. It was just a weird, weird, glitch.

Right?

It occurred to me briefly that I should just delete the game after that.

I wish I had.

I told myself it was all okay, and just watched, as the tower got larger and larger, and the group of Sims huddled around my character began to sing dark, haunted-sounding hymns in their strange, alien language. Lighting candles, their faces flickering in their dim glow. It was 3AM in the game - but nobody was going to sleep.

It was like they were holding vigil. A midnight mass. A dark ceremony to celebrate something awful.

I watched the Sims for several more minutes before I had to go out and do some errands. I turned off the computer, wondering to myself if it would be turned back on again when I returned.

After running several errands, getting groceries and other necessities, I finally arrived back home again. My hands were full of heavy bags and I dropped them all at once, causing a jar of pickles to shatter loudly on the hardwood floor, as I stood staring at the chaos of my apartment.

Someone had been inside, and they had vandalized the place. The refrigerator was hanging open, books were on the floor, clothing was ripped to shreds.

And worst of all, my computer screen was broken. It looked like something had smashed it with a hammer from the inside (impossible!), and there were shards of broken glass all over my desk.

That was when I saw the footprints, about my size, leading from the cracked computer screen, to the chair, and then onto the floor. Caked in mud and dirty with grime.

“No… It’s not possible…”

The door closed behind me and I heard a voice speak softly, sending a chill up my back.

“Sul, sul,” it said.

I gulped, looking at the slightly digitized face which stared back at me. Sim-Jordan looked at me and cocked its head like a confused dog, waiting for me to respond. It took a step forward and spoke again.

“Sul, sul,” it said, now with a hint of impatience.

“Hello, er, sul, sul,” I said back. That was Simlish for hello. I knew that much after playing for so long.

“Hooba es dis place?” it said, taking a step forward, a creepy, computer-generated grin playing at the corners of its lips.

Each time it came closer, I heard a burst of static and distortion and winced at the pain of feedback whining in my ears. It was like having the stereo playing when you call in to a radio station - the sound of something hearing itself and repeating it back with knives scratching glass.

“Earth. This is… This is reality,” I said, hoping it understood what that meant.

“Hooba es reality?” my Sim asked, its eyebrows furrowing, taking another step closer.

That high-pitched whine of feedback blasted me again, growing in intensity by tenfold. I took two stumbling steps backwards, reeling into the fridge and catching the corner of the door square in my back. It flared up in terrible pain and I cried out, opening my eyes to see the thing was standing just in front of me now.

“HOOBA ES REALITY?”

It reached out and grabbed me by the throat and it felt like I was being scalded by a hot brand across my neck. The feedback whine in my ears was so loud and so painful now that I didn’t even realize I was screaming until a few long moments had passed and I wondered who was making that awful sound.

My Sim's head tilted again as he looked in my eyes with a cold stare.

He dropped me to the ground after several long minutes.

I knew what he wanted. I had to tell him, no matter how mad it might make him.

“Your reality… It’s not real. It’s a game. It’s entertainment. You live in a simulation.”

It looked down at its hands and looked in the mirror I had set up nearby, as if having a revelation.

“Neeshga. Wibb’s not possible.”

“It is. It’s the truth.”

I thought for a moment he would run back to the computer and somehow climb back inside - but instead he just continued to stare, his eyes flicking over to the smashed computer screen just behind me.

A too-real smile spread across his face and I looked back to see a furry, black-clawed hand reach out from the computer screen. And I heard a growl begin to emanate from within.

I wish I’d never bought that fucking werewolf expansion.

After a quick escape, I ended up at a nearby internet cafe where I typed this up to warn you all. If you play the Sims and your characters start acting strange - delete the game immediately.

Otherwise who knows what we might unleash on the real world

JG