The Sims, a nonlinear life simulation video game, is not really anything like a regular video game.

Instead of reaching some goal, players get to basically act like God with their avatars, dressing up and giving jobs and relationships to fairly realistic looking cartoon people.

A lot of the pleasure of the “game” seems to be about getting the digital people into bad situations, carting some Sim off to jail or having a Sim put on a hundred pounds before a high school reunion.

What makes Sims game-like at all is the ability employ cheats.

At Gamefaqs there is a set of listed cheats that allows players to call the handyman (soak.create_soak_handyman_situation), call for a maid (soak.create_soak_maid_situation) and take possession of homes that have become temporarily free (freerealestate {on/off}). There is even something called “Death By Embarrassment,” which will cause a Sim to die within five hours. The code for that is sims.add_buff Buff_Mortified.

Over at Cheat Code Central there are codes to help you destroy a relationship (relationship.destroy [your Sim's ID number] [target Sim's ID number]).

This will all come in handy to gamers out there that want to give their Sims a bad time.

In a recent article in The Independent, which cataloged the worst things gamers had confessed to doing to their Sims, the results went from the laughable to the down right evil. And there seems to be a lot of water death involved.

"One time I killed a Sim by drowning. Then I made everyone show up to his funeral in swimwear," confessed a gamer with dark sense of comedic irony.

Another gamer, who should be writing scripts for Lifetime, said, "I found this girl that I really wanted my Sim to marry. Problem is she already had a husband, so rather than just doing the (relatively) normal thing and just increasing the relationship and convincing her to break up with him, I instead became best friends with her husband, convinced him to move in with me, and then drowned him in a pool so I could marry his wife.”