Do you ever wish your life could get expanded?

Welcome to AboutPaula and her views. Well, today I got something through the post. It was the new expansion for the Sims 2 game, FreeTime. Now, I will tell you that I am a big fan of the Sims games but I can't really narrow it down to just one reason so I will give a few!

• You get to control somebody's life without them complaining to much!

• You get job postings in the paper everyday so you can find something to bring in the pay and you are hired immediately and that is without having an interview.

• You can make friends easily enough and you get a welcome wagon come along to greet you when you first move in.

• Depending on what expansions you have, you can get pets, go shopping, skating, bowling, own a car, go to university without much trouble.

• You get skill points just by painting some really rubbish painting or doing some exercise from some video or even by making cereal.

• When you leave uni or home, you automatically are given 20,000 Simoleons to buy a house.

• Houses are really cheap when you move and if you want to expand, no need for planning permission and the Sim god does it all for you. It might be crap but even so, you have more room!

That is just the start of it. Once you get sucked in, you can make legacy's and build perfect houses. Really, you can make of it what you will. It does take a lot of time to get things going but once it does, you really can enjoy it.

The new expansion is about hobbies. You can get your sims really focussed on something like dancing or painting and so every time they do something related to that, you get points and enthusiasm. This can then be used for getting a new aspiration or something related to life experience. You also get invited to secret places that are related to your hobby where you can go and talk to other people who like the same things. Another easy way of making friends which is always helpful. Making friends on here can be easy if you have one sim but once you make a family, it can be difficult maintaining the friendships. Just one thing to look out for!

Anyway, the point of this post is not really to advertise the new expansion as such, it is to ask one question. If you had the option to add to your life, would you do it? It could be a range of things, maybe if you purchased the expansion, you would have the opportunity to forever open business's no matter how badly they fail or maybe you could go to university, for free if you had enough scholarships! You could even get into your hobbies and make a bit of cash for them.

Of course, someone might point out that really, you can do that anyway. What's stopping you from going out there, making your go carts or whatever you might do, and sell them on. Well there isn't anything. Maybe you should do it. It could be fun!

Anyway, here's another question, if you could expand your life by one small payment (say about 40-50 (enter your currency here)), what would it be? Answers in the comments very welcome!

Paula

Take responsibility for your actions

Welcome to AboutPaula and her views. In this blog I want to discuss topics that are out there in the world today and I want to start doing something about it. I think everyone who writes something, wants it to affect people in some way. Now, I don't want to offend people, in fact, I want to make people think about things and if moved in some way, leave comments and feelings about that subject. Now, before you start leaving comments that say that I suck or whatever, I want you to know that these are only my opinions. They are not backed up by anything (if they are, links will be left) so if anything is wrong with what I say, please by all means link me to the stories and research that shows it.

Now that I have made that clear, I can start on today's subject. Today I want to talk about how people who commit robberies, murders, muggings, car thefts etc. blame it on the fact that they played it in a game. I'm sorry but I have to think that anybody who plays games like that should know the difference between real and a game. Using what you have 'learnt' within a game is just being stupid and if a certain person who does think they can thief cars because they done it in grand theft auto, for example, they should not be allowed to play games like that.

Like I said at the beginning of the post, I am not a professor at anything, I do not claim to know anything about the affects on the human mind but if I knew that I could have stopped something from happening by not letting somebody play games, then I would be seriously disgusted at myself. Now, I have a six year old niece and for Christmas, she got her very own DS Lite. She loves it and sometimes we cannot get it off of her but we make sure that the games she plays on it, are appropriate for her age. At the moment she is playing a game based on the show Scooby Doo. She loves the program and knows that it isn't real. She can tell the difference between something that somebody made to have fun and something that is real. She knows that spooky houses/funfair's are very unlikely* and also knows that the characters who play monsters/ghosties are in fact people and those meddling kids always find them out.

I just think that if she ever started to really believe that she can take a gun/car/ghost in real life, she would start to show signs that she believed that and then we could prevent her from playing/seeing things related to the thing she believed in. People who cause murders and accidents and then say that the game made them do it, need to take responsibility for what they have done. The game did not put them in the car or give them a gun, they did that. Yes, it may have given them the idea to do it, I am in no way denying that. People get ideas like that from the littlest things but when someone say, kills somebody with a knife, the game or tv show did not make them do it, it did not force them to go into the kitchen, pick up the knife, hunt down the person they stabbed and hurt them. It just didn't. Whether or not it may have broached the subject that you can do it, does not mean it actually forced them to do it. Also, just because it is a game, does not mean that it is the only way of them getting the idea to hurt/rob/kill somebody. You see it in films and in real life more and more these days and again, this does not mean that the people who do these bad things can blame these shows, they did not force them to do it. They did it on there own free will, nothing else.

Now, you may wonder why I have bought this up. Well, it is simple really. More and more people who do killings are blaming games for the reason of why they did it and they are being accepted as the reason. The latest thing to have happened was the shootings at Idaho University. This was a very bad thing and as of yet, I do not think they have a motive for why the killer decided to take in four guns and kill himself and five innocent people. My Dad watches Fox News. Even though we are in the UK, we get it over here on Sky. Anyway, for those who don't know, they have people come on the news shows and discuss what the killer was thinking and why he could have done it. Now one of the people who came on there was called Jack Thompson and he is apparently, a person who knows all about shootings in Colleges. I may have that wrong but that is how it was labelled on the video! So, he came on the show and had said a bit about the killer and then he said 'we think he played games, which could be related to this'. Now, like I have been saying, this is a ridiculous motive for doing a shooting. Playing games is in no way like real life and as everyone knows, you cannot reset real life once you have died or have done something very wrong. Playing games did not put the gun in his hands and force him into that classroom.

So, to wrap up what I have said, Games do not actually force people to go out and kill/hurt people. They do not give them the real guns/cars/weapon of choice and they do not put them where ever they are when they hurt people so stop using them as a excuse. If you decide to go out and kill people, take the damn responsibility for it.

Please leave comments and hopefully we can put this discussion out there. Thank you.

Paula