Sims, the most recent creation of Will Wright, designer of Sim City, is turning out to have a few unexpected features. When the game was introduced earlier this year it immediately became a best seller, following the tradition of earlier games in allowing gamers to plan cities and watch them take on lives of their own.  But Wright secretly decided to push the interactivity and realism of Sims one step further. On the Sims Web site, he casually began offering components which were supposed to enhance the homes of Sims: party balloons, plants, a pet guinea pig, a moose head to hang on the wall, a cuckoo clock, wall lights and slot machines. Each item was, in essence, a piece of code specifying how the object would fit into a living room or den and how it would respond to the actions of game characters. But what many of them were also Trojan horses, and the players who downloaded them were unleashing havoc on their sims. Soon Sims players discovered that their pet guinea pig was carrying a potentially fatal virus that could kill a human character in the game. The disease spread from one species to another, and once loose in the human Sims population, has also begun to infect other characters. And in the underlying software code, the guinea pig was also had a meta-life as a virus that surreptitiously affected the game?s whole play..



The Sims bulletin board has been full of lively debate over the secret code. Some players have been agonising over the loss of game characters that they had spent dozens of hours developing. The characters had taken on the qualities of pets, and their creators reacted with outrage and confusion to the plague. One player wrote: ?My Sims keep getting a cold and dying. Has someone done something to my game or is this possible? Can anyone help? Is there a way to cure them??The guinea pig only spreads the disease if a Sims player neglects to clean its cage, said Wright, and only if a player reaches into the cage to pet the software animal and is bitten will he get sick. Someone who has gotten sick sneezes and coughs and will infect other human characters in the game who come near enough. Even then, though, death is not inevitable. A sick character will return to health if given sufficient rest. Ignore the illness, however, and your Sims family is in danger. You have been warned.