Sim Sopranos Shakedown for Simoleans

Alphaville’s
a tough town, the sort of place where even the street-smart are rarely
safe and newcomers are often eaten alive. You can call the
cops, but they usually don’t arrive in time. That’s why so many Alphaville
residents seek justice by hiring guys like Jeremy Chase.

He runs a
band of thugs who’ll gladly deal out ugly punishments for the right
price. Chase, a 26-year-old resident of Sacramento, runs the Sim Mafia
 thesimmafia.com), a gang of digital enforcers for a digital world. They
lay down the law inside the Sims Online, a multiplayer computer game
run by Electronic Arts. "Our job is to basically take those complaints
from the normal citizens of the game, who can’t go to EA because EA won’t
do anything about it, and do an eye-for-an-eye for them," Chase
said.

If a player feels his character, or Sim, is being ill treated and can
get no justice from the game operators at EA, he can arrange to have
bad things happen to rival players, by approaching a local Mafia and
ponying up some of the game’s currency, called simoleons.

by Hiawatha Bray in the Boston Globe