I’ve spent countless hours playing the Sims and Sims2. So has my daughter, who shares my enjoyment of games that allow shopping, decorating and home-building without costing actual dollars and cents. So I was quite surprised today to read allegations by Jack Thompson, an attorney specializing in lawsuits against video-game makers, that Sims2 promotes paedophilia.

Say what???

According to Mr. Thompson, a simple code hack can be used to remove the little blur box covering the privates of any Sim changing clothes, bathing or going to the bathroom. Once gone, the Sim is shown fully unclothed and this means, according to Mr. Thompson, that EA Games intentionally released a product that would expose children to nudity.

But not just any nudity. If Jack Thompson is to be believed — and the jury’s too busy laughing to comment on that one — once the blur blox is removed, gamers of any age are exposed to “full frontal nudity, including nipples, penises, labia, and pubic hair”.

Moreover, Mr. Thompson reasons, since some Sims are children, paedophiles are going to capitalize on this mod to “rehearse, in virtual reality, for their abuse.”

“Mods are readily available via the Internet to turn the characters in your company’s The Sims 2 into nudes with exposed genitalia. This includes the children in the game. EA has made this modding easy by making it readily possible to remove ‘the blur’ from the genital areas. Even the New York Times’ web site is providing this cheat code to remove the blur…. (Source: GameDaily)

Well, now. That’s another kettle of fish altogether, isn’t it?

Maybe not. See, prior to publishing his “open letter” about this horrible danger, Mr. Thompson neither contacted EA Games nor tried implementing the nudity mod of which he writes. Had he done so, he’d realize that the “mods” to which he refers are actually skins, created by gamers and downloaded from fan sites. They are not the product of EA Games, and since they serve to slip over a Sim — much like a change of clothing — they don’t actually reveal what’s underneath the blur box.

In fact, according to EA Games, underneath that blur is… nothing. EA’s Vice President of Corporate Communications, Jeff Brown, notes that even if someone took the time to remove the blur box, all they’d find are the bland, featureless, mannequin-like physiques of Ken and Barbie.

Jack Thompson, of course, sees this as more fuel for his bonfire. The box blur, he says, demonstrate that even EA Games knows the Ken and Barbie features shouldn’t be displayed.

Not to point out the obvious, but… isn’t that why they aren’t?

UPDATE: USA Today explores the situation that game manufacturers find themselves in when hackers create add-on codes that turn an otherwise innocuous, all-ages game into something sexually explicit.