underage prostitution in The Sims Online

[Furniture]

At the same time, The Sims Online was revealing its potential as a breeding
ground for a wide range of humiliating, anti-social, and exploitative behaviors.
In a BBC interview, Ludlow later explained that his make-believe newspaper,
created off-game but edited in-character, was founded to document “the emergence
of economic, social and political structures in the game” [3]. As events
unfolded, The Alphaville Herald turned out to be perfectly positioned to become
the media hub of the seething underworld of TSO. As Urizenus, Ludlow
covered the rise of the mafia families and their increasingly hardball tactics,
such as harassing a sim by sending her a new roommate, and then asking him
to tear down her house. The interviews show that the players invested considerable
emotion in the conflicts. In early December, he conducted a series of
instant-messaging interviews with Evangeline, a cyber-prostitute, who had set
up a brothel early on in the game as a strategy to avoid the boredom of skilling
and working. Describing her business in graphic terms, Evangeline let it slip
that shewas underage herself, and claimed that several of the girls that provided
“sexual services” within the game were also minors. Using the proceeds from
the prostitution racket, she had purchased the property at the top of the game’s
welcome list, naming it Free Money for Newbies. Here she cheated newcomers
out of their money, humiliated them by caging them in small rooms and
ridiculing black avatars as monkeys [24].