GrrlGotGame - I'm not a psycho, but I play one on my TV

• BioShock: There is only one major moral dilemma in the game, but it's a doozy: Provide a magic healing touch and save the Little Sisters, or harvest their asses for parts... well, Adam, anyway. See, these little darlings are chock full o' the mystical stuff you need to purchase upgrades throughout the game. "Harvesting" them reveals their true, worm-y form, and loads you up with enough Adam to turn your hands into fists of fire, ice, bees and various other bad-ass upgrades. Of course, you'll get the inevitable "you're a bad person"ending, but... HANDS OF FIRE! No contest.
  
  Just can't bring yourself to give them the wipe of death? Go ahead and save them. You will be sent smaller amounts of Adam as a reward, ensuring you still level up... eventually. Save them all and earn yourself the nice, friendly, blue-skies ending you so richly deserve after slaughtering thousands of junkies and a dozen or so Big Daddy guardians.
  
  
• Fallout 3: Nuke a town or save it? Wipe out a village of ghouls or move them to the Ritz? Save the slave or enslave the slave driver? These are just a few of the decisions you can make (or not) as you wander the Wasteland. Your actions will determine how you are treated, and it's definitely not black and white. I was a bad, bad girl, and thus was shunned in Megaton - but walked right into Paradise Falls, where I am legend. I am also very, very poor.
  
  For some reason the game is monetarily balanced toward those who do good, which is the opposite of what you'd expect. Gamewatcher has played squeaky clean and earned a fortune by helping people out. He's had more Stimpacks handed to him by awestruck fanatical strangers than I've found in the entire game. And of course, his ending was a bit different from mine.
  
  No matter what you do, your actions will "reported" by Three Dog on the GNR network. Personally, I've just gotten used to being called "That little psycho" in between songs. One word of advice: Save your game before getting into someone's face. While taking the snotty route is highly entertaining, it can also screw you out of mission opportunities.
  
  
• Grand Theft Auto (series): OK, no one plays this game to be nice. But you don't have to be a total dick, either. In GTA III, hopping into an ambulance, cop car, taxi or fire truck would open do-gooder missions that were both challenging and rewarding. In GTA IV, you can run vigilante missions, which can be both fun and lucrative - if you get to the corpses fast enough. Just be sure you wrap up all of your do-gooder missions before you piss off the mob/gang that owns the area.
  
  
• The Sims (series): The videogame equivalent of burning ants with a magnifying glass. Older versions of the game required you to tend to your Sims' every need, including potty breaks and feeding times. This became tedious and dull after about... two seconds. But let nature take its course and... well, you'd have a tired, wet, hungry Sim. Who might be better off euthanized, poor thing. (Just sayin'.)
  
  There are entire sites devoted to describing (or illustrating) sadistic Sims deaths. Put them in the pool and remove the ladder, put them in a room and remove the door... well, you get the idea. It doesn't take much to get the grim reaper a-calling.

It isn't easy being mean
The downside of these games is, of course, the small portion of the population that doesn't get what's wrong with this picture. Shortly after Grand Theft Auto III arrived on the scene, Gamewatcher and I had wandered into a local videogame lounge where a small crowd surrounded a man who was gleefully stomping on a hooker in the game. Laughter quickly turned to uncomfortable silence as he continued, on... and on... and on... to the point that an employee actually suggested he might want to go steal a car or something.

Personally , I've never taken the "healed by a hooker" and then beat her to get your cash back approach. It seems unfair to screw them over twice that way. I prefer to liberate those hard-earned funds by beating down the Huggy Bears of my virtual world. (You did know he was a pimp, right? Well, now you do.)

Everyone has their limits. I won't be playing the virtual rape game that won't get name-checked here. (Google it if you must know.) And I genuinely felt badly about how I handled the Oasis mission in Fallout 3 (let's just say the Shishkebob was involved... and it was a very quick mission). Briefly. And I totally let Clover go... after she annoyed me one too many times. (By the way, you can't kill her, but she can die in combat. Just sayin'.)

OK, fine. I don't feel badly about how I play or what I do. Because in real life, I would never do any of those things. Videogames allow me to explore things I would never do in real life, from the obvious (walking a bajillion miles to go anywhere – I'm looking at you, Bethesda Softworks!) to the disturbing (pretty much any GTA mission). When I feel like being good, I'll volunteer for a worthy, real-life organization, like my local Boys and Girls Club.

But when I feel like being bad, I'll boot up the ol' game console and go to town.