Published by EA Maxis in 2009, The Sims 3 is considered to be the best life simulation video game by many gaming enthusiasts, and has sold over ten million copies worldwide. In this life simulation game, players are presented with a possibility space in the form of an entirely customizable town that appears to have no set rules, but they quickly realize the incredibly rigid structure in place only moments after starting to play. Using procedural rhetoric, this rigid structure

**some of the content within this piece contains discussion of violence within the context of video games. Today’s scapegoat for the vices of society is video games. Surprisingly, this is not the first time that nerdom has been framed as nefarious. In 1979, a bright young boy named James Dallas Egbert III went missing. Unknown to those in his life, he left his promising university career to hide out in Louisiana, where he attempted suicide. When that didn’t work, he returned