CRUSHING OF DISSENT! in the Sims Online. I don't know what's weirdest about this story. That a grown man - a professor! - would go to the trouble of setting up a virtual newspaper in the Sims Online, for the purpose of reporting on the seamy underbelly of Alphaville, the Sims' virtual city? Or maybe that Electronic Arts, which acts as the government of Alphaville, would close down his newspaper and send the professor's Sim counterpart into exile, "for the good of the game and its community"? Or maybe it's that there is a seamy underbelly to Alphaville at all, filled with con artists, virtual prostitutes, some kind of Sims mafia and a crooked, parallel town government?