Sometimes it feels as though horrific world events and the malicious entities behind them are reaching into every aspect of our lives, from heatwaves that keep me shut away indoors, to generative AI that makes it increasingly difficult to trust what I read online. I can no longer even retreat into my favourite video game without funding human rights abuses across the world.

I’ve been playing The Sims series of life-simulation games since its first release at the turn of the millennium, when I sat with my sister in the corner of the sitting room using money cheats to build mansions for our digital dolls. Over the years, these games have helped me make friends: from the schoolmate who taught me to play more efficiently with hot keys, to the local fan who watched me stream The Sims 4 online and now meets me for lunch every week. In the last quarter of a century I’ve sunk thousands of hours into these games.

But all of that stopped, with the sudden snap of a clean break, when it was revealed last year that a group of private investors planned to acquire Electronic Arts (EA), the publisher of some of the world’s most popular video game series: FC (previously Fifa), Battlefield, Dragon Age, and many more – including my beloved The Sims. There are several reasons why I........

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