Many video games let you get drunk. For example, in the original Deus Ex game, you could drink foties and bottles of wine, and this would heal a small amount of combat trauma while making your screen sway and zoom in, so that for a while you tended to stumble around into things and generally make a fool of yourself.

I remember that the original Police Quest game let you do that as well, although I believe that it lead to a game over since your character conveniently forgot he'd agreed to basically do a double shift and the drinks were occurring in between those shifts. Thanks Sierra!

I was pretty surprised when I recently got The Sims 3 on a Steam Sale that alcohol did not seem to be present in the basic game. After all alcohol is a big part of how many people socialize and has certainly been an important part of world history. The game will let you dumpster dive and vomit afterwards, but it won't let you sip a fotie.

Eventually, I got the World Adventures expansion pack that let you go to France and learn to make your own....no, not wine, "nectar". After stomping on grapes. And processing them. And you store the bottles in a special rack.

However, it's not wine. You can't get drunk. If you click on a bottle you get the option to "serve nectar" but there's no option to "chug".

I realize The Sims is geared towards casual gamers and social relations, but this seems kind of weird. Drinking is a big part of social relations and I would argue has been a lynchpin of social relations for most of recorded history.

Besides, it would make your sims much more entertaining to watch than if they're basically in control and predictable all the time.

I wonder if this is due to some decency rules in some country or another. I wonder if there's a mod to fix it.

Doesn't seem like your sort of game though. Are you simulating small unit tactics with your sims?

LOL, not exactly. World Adventures lets you do Indiana Jones type temple raids and challenge people to kung fu battles, though. Apparently you can be cursed by a mummy, too, but I haven't gotten to that part yet.

You can apparently beat up burglars, but I haven't figured out if you can just cultivate a beef with another character and get into a fight with them (i.e., does that option appear if your relationship is poor enough?), or if that only applies to burglars. I also need to figure out if you can join the "criminal career" and then actually be a burglar who gets to battle with everyone in the neighborhood.

But, yes, it's definitely stilted in the direction of avoiding certain topics of themes, like anything relating to violence for the most part except as above. It's actually kind of fascinating at how notably different this makes The Sim from traditional video games, or put another way, how many games that wouldn't necessarily have to be violent tend to include violence because it's sort of de rigeur or because everyone expects it. (For example, I'd argue that LA Noire had way more firefights than it needed to have; it could have been a more unique game by having all firefights be avoidable instead of them all being sort of throwaway battles). I guess you can say it's been an interesting exercise of perception.