This week io9 is launching "The Sims Go Scifi" contest, where you show us screengrabs from the best scifi scenarios you've created in The Sims. Our panel of distinguished judges will pick a winner, who gets a copy of The Sims 3, as well as $250 to spend at an online store of your choice so you can give your own life a makeover as well as your Sim life.

The contest deadline has been extended to Friday. Apologies if anyone had tried to write to the contest address and had problems. That email address should be working now.

Here are the rules:

1. Create a scifi scenario in The Sims 1 or 2, and take screengrabs (no more than 8) or movies (no more than 2) from it to show us your scene or story. You may use user-generated content and mods, as long as they work in the game. The idea is to create a scenario that actually works in the game, not to modify images or machinima after the fact.
2. Include a written description explaining the story and how you made it happen.
3. Submit your screengrabs and description to scifisimscontest@io9.com by midnight PST on June 9.

Argues Thompson:

There are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so many ways to describe reality. After I'd read my 189th novel about someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I was like, "OK. Cool. I see how today's world works." I also started to feel like I'd been reading the same book over and over again.

Here's my overly reductive, incredibly nerdy way of thinking about the novel: Consider it a simulation, kind of like The Sims. If you run a realistic simulation enough times — writing tens of thousands of novels about contemporary life — eventually you're going to explore almost every outcome. So what do you do then?

You change the physics in the sim. Alter reality — and see what new results you get. Which is precisely what sci-fi does. Its authors rewrite one or two basic rules about society and then examine how humanity responds — so we can learn more about ourselves. How would love change if we lived to be 500? If you could travel back in time and revise decisions, would you? What if you could confront, talk to, or kill God?

Teenagers love to ponder such massive, brain-shaking concepts, which is precisely why they devour novels like Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, the Narnia series, the Harry Potter books, and Ender's Game. They know that big-idea novels are more likely to have an embossed foil dragon on the cover than a Booker Prize badge.

SciFi is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing [Wired]