The hunger bar dropped. Then the social bar. The mom sat down to eat a plate of "food"—a single green pixel that made a crunching sound like a broken speaker. The dad tried to talk to the toddler. Instead of a conversation, a text box appeared:

When he plugged it back in and rebooted, his hard drive showed 120 gigs free. Minesweeper was gone. The recycle bin was empty.

But in the corner of his desktop was a new file. 100 MB. Named "Leo_Real.zip."

He double-clicked.

Leo stared at the blinking cursor on his ancient laptop. The hard drive had 120 gigs total. After Windows and a single save file of Minesweeper , he had exactly 98.6 MB free.

It was labeled: REALITY BANDWIDTH: 100MB / 100MB USED.

A pop-up appeared: "Your Sims are missing a texture. Download more RAM? [YES] / [NO]"