Sometimes good things come out of corporations pulling together. Take, for instance, the recent collaboration between Electronic Arts, Yahoo, and Swedish fasionistas Hennes & Mauritz. First, Electronic Arts releases The Sims 2. Somewhere along the way, they team up with H&M to offer a branded expansion pack. To get in on the ad dollars, Yahoo launches a Sims-themed Virtual Fashion Runway. So far, so crass, like a NASCAR car littered with mismatched sponsorship decals.

But when you throw in the fans who actually adore the game, a little goodness and heart can't help but bubble up out of the whole corporate mess. All the parties involved sponsored a contest. Sims fans would use the expansion pack's clothing designer to create outfits, which would be submitted to the Virtual Fashion Runway and voted on by other fans. The winning outfit would actually be created by H&M – in the real world! – and sold from its retail outlets.

This would be a recipe for disaster in any other gaming community, which would rally around Rick Rolls, penis-shaped Spore creatures, or goatse spray tags. But huge kudos to the Sims community for not being a bunch of stupid boys. You can tell because "Let's Go to the Beach", a bikini, didn't win.

Instead, the winner was "Night Out", pictured above, from adriennerp1978 in Michigan. Being a stupid boy myself, I would describe it as a tastefully pinstriped business skirt outfit with white parts where the breasts go. It beat out other top contenders like "Red Carpet", "Street Wear", and "Party Time". A real live actual version of "Night Out" will soon be sold from select H&M retailers for $15. Based on what little I know about women's clothing, I'm pretty sure a zero or two is missing from that number, but that's what the press release said.