The Sims and the Sociology of Interior Design
June 14th, 2007
Signifying Play: The Sims and the Sociology of Interior Design
by Charles Paulk
Historically, videogames have had little use for the domestic. In contrast to television, which from its inception reflected workday suburbia back onto itself in family sitcoms like Ozzie and Harriet, the videogame medium has reliably tended toward more fantastical backdrops. When home and hearth have come into play, most often in roleplaying games (RPGs), they have typically been used as a waypoint en route to more dramatic, consequential things. Developers can hardly be faulted for this prejudice; few could have imagined a thriving audience for virtual domesticity. Will Wright, however, did. In the year 2000, the PC-gaming auteur delivered The Sims unto the world, and several million people deemed it good. Here was a game as menial and repetitive as life itself, and its utter dearth of the fantastic perversely served as its hook. The Sims’ enigmatic appeal scythed across boundaries of age and gender, winning over jaded, hardcore gamers and, more impressively, vast numbers of those uninitiated or even hostile to the medium. Within two years of release, it had ousted Myst as the bestselling PC game of all time, with sales of US $6.3 million. By 2005, the audience for The Sims and its various expansions had swollen to over 52 million worldwide. The game has been translated into 17 languages, and the franchise has seen life on platforms ranging from the Xbox to mobile phones (Winegarner, 2005). Some six years on, the game has rarely been referred to without the words “groundbreaking” or “cultural phenomenon” in close proximity.
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