A "life simulator" from
Maxis, the people who brought you
SimCity and other
games/
software toys in that franchise. Wildly popular; the original game and its three "
expansion packs" (
The Sims: Livin' Large,
The Sims: House Party, and
The Sims: Hot Date) have sold millions of copies. The
franchise is still going strong. The Sims still sells well, despite having been released in 1999.
The basic shape of gameplay is simple. Decide on the composition of a family (parents, kids, whatever), build them a house, and then micromanage their tedious little lives according to such quantified needs as tiredness, hunger, and requirement for social stimulation. They can make friends with each other and their neighbours, strive toward career advancement, and buy stuff.
Everything is handled with numbers. Not just the way all the stuff in the digital world is handled with numbers on some level, but right up in your face numbers, with values assigned for the comfortableness of couches and degree of being in love and knack for creativity and how bad your Sims need to pee.
The Sims is phenomenally addictive at first, for days or even weeks at a time, just like a Tamagotchi. You play for hours and hours and hours straight, trying to learn all its secrets. But, just like a Tamagotchi, it's profoundly limited in certain important ways, and once you've seen what it can do within its limits, you never want to play with it again.
The appeal of The Sims is in seeing what clever behaviours the programmers designed your little electronic beings to carry out. Cooking is a fairly complex activity, and it can be modified in several ways -- on its most fundamental level, it only involves a refrigerator and a stove, but you can buy your Sims a food processor or a microwave or any number of other little toys, each of which modify the cooking process. It's fun to see how your Sims behave differently when you buy them new stuff.
As such, one of the The Sims's major selling points is the availability of player-created downloads -- new furniture, new appliances, new plumbing fixtures, new clothes for your Sims, and so on. That's mostly a sham. What you can download is new graphics, which are nifty for a while, but you can't get around the fact that the Sims' behaviour doesn't change. A bed's still a bed, a toilet's still a toilet. Maybe you can buy a set of knives, but it's just a food processor with a different graphic. The expansions look different and might have different numbers associated with them, but they don't really expand the game in any meaningful way, because they don't come with new behaviours. For that, you have to buy Maxis's expansion packs ... and the new activities they bring are really no great shakes.
This is the major gameplay problem. There are smaller ones.
Many of the downloads follow themes. You can have your Sims live in a medieval castle, or a mad scientist's lab, if you want, which seems cool, but there are no lifestyles to match -- you're stuck with the career tracks of modern suburbanites, and a cute papergirl still delivers the newspaper to your front lawn every morning. The "conceit", the consensual hallucination on which the game is based, is blown away like those houses near the end of Terminator 2. What kind of a medieval overlord has to call the police when a burglar in a mime costume breaks in?
The lack of complexity in the Sims's lifestyles is alarming, sociologically. They live in a suburb, and their whole reason for existing is to work and buy new and better stuff, so as to make recovering for the next day's work easier. That's it. That's the whole story. Yes, it's much like a real life, and it's supposed to be, but the game simulates the most boring parts of it. The heights of human experience are mechanized. It's positively easy to make Sims fall in love (tell jokes and give gifts, and you can go from strangers to married couple in one evening of game time). Promotions come automatically once you've reached certain ability scores.
So what?
The baseline activity of a game like NetHack, for instance, is interesting in itself: exploring turf and whomping monsters. There are tactics to apply to meet challenges, and that's fun. The vast array of unusual happenings NetHack players face is all bonus. The baseline activity of The Sims is tedious: sleeping, eating, pooping, and going to work. And you have to spend staggering amounts of time in those activities in order to have an occasional spot of out-of-the-ordinary fun, like hosting a party.
In an effort to get their Sims to do new stuff, players are renowned for behaving in near-psychotic ways. They revel in setting fire to them with faulty cookware, drowning them in swimming pools, starving them, demolishing their marriages and getting them into orgiastic lifestyles. Some critics say this is an insight into the average First Worlder's mind and soul; I think it's a reaction to a game that gets boring rapidly.