The Sims 4

I remember sitting down in front of the first Sims game and looking up three hours later with no idea where the time went. You start with the intention of quickly building a house, but then your Sim needs a job, the job requires skills, skills take time, and suddenly you’re orchestrating this entire miniature life. Someone you’ve just created needs to eat, sleep, maintain relationships. You become genuinely invested in keeping these digital people functional, which is absurd when you think about it.

The Sims 4 gives you the tools to design everything—the Sims themselves, their homes, their communities. As a designer, there’s something genuinely satisfying about that level of control, whether you’re obsessing over architectural details or zooming out to manage entire systems of relationships and careers.

The game doesn’t ask you to win anything. You’re just creating and observing, building systems and watching them function or collapse in interesting ways. It’s closer to playing with dolls than a competitive game, except the dolls have agency—their own moods, wants, anxieties that can derail your plans.

I think part of why The Sims has always been irresistible is that it offers a kind of god-game simplicity without the usual toxicity. You’re not conquering or destroying anything. You’re arranging, creating, maintaining. It scratches an itch that a lot of games deliberately avoid—the itch to just build something and watch it exist without pressure.