The Sims is a key part of why I ended up in interior design
The Sims has been allowing players to act out their architecture and interior design fantasies for more than two decades. Jane Englefield finds out how the makers of the iconic life-simulation video game keep up with shifting trends.
“People laugh when I mention playing The Sims, but it was hugely significant in terms of spatial planning and was a key part of how and why I have ended up in the line of interior design work that I have,” interiors stylist and editor Rory Robertson told Dezeen.
“The Sims offered people the opportunity to get a feel for design,” he reflected. “You could be as extravagant and outrageous, or as briefed and restricted as you liked.”
Created in 2000 by American game designer Will Wright, The Sims is a video game where players make human characters – or “sims” – and build their virtual houses and lives from scratch, catering to their needs and desires.
With four iterations of the main game and dozens of themed expansion packs focussing on topics such as university, parenthood and cottage living, The Sims is one of the best-selling video-game franchises of all time.
“It’s really accessible”
Architecture and interior design has been a major part of The Sims experience from the very beginning.
Having previously created the city-building game SimCity in 1989 – which itself has been credited with inspiring a generation of urban planners – Wright was originally motivated to develop The Sims after losing his home in the Oakland firestorm of 1991 in California.
In fact, early designs were for an architecture game, with the shift to focus on people a relatively late addition to the concept, according to one of the game’s first art directors, Charles London.
Design remained a core part of the offering, however, and the interface features tools that allow players to instantly build structures and decorate and furnish them from an extensive inventory of items.
“It’s really accessible, so I think a lot of people get into it without even realising that they’re playing with architecture and playing with space,” said video-games expert and historian Holly Nielsen.
“While it was like catnip for design budding minds, it was also just a wonderful opportunity for procrastination and frivolity for people who aren’t particularly confident or tuned in to interiors or architecture,” echoed Robertson.
Since the original The Sims, a broad set of options has been available for players to suit their tastes and imaginations.
Possibilities have ranged from minimalist bungalows filled with neutral furniture to more outlandish dwellings, such as castles defined by Dalmatian-print wallpaper or hot tubs parked in the middle of multiple living rooms.
“We’ll take any source”
The team behind these possibilities described how they ensure that the architecture and interior design options stay feeling fresh and contemporary with each new game in the series.
“Since we’re a game about real life, anytime we step outside our door we have inspiration by just looking at what’s in our immediate environment,” game designer Jessica Croft told Dezeen.
Art director Mike O’Connor added that he and his team scour the real world and the web for up-to-date references.
“We’ll take any source,” he said. “We’re looking for patterns. If we start to see round furniture, or bouclé, or whatever the trend is, [we ask] has it already gone?”
“The internet doesn’t scrub old ideas. So you know, it’s seeing if there’s a trend, is it sticking, does it apply to what we’re doing now?”
Furniture and appliances within the game are regularly revised over time to reflect cultural and technological progression in the real world, Croft explained.
“In Sims 2 [released in 2004] I would not be surprised if there was a landline phone – and there definitely isn’t a landline phone in my own house, or Sims 4,” she said.
“Even things like VR [virtual reality] didn’t really exist back in The Sims 2 days, so things like VR consoles, computers – we just added dual-monitor computers, and LEDs are now in most households,” she continued.
That in turn sees the team take a surprisingly deep dive into how interiors are changing, O’Connor acknowledged.
“Over the life of this game, you see an evolution,” he said. “Electronics are probably the biggest category [of change]. Even just how people use TVs, how they place them, has changed.”
The idea, says Croft, is to ensure that The Sims players feel a close connection to the world they are building for their sims.
“The most fun thing for me is being able to allow players to craft stories that are relatable to them,” she said. “So, looking for opportunities to make players feel seen.”
“An element of freedom and fantasy-building”
But, as Nielsen points out, there is an additional aspect to the game’s architecture and design possibilities that is central to its appeal.
“In one sense, it’s reflective of society, but in another way, it’s aspirational,” she said.
“There’s an element of freedom and fantasy-building to playing The Sims,” she continued. “Homeownership is a thing that a lot of us will not get to do.”
As in real life, everything you build or buy in The Sims has a cost.
However, unlike in real life, punching “motherlode” into The Sims cheat-code bar will immediately add a healthy 50,000 simoleons to your sim’s bank account, putting that luxury sofa easily within reach.
That possibility remains central to Robertson’s nostalgia for playing The Sims as a young would-be interior designer.
“Once you double-clicked The Sims graphic on your Microsoft desktop, a multi-roomed mansion cost nothing to design,” he said.
This aspirational element has become an increasingly large part of The Sims’ commercial model over the years.
The Sims 4, as an example, is accompanied by 19 purchasable “Stuff Packs” that expand the options of items available to buy, including “Perfect Patio”, “Cool Kitchen” and one based on the products of Milan fashion label Moschino.
And the latest of the more extensive expansion packs is For Rent, which allows players to build rental houses where some sims are landlords and others are tenants.
Within the game, landlords encounter various true-to-life issues, including the potential for toxic mould build-up in their properties – although, unlike in the real world, the mould feature can be toggled on and off.
Inclusivity has also become an increasing focus of The Sims, with integral features now including options to choose sims’ sexual orientation, for instance.
For Nielsen, that traces back to a significant foundational element of the game’s widespread appeal – as well as being one of the reasons it has had such strong interior-design influence.
“It didn’t feel like it was aiming for anyone,” she explained. “One of the things that people bring up a lot is that it has a very female player base.”
“For me, it was a big turning point – it was getting to create the spaces but also play around with the people inside them. It felt like a socially acceptable way to play dollhouses.”
The images are courtesy of Electronic Arts.
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“With this ink on paper drawing I explored the relationship of narrative and drawing. Drawn images often tell stories: the strongest stories often create imagery. The imagery I created is about, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a book that I associate strongly with my own life. Jonathan is a seagull who leaves his flock to fly higher, explore, and learn new things. In the end, he finds his freedom and escapes from the cage where the cage represents limitations and a reality that was told to be the only reality. For me, the best way to realize that there are other realities is to travel and see people born and raised in different societies and cultures. The more I explore, the more I become free.”
“The tower of ilicity is an exquisite corpse that explores the duality of urban city life. Similarly to the SoHo block, the tower stitches together familiar, essential and mundane elements into a randomized agglomeration of components that follow a Truchet aperiodic tiling composition. This stitching together of random parts is a social and spatial condition, that challenges the occupant as they experience the assemblage through the lens of dirty realism.
“A semi-fictional view of an evening in Fengjing, China. All hand-done graphite pencil drawing with watercolour wash.
“Monsoon arrives misery every summer in the City of Chandigarh, Le Corbusier’s modernist metropolis. How does a landscaping intervention protect the city from inundation caused by climate change? Rather than obstruct the water, a network of sunken landforms and water-purifying facilities invites water into the city fabric. Waterscapes are juxtaposed against Le Corbusier’s greenery fingers across the city. Purified water will recharge the deep aquifers, an indispensable water source for commercial and domestic use.
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“I imagine a future where the only boundaries of architecture are creativity and physics.
“Cafe Palace selected a series of plans of landmark buildings with different cultural backgrounds according to the composition of immigrants in the block, which served as the inspiration and design starting point of the overall underground space layout. Through the redefinition and blend of different architectural styles, an architectural atmosphere similar to the situationist concept was created.
“The Galveston Bay Park Plan (GBPP) project is a surge flooding protection, navigation enhancement, public recreation and environmental enhancement project that is unique in its scale, impact, innovation, and long-term adaptiveness. The GBP approach will be transformative to the Galveston Bay region by creating a permanent thirty-mile landmark that is central to the region’s resiliency strategy, economic vitality, habitat preservation, and standard of living.”
“This is a painting about the concept of architecture expressed through images in a dream world. The theme of the painting revolves around the culture of coffee and the society that is triggered by coffee as a sober dependency of people.
“A new stage in urban sprawl in a context of physical, environmental and energy insecurity: a pioneering and vertical colonization of abandoned places in urban or industrial centers. Of course, properties are being protected and mobility is being adapted, far from the architectural utopias. Factories are still running, weighing down a starless sky that vanity jets cross, each for himself, more than ever. After all, the garden is not doing so badly; as for the fauna, it is less certain.”
“This work depicts an interior view of a house we built in Whitechapel. The view is of the main ground floor living space, looking south to towards the courtyard. The space has contrasting volumes, with the large diagrid lantern light glazing contrasting with the lower perimeter spaces. I was interested examining the way in which the space is lit naturally, and how the fall of natural light affects the volumetric impression of the space. I felt that this required an image of high contrast. I tried to depict that wonderful time of day in early summer, when the sun has almost disappeared, but where the light remains vivid, and where the areas of the interior not directly lit recede into the increasing darkness.
“Iconic architecture enjoys celebrity status, a fame generated by the dissemination of glamorous images presented to the public for admiration and praise. While the formal language of this “star-chitecture” varies widely around the world, these static icons share rarified air in the top-ten lists and google searches where their images are most commonly consumed.
“The process of this drawing relies on previous reiterations from an earlier collage of building constructions, which fragmented into an imaginary landscape of ruins. Using a Xylene transfer of a black and white copy onto plaster, the ghostly images provide a ghost in which new constructions can be developed. The idea of the city as a continuous palimpsest evokes the nature of how cities transform throughout time by demolition, re-use or new construction. This additive transformation builds on the old to re-invent the composition. As an architectural speculation, the generative process of drawing yields new spaces and forms influenced by the pre-existing context of the ghost collage. These graphic ponderings stitch together the fabric of the old and new, complimenting and contrasting the organic and the man-made.
“The head, the heart, and Everything In Between. A Charlie Chaplin experience provides us humor, joy, and purpose connecting senses, feelings, and thoughts.
“Tied to its age-old exclusion of a ‘Colonial Party House’ Burt Hall reminiscences to days that now are gone. The drawing imagines an Adaptive Habitation future, breathing life into this melancholic giant. Home as an ever-evolving skin; shedding yet rejuvenating.
“Human race is living in the world which has all the impact of socio political, chaotic crisis and environmentally modified world. Weather its pandemic or any other natural disaster which is shaping up our society and climate. It’s the spirit of time which bring the evolution to any entity. No vision can be drawn by itself, it needs to have a situation, which brings the desire to accomplish absoluteness.
“Humanity has resorted to forsaking their flesh for the planet’s survival, and thus exists as immortal, machine lifeforms, as virtualised consciousness within vessels.
“Drawing from EM Forster’s 1909 short story “The Machine Stops”, this allegorical architectural drawing re-presents a seminal tale of environmental devastation caused by the 1860 New Zealand goldrush. Propelling the Otago region into economic prosperity, the mining operations were abandoned once the gold dried up—the forgotten industrial artefacts, environmental scarring, and their historic narratives slowly decaying over time, destined to be lost forever.
“A Dystopian metropolis constructed with on top of multiple levels of roads, Buildings and Structures. Sky ships deliver cargo from the air, while logistical lorries, tucks and cars services the city from the complex network of elevated highways. A place to explore endlessly.”
“The Choice” portrays a person standing on the brink of decision. He or she began life in today’s world, which is pictured behind them in a dim cityscape. The reason for the landscape tilt illustrates the uneasy feeling that we often get in life that things are not quite right. The personal decision that every human faces is represented: joining either utopia or dystopia.
“The wall wasn’t just there, it was everywhere. My gaze wandered endlessly and yet the wall seemed to move. What did you separate me from? The deeper I looked into it, the less I could grasp it and the more complex its structure became. It seemed to me that the wall was looking for a counterpart. She was a surreal lonely reality and my soul could see no beginning or end. Unlimited truth and infinite questions.
“Nature has always inspired architects. The famous architect Mies van der Rohe suggested that details are essential for architectural drawings as they are essential in nature. He used the term “God is in the detail” to emphasize this point. The infinite level of detail in nature is an abstract concept. In order to visualize this concept, I have drafted an architectural-themed cosmology drawing. This drawing is characterized by some scientific infographic about nature and an artistic interpretation of the universe.”
“Art cannot solve humanity’s problems, but it can be a refuge from daily frustrations or make us temporarily forget about problems by visiting a gallery, listening music etc.
“Observation and imagination. The white lines are a wireframe perspective of GOMA (Gallery of Modern Art) which sits on the Brisbane River at Kurilpa Point (Queensland, Australia). Using early photographs of European settlement, explorers’, convicts’ and botanist’s’ accounts along with indigenous histories, I was able to site this existing building within a landscape which I imagine would be very similar to that the indigenous population experienced pre settlement.
“‘Living Lemon Life’ responds to the current development dilemma in Ikuchijima, Japan. Ikuchijima, a trading hub in the Seto Inland Sea, is a beautiful island famous for its popular cycling route, best-selling domestic lemons and an abundance of museums. However, population loss has been affecting the island’s population structure and sustainable development.
“Examples of architecture can too often be seen as solid objects, but of course, they are not. They contain spaces, voids in which humans interact, work and play, love and live. In this sense, the volumes contained by architecture are the collective kinetic stories of all who have gone before and will yet arrive. This drawing – “Up” – explores the energies of that process, the ideas of entrance and exit, of doors and stairways that we all employ to knit our internal lives to the external world and in some silent way, to one another and to time itself.”
“Perched in the soaring West Coast treeline, accessed by pully operated elevator cabs, the Lift Cabins provide the ultimate nature-immersion experience. Ride up as a solo cabin’er or get extra cozy with a +1, enjoy your time way up high, just below the sky!”
“In cold grey concrete and abstract forms, spomeniks are monuments imposed on remote historical sites as the symbol of unity during the socialist Yugoslavia. However, as they became associated with opposing ethnic groups during the 1990s Yugoslav Wars, many were destroyed and vandalized as the prime targets for hate crimes. Today, they are the embodiment of war and violence.
“In cold grey concrete and abstract forms, spomeniks are monuments imposed on remote historical sites as the symbol of unity during socialist Yugoslavia. However, as they became associated with opposing ethnic groups during the 1990s Yugoslav Wars, many were destroyed and vandalized as the prime targets for hate crimes.
“Long, long ago in a galaxy not so far away… there was a place named “Meeting of Cultures” which marked in Sarajevo where the eastern Ottoman empire kissed western Austro-Hungarian. On this historically diverse landmark where nobody is meeting, and among the ruins of Yugoslav Brutalist monument laid like scars to the ethnic division, clouds of simple materials – wood sticks and nails – formed modular polyhedron units. They bonded into seats, tables, movie screens, theatrical platforms… all of which allows for long-lost nostalgic dialogues. Eventually, Urban Sijelo was concieved.
“Urban Sijelo is the materialization of an old Yugoslav concept Sijelo – a social evening gathering featuring traditional music and amusement. The assembly intends to bring people together through endless possibilities in forms, allowing for various leisure communal functions illustrated. The versatile spirit is enabled by multiple 1′ – 6″ polyhedra, the homage to our inspiration K-67 – a modular, spaceship-lookalike kiosk associated with day-to-day memories of the united socialist Yugoslavia.”
“Hsinta Ecological Power Plant really wanted an innovative design to establish its green corporate image. Yet is it possible to design the three chimney stacks that breaks away from the industrial past? How do we deal with this issue honestly while balancing the fact of energy consumption vis-à-vis conservation of wildlife? What if the building’s skin generates wildlife, becoming an interface for social and environmental uses?
“Every year, we build taller buildings. Our cities are becoming taller and taller without taking into consideration the natural surroundings. Our cities become more polluted as they become more crowded. Have you thought about the future? Have you considered our children? They are our future.
“The people of Bosnia & Herzegovina yearn for a sense of unity, once shared by South Slavs during the golden years of late Yugoslavia. The loss of unification in a diverse field of ethnicities, coupled with following years of ravishing war, have instilled an intense feeling of what was now only a nostalgic memory. The government inflicted Spomeniks of the Yugoslav era, now represent the conflicts further perpetrating division and plaguing the Bosnian people.
“Design Image for a Modern house in the Hudson Valley. The perspective drawing shows the easy transparency of the public rooms, fostering an inside-outside connection for the family who will dwell here. The house employs western red cedar, local sandstone, and salvaged oak flooring to lend a rustic feel to the architectural crispness. The soft pencil drawing helps to convey this feeling.”
“This is a drawing of the near future in Hiroshima Hatchobori intersection.
““Civilization has done little for labor except to modify the forms of it’s exploitation” – Eugene V. Debs
“The etymology of a Monsters is to not scare, but rather to show and reveal hidden truths.
“The Woven City – an interlaced architectural landscape with a complex array of structures, materials and textures forming part of a cohesive whole.
“Mercato, Africa’s biggest open-air market located in Ethiopia, is a neighborhood of informalities under the danger of urban erasure by insensitive developer projects. Searching for a solution that can both densify and respect Mercato’s existing social networks, the project looks at architecture through the users’ daily lives and traditions rather than standardized formal methods architects are trained to use and investigates architecture’s potential as a stage that allows creating stories. Through the use of the section cut, the drawing reveals a glimpse of daily lives of Ethiopian women in the project. Nothing is static about the project but the constant dynamism. The section welcomes us to the center with all of the market’s smells, noises and textures, but finds calmness in its architectural expression.”
“Dear Diary,
“Three iconic pieces of modernist architecture, one each of three architects that we might call pillars of modernism, stack upon one another forming a pedestal. Sitting atop rests a piece, studied and acknowledged, yet somehow less celebrated. Eileen Gray’s E-1027 built upon foundations developed by Le Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright, to develop a design that would become coveted by at least one of them. The piece is held together by its own voids, also acting as the glue holding the pedestal intact to further build upon.”
“A Garden Reconsidered explores the notions of divine beginnings/middles/ends and of earthly past(s)/present(s)/future(s) that exist simultaneous, cyclical, and linear. It is an exercise of what might lie behind the facade of divine follies conceived of centuries ago.
“This drawing essentially warns us about what it would mean for a country such as the US to re-elect the ‘unmentionable’ back for president in 2024 — just in case people forgot about him already.”
“The main character in the story is based on a building from hundreds of years ago, the Sendai Mediatheque.
“Boyle Heights is often seen as a separate entity to the overall Downtown Los Angeles area. This separation translates physically by this historic district barriered between Eastern Los Angeles freeways and the LA river. However, part of this barrier renews and keeps Boyle Heights prominent and preserves the present Hispanic Community. But, part of this separation has been slowly deteriorating in certain sections like first street that bridges Boyle Heights with neighboring communities.
“The architecture we know now is created with the elements of the “body” that is the earth. A bird’s nest is just as architectural as any man-made structure, but one is considered “nature” while most man-made architecture is not. Partly this is because much of human architecture is, whether desired or not, harming the body of the earth.
“The cathedral as a cross roads signifies a convergence of the community at large. The plaza opens wide to embrace all that approach. This edifice’s presence symbolizes the community’s strength and beckons all to gather. Its towers reach to the heavens reminding one to embrace the beauty in daily life. The cathedral endures and embodies the community’s past, present, and future.
“Through the interlacing of two distinctly different cities – Downtown Los Angeles and Boyle Heights – the relation of consistent, cyclical geometry provides a moment for distinct views to take place, fragmenting each cityscape into an abstract piece of solid and void that come together as one.”
