SimArchitect vs. Reality: Reclaiming the Brutal Logic of the Original Vision
The Christmas holidays are just over and having spent some time with my children playing video games during the cold rainy evenings made me think about the evolution of The Sims game, starting from its original form, " SimArchitect ". Long before it became a digital nursery for drowning your least favourite virtual aunt, The Sims was supposed to be something far more austere. Will Wright’s original vision was a cold-blooded assessment of how physical space dictates human behaviour. The "Sims" themselves were merely biological sensors, fleshy thermometers used to test whether a kitchen layout was efficient or if a hallway was a bottleneck of domestic despair. It was about functional success, not floral wallpaper. Yet, somewhere between the prototype and the expansion packs, we lost the plot. We turned a rigorous architectural stress test into a shallow exercise in consumerist escapism, and tragically, our real-world urban planners seem to have followed the same traje...