A home is built, a family moves in, and Sim life takes its course. To be sure, the game offers no carjackings or buxom, gun-toting heroines-just regular people, or rough approximations thereof, going about their day-to-day routines. Despite his Midas-touch track record, Wright acknowledges predictions were dire from the get-go: "We had an official product-selection committee, and I gave my spiel to the committee, and they actually rejected it they thought we couldn't do it" (Becker, 2006). So how did it happen? By all rights, The Sims should have been a commercial disaster. Some six years on, the game has rarely been referred to without the words "groundbreaking" or "cultural phenomenon" in close proximity. 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). By 2005, the audience for The Sims and its various expansions had swollen to over 52 million worldwide. Within two years of release, it had ousted Myst as the bestselling PC game of all time, with sales of US $6.3 million. 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. Here was a game as menial and repetitive as life itself, and its utter dearth of the fantastic perversely served as its hook. In the year 2000, the PC-gaming auteur delivered The Sims unto the world, and several million people deemed it good.
Developers can hardly be faulted for this prejudice few could have imagined a thriving audience for virtual domesticity. 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. 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.
Historically, videogames have had little use for the domestic. Signifying Play: The Sims and the Sociology of Interior Design by Charles Paulk
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