Is The Sims A Virtual Dollhouse?

Not sure if that author isn't feeling more a need to just give a name to something to make them feel comfortable. Will Wright was going for simulation, but in the end it is up to the player as to what they see and experience. I honestly don't care what to call it. Sims is just fun to me. Even the current devs are keeping it a bit ambiguous with adding the first-person experience into the whole shebang.
Give it another decade or two, and we may be calling it a holographic AI room experience. Perhaps a....holodeck?

"Cupid;c-16942966" wrote:
That's pretty much what it is. We can bounce away from calling it a "Virtual Dollhouse" to make it sound less emasculating for male players, but the fact that people (like the author of the article) feel a need to do that in the first place points to a bigger societal issue in my opinion.

On a side note the grammar in this article is horrendous. Journalism seems to be a dying art :D

Kotaku and its sister sites like Jezebel have always been nothing but a farce. If they draw attention to something interesting, then there is likely a better article on the subject written elsewhere. Even PCGamer has decent features now and then.

"catloverplayer;c-16943223" wrote:

"duhboy2u2;c-16942958" wrote:
Gender role stereotypes aside, (I don't believe dollhouses are just for girls) I think in a very real way, a life sim and a dollhouse are pretty much the same thing. Children playing with dollhouses mimic the world they see around them when playing. Isn't that wat the Sims does? Either way I agree its fascinating, but then, I've always found human interaction fascinating.

The differences though is you can make your Simself and live out your fantasies in this doll house.

Can do the same with a live dollhouse, too. Especially if you are crafty enough.

It totally is! Maybe that's why I love it so much...

Of course, it's a virtual dollhouse. Boys play with dolls too - action figures. I'm actually very opposed to the idea of controlling a child's environment specifically according to their gender. It's unnecessary and based on plain homophobia. But that's a very different discussion.

Yes, a virtual dollhouse is exactly how I describe it, and I am mean it in an entirely positive way. I always loved imaginative play and dollhouses as a little girl. Pretend play is, as others have stated, not gender specific and a natural part of child development. I guess I never grew out of it.

That is just one of many things it is. I don't spend much of my gaming time dressing up my sims, and I hardly spend time decorating their homes. To me tthis game is a superb story telling trigger. It gets my fantasy going, I even use it to create short stories that I sell to magazines. Because most of my families have longe and detailed background stories, I find story ideas everywhere, and I can stay in a house for a couple days to make notes/develop the characters. AND, when I just play, I often focis on the community aspect more than each household or sim.

Still, yes, it's a virtual dollhouse, also, if you want it to be.

Simmerville wrote:
It gets my fantasy going

The very core of my gameplay. Anything to spark that imagination.

"Virtual dollhouse" is a good easy descriptor for non-gamers who don't know what it is. If I wanted to elaborate, I might say, "Imagine a virtual dollhouse... but more organized and every once in a while, the dolls will go off and do something wacky you weren't planning for. Let set themselves on fire."

Sims a dollhouse? This is what I've been saying for years.
This is the kinda game playtime I had when I was a kid. It didn't always have dolls but playing house or whatever is the same thing. Simulating life.
In the sims form... it's a little different and I could see why men would be into it aswell. There is a great deal of goal oriented gameplay in it, it's strategic. For me, both work.

It's definitely a virtual dollhouse to me. That was always my favourite toy as a child - my dolls played out the stories in my head.

When I hear dollhouse I think more about the creative aspect of The Sims. Assuming control of a sim, have them do something, then think about another sim would react, switch to that one and have them act. So when I roleplay I'm playing dollhouse style. I rarely felt the need to write down the geography, history and civic laws of my dolls and rubber cowboys as a child, though, which is a major part of my simming.

But isn't that a playstyle that came later? From how I experienced the original game game it was all about time management. Go to work, buy furniture that fills needs more efficient, have more time for skilling, get promoted, gain more money for even better furniture and to expand the house to improve routing, resulting in more time to skill... rinse, repeat.

In my mind The Sims will always be a roleplaying game in a somewhat exotic setting, because of this buy gear-level up-face harder challenges mechanic.