

The original inspiration for The Sims was Christopher Alexander's 1977 book on architecture and urban design, A Pattern Language. Objects fall into one of eight broad categories: seating, surfaces, decorative, electronics, appliances, plumbing, lighting, and miscellaneous. Players have a broad choice of objects that their respective Sims may purchase. The game was originally designed solely as an architecture simulator, with the Sims there only to evaluate the houses, but during development it was decided that the Sims were more interesting than originally anticipated, and their once limited role in the game was developed further. In addition, the game includes an architecture system. The base game contains over 150 items including furniture and architectural elements. Walls and fences extend along the edge of a tile and can follow the edge of the tile or cross it diagonally, but furniture items cannot be placed on either side of a crossed tile. All architectural and customizable features and furnishings in Build and Buy modes follow a square-tile system in which items must be placed on a tile.

After purchasing a lot, a user may construct or remodel a house in Build mode or purchase or move furniture in Buy mode. These funds can be used to purchase a small house or vacant lot on the neighborhood screen. When the game begins, each family starts off with §20,000 simoleons (regardless of its number of members). When the "Live" mode occurs in the game, the player may enter "Build" mode or "Buy" mode to pause time and renovate the house or lot. Children will be sent away to military school if they fail their classes or if they have not fulfilled their needs (especially when hunger is very low), a social care worker will take them away from their household and they are no longer returnable. In addition, Sims can leave the game for good and never return, or two adult Sims with a bad relationship may brawl, eventually resulting in one of them moving out. When a Sim dies, a tombstone or an urn will appear (in later expansion packs the Grim Reaper will appear first), and the ghost of the deceased Sim may haunt the building where it died. One is that Sims may die, either by starvation, drowning, fire, or electrocution (or from natural causes/age in certain versions). While there is no eventual objective to the game, states of failure do exist in The Sims. The original neighborhood in The Sims consists of a single screen displaying all playable houses. Sims communicate in a fictional language called Simlish, which is mostly composed of blowing raspberries and saying nonsense. They are unable to take certain actions without specific commands, such as paying bills, finding a job, exercising, and conceiving children.

Unlike the simulated environments in games such as SimCity, SimEarth or SimLife, Sims are not fully autonomous. However, the player can override most of these autonomous actions by cancelling them in the action queue at the top of the screen.
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If enabled in the game's options, Sims have a certain amount of free will, allowing them to autonomously interact with their world. Sims may receive guests at their home lot, invited or not, from other playable lots or from unhoused non-player character (NPC) Sims. Sims are influenced by the player to interact with objects or other Sims. It has been described as more like a toy than a game. The Sims technically has unlimited replay value, in that there is no way to truly win the game, and the player can play indefinitely. The presentation of the game's artificial intelligence is advanced, and the Sims will respond to outside conditions independently, though often the player's intervention is necessary to keep the Sims on the right track. The structure of the game is an agent-based artificial life program. Several sequels were released- The Sims 2 in 2004, The Sims 3 in 2009, and The Sims 4 in 2014. It also won several awards, and placed 31st on Time's The 50 Best Video Games of All Time list. Upon release, it garnered generally positive reviews and was described by Wright as being successful in attracting casual and female gamers. Seven expansion packs were released from 2000 to 2003, each of which added new items, characters, skins, and features.
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The game's development was led by Will Wright and the game was a follow-up to Wright's earlier SimCity series Wright was inspired to create the game by Christopher Alexander's 1977 book A Pattern Language, and Scott McCloud's 1993 book Understanding Comics later played a role in the game's design.
