Creator Will Wright designed The Sims to function as a dollhouse, after his real-life home was burnt down by a fire in the early '90s. As a Sims player, your purpose is to create characters and advance their careers and personal lives. But, as when playing with a physical dollhouse, most of the fun is in creating their home and surroundings. At the start of the game, your Sims might only be able to afford scuffed up, nondescript coffee tables or a range stove that catches on fire when used, but as you start earning more money, options open up.

In The Sims, decorating your house is as important as getting married and having children, even if your Sim might not interact with the furniture all that much. Auriea Harvey, who worked on design, direction, art and programming for Tale of Tales’ Sunset, told Hopes&Fears, “A lot of furniture that comes into our lives are things that are very functional. I go into Ikea and buy this chair because I need this chair. [But] when you have control over furniture, what you're buying, it expresses something about your style. So even when you're not sitting on it, it's still serving some function.” This is true of the furniture in The Sims, which serves as an aspirational goal that gives your Sims motivation to slog through work and slowly increase their economic standing.

While players of The Sims may spend hours earning simoleons (the currency of the game) to buy the perfect chair for their living room, the instances in which they will sit in that chair are pretty few and far between. “To let the player sit on a chair, someone had to code a ‘sitting system’ and bind specific character animations to it, which is a non-trivial cross-department feature that might takes days or weeks to develop,” Robert Yang, a game developer and academic who teaches design and development at the NYU Game Center, told Hopes&Fears. “Meanwhile, an experienced 3D artist could sculpt out a unique chair within an hour or less. The Sims probably has a hundred different chairs for you to buy—but inside the game, each chair functions exactly like the other, with slightly different stats.” In short, it takes time and resources to code in options like sitting in a chair. In order to justify spending resources for that job, the game needs to have a specific function tied to chair usage.

But the appeal of playing house by consuming digital furnishings is part of what has made The Sims a lasting franchise. Beyond the basic furniture sets provided in the game, which range from a country style living room set, to expensive and modern stainless steel kitchen counters, the community that has sprung up around this franchise has taken to creating custom modifications for their own fantasy furniture. If you feel the game is missing space age '60s beds and dressers, you can find those online. If you’d rather have your home covered in gothy dark brocade and black lace, that’s available too. Even tiny details, like a small pile of mail for the coffee table or an iPod speaker to perch on your mantle, have been created to fill in the gaps of what players consider the markers of modern life.

The Sims gives a sense of ownership to the player so that they create their own space, in the same way you do in the real world (where you can’t just type "rosebud" to get an extra $1,000): through consuming products. Whether the game is a clever satire of modern capitalism or merely a reflection of it is still up for debate, 15 years and countless expansion packs later.