The Sims

Will Wright pitched The Sims as an architecture game and the publisher hated it. Nobody, they said, wants to play a virtual dollhouse. It went on to become one of the best-selling franchises in the medium's history, largely because everyone immediately understood what to do with it.

The genius is that the game has no goal, so players supply their own. Some build meticulously accurate houses. Some run multi-generational family sagas. And a very large number spent their childhood removing pool ladders, which has become the franchise's unofficial defining anecdote.

Simlish deserves credit as a design decision. Rather than record dialogue that would age badly, Maxis invented gibberish with real emotional inflection, and it works better than actual language would.

The green plumbob above every Sim's head is one of the cleanest UI ideas in gaming - mood, selection and identity in a single rotating shape.

This collection covers plumbobs and Sims iconography. Try not to trap anyone.