Explore Online Game Worlds Where Players Decorate a Home

Our flat is 46 square metres. When we moved in, I spent a whole evening in The Sims 4 rebuilding it to scale, wall by wall, to test where the sofa could go before we bought one. It took about three hours and saved us from a sofa that would have blocked the only radiator. Since then I have taken home-decorating games more seriously than most adults probably should.

Plenty of online games now let players build and decorate homes. Some are full design tools, some are cosy side activities inside larger games. Here is what each type is good for, and what a small real home can borrow from them.

Two kinds of home-building games

It helps to separate these games by purpose, because they teach different things.

Planning games try to model a real space. The Sims 4 build mode, Home Design 3D and House Flipper 2 let you set walls to real measurements and place furniture at real sizes. They are useful before you move or buy something large.

Expression games care more about mood than measurements. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Minecraft and the housing systems in online games such as Final Fantasy XIV let you decorate freely, with furniture that does not obey real dimensions. They are useful for working out what you like, which is a separate and harder question.

What planning games taught us about a small flat

Rebuilding our flat in The Sims was more instructive than any interiors magazine. A few lessons came straight from the screen.

• Walking paths matter more than furniture. When the game's characters got stuck between the table and the bookcase, we realised a real person would too. We now keep a 70 centimetre clear path through every room.
• Doors swing. We almost bought a wardrobe that would have stopped the bedroom door opening fully. The game made that obvious in seconds.
• Light comes from one side. Our flat has windows on one wall only. Seeing it modelled showed us why the far corner always felt gloomy, and we moved the reading chair accordingly.

House Flipper 2 is better at the physical side of decorating. You paint, tile, clean and assemble furniture yourself, and the game is honest about how long a wall takes to paint compared with how long you expect. When we repainted our real hallway, I was not surprised that it took a full Saturday.

What expression games are good for

The trouble with real decorating on a budget is that every mistake costs money. In Animal Crossing, I could try a dark green bedroom, live with it for a week of evenings, and decide I hated it without buying paint. Odalys tried four different kitchen layouts on her island before admitting she wanted the one we already had.

Players in online games with housing systems spend remarkable effort here. In Final Fantasy XIV, housing plots are scarce and sought after, and players build intricate cafés, libraries and gardens inside them. Some of those homes are better designed than real flats I have rented. The lesson I take from those players is that a home feels finished when it has a clear purpose for each corner, not when it is full.

Where the games mislead

I have to be fair about the limits, because a few habits from these games are actively bad advice for a real home.

Infinite storage

In most games, items disappear into an inventory or a magic chest. Real things need somewhere to go. Our first real-world attempt to copy a clean game room failed because the game room had no shoes, no post, no laundry and no cables. Real homes need storage planned first, decoration second.

Free furniture

In expression games, furniture is cheap or free, so players fill every surface. That look photographs well and lives badly. The rooms we liked best in our own games were the emptiest ones, and the same is true in our flat.

No maintenance

Plants in games never need watering, white sofas never get stained. We bought a cream rug because it looked lovely on screen. It lasted four months. If you are setting a home budget, our piece on how online game players budget like a small household covers how to plan for things that wear out.

A simple method for using games to plan a room

This is the process we use now, roughly an evening's work per room.

1. Measure the real room, including door swings, windows and radiators.
2. Build it to scale in a planning game. The Sims 4 works, as does a free tool like Sweet Home 3D.
3. Place only the furniture you already own. Walk a character through it and see where they get stuck.
4. Add one new item at a time, at its real size, before you buy it.
5. Then switch to an expression game and play with colours and mood without worrying about scale.
6. Keep only the ideas that pass both tests.

It sounds like a lot of effort for a 46 square metre flat. It saved us from at least three bad purchases, which in our budget is real money.

The three, for the record: a corner sofa that would have left 40 centimetres between its arm and the bedroom door, a dining table for six that we would have walked around sideways every day, and a tall bookcase that would have covered half of the only window in the living room. Each one looked perfect in the shop. Each one failed within a minute once we placed it at real size and walked a character past it.

One more tip from those sessions: build the room as it looks in winter, not summer. Games default to bright midday light. Our flat spends five months of the year lit mainly by lamps after 4 p.m., so we now test layouts with the game's lighting set to evening. It changed where we put both floor lamps and showed us that the hallway needed a second light more than the living room needed a new rug.

Decorating together without arguing

Couples rarely agree on decorating. Odalys likes warm wood and clutter with a story. I like bare surfaces. The games gave us a neutral place to disagree. We each decorate the same virtual room separately, then compare. Usually we find that one of us cares strongly about two or three things and has no opinion about the rest. Those strong opinions win, and the rest gets split. It works better than arguing in a furniture shop.

We wrote more about sharing decisions in a small home in our Our Home section, and the evening routine that makes room for this kind of play is in our guide to an evening routine for two.