What Are Simulation Games? Management, Life, and Vehicle Sims
The simulation genre explained, from management and city-building to life, vehicle, and sports management sims, with classics like SimCity and The Sims.
You lay down roads and set taxes for a city, cook dinner for a virtual family, and drive a truck down European highways for hours on end. Games that look completely different from one another like these are all grouped under a single name: "simulation games."
Simulation is less a single genre than a large umbrella covering many genres. What they share is that they translate some activity from reality (or a plausible virtual world) into rules and let the player run it themselves. Many simulation games have no fixed ending or win condition, or only a weak one.
In this post, we cover the definition and core appeal of simulation games, their subgenres, landmark titles in their history, their design characteristics, who they suit, and where the genre is heading today.
Definition and Core Appeal
English Wikipedia describes simulation video games as "a diverse super-category of video games, generally designed to closely simulate real world activities." Simulations were originally tools for training, analysis, prediction, and education, and games brought that approach into entertainment. That's why, even today, the line between games and simulators with real purposes, such as flight training or military instruction, overlaps.
The fun of simulation games comes from three main sources.
- The joy of understanding a system: learning cause and effect, such as what drops when you raise taxes or how traffic changes when you add one more road.
- The joy of building and nurturing: the satisfaction of watching empty land become a city or a small farm grow. The goal is not to defeat enemies but to build something up.
- The joy of doing what's hard to do: safely experiencing things you can't easily do in real life, like flying an airliner, driving a big rig, or managing a soccer team.
This is also where the difference from strategy games comes from. Wikipedia's article on construction and management simulations explains that the goal of a pure management sim is "not to defeat an enemy, but to build something within the context of an ongoing process."
Subgenres
| Subgenre | What it simulates | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Construction and management (CMS) | Building and running cities, companies, or facilities with limited resources | SimCity, Cities: Skylines |
| Life simulation | The lives and relationships of virtual people or creatures | The Sims, Animal Crossing |
| Farming and rural life | Farming, seasons, and relationships with villagers | Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley |
| Vehicle (flight and driving) | Piloting planes, cars, trucks, and spaceships | Microsoft Flight Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator 2 |
| Sports management | Running a club and its tactics rather than the matches themselves | Football Manager |
| Occupational simulation | Specific jobs like surgeon, photographer, or police officer | Trauma Center, Pokémon Snap |
| Military simulation | Realistic recreation of real warfare at the tactical or strategic level | Military training simulators |
Vehicle simulations are further divided by degree of realism. There's a "hardcore" side with fuel management and precise physics, and a "casual" side with simplified controls. Racing games that push realism to the maximum are called "sim racing," which we cover separately in our post on racing games.
In the mid-1980s, when Britain's Codemasters released a string of games with "Simulator" in the title, such as "BMX Simulator" and "Grand Prix Simulator," a magazine mocked the trend in 1988 by releasing a parody game called "Advanced Lawnmower Simulator." The joke that "anything can be a simulator" has been around for a long time.
Landmark Games in History
| Year | Game | Developer | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1964 | The Sumerian Game | Designed by Mabel Addis | A text game about ruling an ancient city-state, considered the first economic simulation |
| 1982 | Microsoft Flight Simulator | Bruce Artwick (subLOGIC) / Microsoft | Fly a Cessna 182; the first entry in a series that continues today |
| 1983 | M.U.L.E. | Danielle Bunten Berry | An early economic sim with multiple competing players |
| 1985 | Hang-On | Sega (Yu Suzuki) | A ride-on arcade game controlled by leaning on a motorcycle cabinet |
| 1989 | SimCity | Will Wright | Popularized the city-building simulation |
| 1992 | Championship Manager | Sports Interactive | Soccer club management, which later led to the Football Manager series |
| 1996 | Harvest Moon | Amccus (planned by Yasuhiro Wada) | Centered on farming and village life; relaxed rural living instead of competition |
| 2000 | The Sims | Maxis / EA | Daily lives and relationships of virtual people, no set win condition |
| 2012 | Euro Truck Simulator 2 | SCS Software | Freight hauling on a scaled-down map of Europe |
| 2015 | Cities: Skylines | Colossal Order / Paradox Interactive | City-building with detailed traffic, zoning, and public transit |
After SimCity, Will Wright made games covering larger-scale worlds, such as SimLife and SimEarth, and in 2000 he released The Sims, which deals with the lives of individual people. According to Wikipedia, The Sims sold 41 million copies, including the base game and expansion packs, by September 2004.
Recent titles also have clear sales records. According to Wikipedia, Cities: Skylines sold more than 12 million copies across all platforms by June 2022, and Euro Truck Simulator 2 had sold more than 22 million copies as of January 2026. That games about laying roads and hauling cargo, without any flashy combat, are this beloved shows the strength of the genre.
Design Characteristics
- Open-ended goals: Many games, like The Sims, have no fixed win condition. Instead, metrics like population, revenue, and happiness help players set their own goals.
- Feedback loops: Devices that make the state of the system visible, such as demand graphs, color-coded traffic, and characters' need bars, are essential. Players can only learn and fix things when cause and effect are visible.
- Balancing realism and fun: Copying reality as is would be boring or too hard. Most games speed up time, trim tedious processes, and keep only the interesting decisions. On the other hand, some games, like flight and racing simulators, are fun precisely because of their realism.
- Sandbox modes: Many games include a separate mode for building freely without money or resource limits. Cities: Skylines also offers a sandbox mode that expands creative freedom.
- Long playtimes and expansions: Since a single playthrough can easily last dozens of hours, structures that keep players engaged with expansion packs, mods, and updates are common.
- Dedicated hardware: Vehicle simulations evolved alongside equipment like steering wheels, flight sticks, and motion seats. Sega's "taikan" (body-sensation) arcade games of the 1980s are a prime example.
Who Should Play Them
- People who like making plans and watching the results
- People who want to play for a long time at their own pace, without competition or time pressure
- People with a strong interest in a specific field, such as airplanes, trucks, urban planning, or soccer tactics
- People looking for a game to unwind with at the end of the day by leisurely tending to something
If you want quick reflexes and short bursts of intense tension, action or racing games may be a better fit.
Simulation Games Today
These days, simulation actively blends with other genres. Games that add RPG-style progression and exploration to farm life sims have become popular, and Wikipedia's Harvest Moon article notes that Stardew Valley developer Eric Barone has repeatedly said he was inspired by the series. Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, and Animal Crossing are mentioned together as the games that led a "new golden age" of the genre.
Another trend is education and training. Simulation games were used as learning tools from the very beginning, and schools, companies, and militaries still use game-style simulators today. At the same time, in the era of online streaming, "anything simulator" games that exaggerate absurd situations have become popular as entertainment to watch.
In short, it's better to understand simulation games not by "how closely they resemble reality" but by "what experience they've turned into rules." Even within city-building, a game centered on managing numbers and one centered on decorating offer completely different kinds of fun.
References
- Simulation video game - Wikipedia
- Construction and management simulation - Wikipedia
- Life simulation game - Wikipedia
- SimCity (1989 video game) - Wikipedia
- The Sims (video game) - Wikipedia
- Microsoft Flight Simulator (1982 video game) - Wikipedia
- Euro Truck Simulator 2 - Wikipedia
- Cities: Skylines - Wikipedia