Before exploring a virtual world, players start by building a house. In Minecraft, the first night can mean quickly putting together a shelter from whatever is nearby, while in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, players arrive on an empty island and slowly fill it with houses, gardens, paths, and furniture. In The Sims, building and arranging a home has always been part of the game. Different games, same habit: make a place, then come back to it. As games have become larger and more social, those places have taken on a life of their own. Players spend hours decorating houses, meeting friends, hosting events, or simply hanging around. In some VR worlds, people even sleep there. At a certain point, it becomes difficult to describe these spaces as just part of a game. There is a catch, though. The house might be yours in every practical sense, since you built it, furnished it, and spent time there, but the world around it belongs to someone else. And that can disappear.
image courtesy of Andyisyoda
from navigation to dwelling
Players move through game worlds to complete objectives, collect resources, encounter other characters, and trigger narrative events, but dwelling begins when that relationship with the environment changes and the world stops being somewhere the player simply passes through. A bed becomes a place to return to, a chest gives possessions an order, furniture is moved around, crops are planted outside, and a familiar room gradually turns into a meeting place for friends. None of these actions necessarily advances the central objective of the game, yet their repetition gives the environment a different meaning: through everyday routines and small acts of maintenance, an abstract digital landscape begins to acquire familiarity, memory, and a sense of place.
Martin Heidegger’s writing on dwelling and Gaston Bachelard’s reflections on the domestic interior offer one way of thinking about this shift. For both writers, inhabitation is also a way of establishing a relationship with one’s surroundings and finding orientation within them. Digital environments bring that idea into a different context. An open world may appear to offer unlimited freedom, but its scale can also make it difficult to establish any sense of familiarity. Without fixed points, routines, or places to return to, a seemingly limitless landscape can remain anonymous. Building a home changes that relationship by creating a point of reference within the larger world, somewhere the player can leave and return to, alter over time, and gradually make familiar.
The Sims | image courtesy of Electronic Arts
the house as interface
Since its first release in 2000, The Sims has allowed players to construct houses and then watch their inhabitants negotiate the spaces they have created. The arrangement of a floor plan affects movement, access to objects, daily routines, and the small interactions that take place between characters, so that building a house is inseparable from observing what happens inside it.
This approach grew out of The Sims creator Will Wright’s long-standing interest in systems and simulation, as well as in the ways people interact with their environments. Architectural ideas, including those associated with Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, formed part of the wider thinking behind the game and its attempt to translate spatial relationships into an interactive model. This life simulation game gave players a system they could test and modify, often discovering the consequences of their decisions only after the inhabitants began using the spaces. A poorly arranged room might interrupt circulation, while inaccessible objects or awkward layouts can interfere with the routines that structure everyday life inside the house. Players learn about space through trial and error, adjusting walls, furniture, and rooms in response to the behavior of the characters they are trying to accommodate.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when movement restrictions confined many people to their homes and forced the domestic interior to accommodate an expanding range of activities, the relationship between domestic life and digital space became particularly visible. Released in March 2020, Animal Crossing: New Horizons became one of the defining cultural environments of that period. Players arrived on an undeveloped island and gradually transformed it through construction, landscaping, collecting, and decoration. Players could redirect rivers, reshape the terrain, lay paths, and fill the island with gardens and outdoor spaces. Over time, many built cafés, markets, libraries, laundromats, and parks, using the same tools they used inside their houses to shape the rest of the island.
The game also runs on the same clock as the player’s everyday life. Shops open and close at certain hours, fruit grows back, flowers need attention, and seasonal events arrive throughout the year. During the pandemic, when days often felt repetitive and disconnected from their usual routines, this gave people small reasons to return to the game.
image courtesy of Nintendo
from the bedroom to the city
The idea of making oneself at home in a virtual environment can take surprisingly literal forms. In VRChat, some users sleep while wearing a headset, spending the night in digital bedrooms, apartments, or landscapes alongside people who may be physically thousands of miles away. Michael Yin and Robert Xiao examined this practice in their 2023 CHI study, Drifting Off in Paradise: Why People Sleep in Virtual Reality, finding that the boundary between the physical room and the virtual one does not simply disappear. Users often try to make the two correspond, using blankets, fans, and other objects in their physical surroundings to make what they see and hear in the headset feel more real.
Unlike a game session built around movement or achievement, sleep requires the user to give up control and remain in one place. The virtual environment becomes a place to be with another person, even while the body remains elsewhere. That same capacity to inhabit a digital space has also been used at a very different scale. Since 2012, UN-Habitat’s Block by Block initiative has brought Minecraft into participatory planning workshops, where residents can work together on models of streets, parks, and public spaces. The workshops give residents blocks to move, buildings to alter, and spaces to discuss directly inside a shared model of their neighborhood. Minecraft has also been used to make architecture do something more political. The Uncensored Library, created with Reporters Without Borders, takes the form of a monumental virtual library containing journalism that has been censored in different countries.
Built inside a game known for its open-ended worlds and amateur construction, the project turns a familiar architectural type into a way of circulating information across national borders.
The Uncensored Library
architecture after the physical constraint
Architects and designers have also approached game environments as spaces that deserve architectural analysis in their own right. You+Pea, the practice founded by Luke Caspar Pearson and Sandra Youkhana, studies video games through plans, sections, axonometric drawings, and other architectural forms of representation, treating interactive worlds as spatial systems with circulation networks, boundaries, visual relationships, and urban structures. A player experiences a virtual world through movement, while architectural drawing can reveal relationships that remain difficult to perceive during play. A section or axonometric can expose the organization of an entire environment at once.
Space Popular has similarly investigated the relationship between physical and virtual architecture. The work of the studio considers how domestic space changes when conventional boundaries between physical and digital environments become less distinct. Projects such as The Venn Room ask what happens when separate physical interiors overlap through shared virtual environments. A living room can remain physically private while simultaneously functioning as an entry point into a shared digital space. Who has access? Where does privacy begin? What happens when distinct spaces overlap? Virtual architecture does not eliminate these concerns but gives them new conditions.
London Developers Toolkit | image by You+Pea
THE TENANT IN THE VIRTUAL HOUSE
Virtual housing becomes particularly strange when there is not enough of it to go around. In Final Fantasy XIV, housing plots occupy specific locations within residential districts, where houses sit alongside one another and players compete for a limited number of available properties. A home can therefore become attached to a particular place: a street, a neighborhood, and a group of nearby players. Its location matters, and so does the possibility of losing it. The housing system is designed to return unused plots to the market, meaning that a player’s relationship to their home is never entirely secure. Keeping a house also depends on conditions outside the game itself. Players need access to the game, an internet connection, and enough time to log in and maintain their property. When real-world emergencies disrupt those conditions, the consequences can extend into the game, which is why Square Enix has suspended housing demolition during certain crises. It is an odd version of homeownership. Players can spend months furnishing a house and shaping it around their habits, while knowing that the land beneath it belongs to the game and that the rules governing it can change without their involvement. The house may feel personal, but the terms of staying there are set elsewhere.
PlayStation Home offers a different version of the same problem. Sony’s social virtual world, which operated from 2008 to 2015, gave users apartments and shared spaces where they could decorate interiors, collect objects, and meet other players. Like many online worlds, it encouraged people to spend time and money building environments that were meant to become familiar. Then the service closed. With the shutdown came the loss of access to the spaces that depended on it. Apartments, interiors, and social hubs could no longer be entered in the way they had during the operation of the platform, leaving behind screenshots, videos, files, and memories of spaces that had once been part of people’s everyday online lives. When an online world shuts down, its spaces can become inaccessible. Fan communities have tried to preserve some of these lost worlds by collecting files, screenshots, and recordings. What remains is often only fragments of places that people once built, visited, and called their own.
Final Fantasy XIV housing neighborhood
can a corporate server be a home?
Across these worlds, a different way of thinking about architecture starts to take shape. In The Sims, a floor plan affects how characters move through and use a house. In Minecraft, the same building tools can produce a temporary shelter, an elaborate home, or a model of a public square. Animal Crossing turns an empty island into a place shaped by routines, collecting, decoration, and social life, while social VR brings the physical body into an even closer relationship with digital space.
Taken together, these examples show how many different forms dwelling can take in a digital environment. It can involve building a shelter before nightfall, arranging a room around everyday routines, competing for a place in a virtual neighborhood, or adapting a physical bedroom to sleep alongside someone who is elsewhere. The spaces and technologies differ, but each example complicates the idea that a virtual world is simply somewhere to visit.
image courtesy of Andyisyoda
image courtesy of Electronic Arts
The Venn Room | image by Space Popular
image courtesy of Andyisyoda
image courtesy of Andyisyoda
image courtesy of Nintendo
image courtesy of Nintendo
This article is part of designboom’s MODES OF HABITATION chapter, exploring how the spaces we inhabit can reshape the ways we live together. Discover more stories rethinking domesticity, shared living, and the many forms a home can take here.
The post building a life in virtual worlds: the places we inhabit and lose appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.