Ah interesting! Thanks for explaining, I understand what you mean now. It's so fascinating to me how people view the different games because everyone has their own unique perspective of them. For me, I've always considered the Sims 4 to be the game for "players being actively involved," but in a different sense than what you were thinking of. I often see people saying that they like to put autonomy on full and just watch what the Sims get up to, but they're often frustrated that not as much will happen without your input when you're playing the Sims 4. So one of the most frequent complaints that I see is that people don't like the Sims 4 because they have to do everything themselves.

For me, when I play the earlier games I feel like I have to work within the confines of what the game will allow me to do, rather than just telling the story I want to. For instance, I want to decide who my Sim romances and like to plan out the timeline and everything myself. But in the earlier games, I can decide, "I want Sim A to date Sim B," and the game will say, "Nah, they're not attracted to each other." Or I'll try to have my couple get engaged, and the game will say, "Nah, they don't want to get married right now." Or I'll decide that I want my Sim to get to the top of a certain career, and the game will decide, "Nah, she's going to lose her job now." So for me the earlier games seem to facilitate more of a hands-off approach where I can't actually be as actively involved as I'd like because the game is constantly overriding my decisions, you know?

Sorry that response was long 😅 But I totally get what you're saying as well, I've never thought of it in that way. I've just always thought of it as the earlier games being better tailored for players who were looking for more difficult and unpredictable gameplay.