Well when it comes to men vs. women your dealing with a rational vs. relational way of thinking. Not that one is nessicarly better than the other. It's not surprising women like The Sims better than say Fallout. Fallout presents clear problems with fairly logical solutions. The Sims on the other hand has everything being relative, there is no right or wrong, or set objective, everything is based on it's relation to everything else and there
is little in the way of solid logic.
Plus when you think about it, what the Sims are is little dolls. Guys run around and play army (Argggh! Death!) girls dress up their dolls, play dress up, and pretend their at social functions. Contrary to the feminism movement this is fairly intristic. While there are exceptions (Tomboys and Girlymen) even when detached from society at early ages kids gravitate in those directions.
THAT said (in response to one of the posts)
I do not find The Sims to be paticularly exciting, but then again I've never much cared for flight simulation games. Strangely I've found a lot of people who hate The Sims love empire management games where there is no real point (oh boy, I've made 50 bajillion dollars!). The Sims seems to be very similar except on a smaller scale.
But hey, I'm into enough wierd/unpopulat stuff where I am more than willing to let the majority have their casual "life simulator". Not my cup of tea, but as long as they leave me alone and I get my RPG games and such, I'll mostly stay off the case of the Sims.
Spore had potential as a concept. They needed to add more depth though, they made it waaay too casual. I coulnt' believe after all that dev time it wasn't a deeper game.