An Interior Designer Is You

You should see the pool.

"You earn money, but the only things to spend it on are refueling every hour or two and buying entirely-cosmetic furniture to fill the apartment you visit like three times in the course of the game, so it's either pointless or an unsubtle satire on modern living."

— Zero Punctuation on Cloudpunk^note You can also buy clothing and not-really-necessary car upgrades. Which maybe works as a continuation of said satire.

So, you're playing a videogame, and you have your Player Headquarters. It could be a house. It could be a military base of some kind. And, you know, it's a nice place. Well, OK, the walls are kinda brown and boring. And except for the conference table, it's kinda empty. And maybe the carpet could use some scruOHMYGOD! This room needs a makeover STAT!

Luckily, this isn't hard. Why? Because An Interior Designer Is You!

In some games, you'll get a room (or two, or three) that you can kit out as you see fit. You can collect furniture and other decorations, put them up in as weird a combination as you please, and just generally customize your space. Sometimes, you only have a few different decoration options, and you can only change the "style" of items. Other games give you complete freedom to place items.

Compare Virtual Paper Doll, An Entrepreneur Is You, Renovating the Player Headquarters, and And Your Reward Is Interior Decorating.

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Examples:

Action Adventure

• Joe & Mac 2. You can buy furniture for your house.
• Indie Metroidvania An Untitled Story lets you decorate a personal room by purchasing furniture. Although they're placed in preset places, you can buy quite a lot of items including arcade minigames which are necessary for full completion.
• Castlevania
  • Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance had a room which you could decorate. It didn't fit with the rest of the game very well (and doesn't make sense character wise, Juste, as a Belmont, is in a position to know the castle will disappear/fall apart when he's done). It's a borderline example, though — you couldn't choose the placement of the items.
  • Castlevania: Curse of Darkness is the next in line for this, except that you only have chairs to decorate your room.
• The Wii game Go Vacation by Bandai Namco lets you have your own villa once you play half the minigames in the game though you don't have to beat them all. You can change its exterior look, the layout of its rooms, and what furniture is in it, and whenever you beat certain challenges in the game you get silver or gold keys that let you buy more furniture types.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you can buy a house in Hateno village and decorate it. Most of the additions are preset, but there are also mounts for weapons, bows, and shields.
  • The above's sequel, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, takes this another step further with a "modular" home, you can buy preset units for various purposes that come in box-like sectors, and with Link's new Ultrahand ability, you can arrange these rooms however you'd like to no matter how nonsensical. While most of the decorations are static, the bow/shield/weapon stand rooms return as well.
• Overlord offered a limited version of this with your tower, once you had upgraded or bought an item that was pretty much it with only the flags capable of switching. The sequel expands it to give you a choice of three different styles for each item.

Action RPG

• Fae Farm: Your farm includes a customisable house, and you gain more as you progress through the story. Certain furniture items are labelled as cozy, meaning they boost your health, stamina, or mana.

Adventure Game

• In Chicory: A Colorful Tale, you can obtain various decor objects that can be placed in various locations, including Pizza's home.
• Doki-Doki Universe has a home planet that you can customize to your liking, with different backgrounds, decorations, and summonables.
• The Quest for Glory II remake gives you your own room in the inn. As the game progresses, you can buy decorations from various shopkeepers (potted plants, wallhangings, trashcans, etc) and place them in the room to make it more like home.
• In The Walking Dead: Season Four you can find different objects during the walk-around sections that you can then use to decorate your room (though every object has its own, set place due to engine limitations). Some of these are fairly mundane, like fake flowers, toys, drawings or a crystal, but you can also find different animal skulls or a potted venus flytrap.

Fighting Game

• Smackdown vs Raw 2007 enables you to customize and explore the locker room. Interior designer indeed. You can also do this in 2006, but you can't freely walk around your locker room like in 2007: just move around to get to all the different options easily.
• In WWE '12, you can customize your arena to your heart's content. WWE '13 expanded on that concept by allowing you to customize the entrance stage.

Four X

• You can customize your palace in Civilization, and improve your throne room in Civilization II (though in the latter, you have no choice of style). Civilization III has this as well, if you hit a certain objective: you can choose styles, but it's basically just designing the same thing, in the architectural styles of different civilizations, making this more of "An Architect Is You".

Hidden Object

• In Hidden World of Art and Hidden World of Art 2: Undercover Art Agent you can decorate your apartment using the money you earn by "restoring" paintings.
• Earning money to redecorate is pretty much the point of most Playrix games.
• Like its predecessors Gardenscapes and Homescapes, Manor Matters allows you the freedom of designing the furniture, wallpaper, and relics however you want. You can change the styles whenever you want.

MMORPGs

• The Allegedly Free Glorified Chat Room Habbo Hotel, where to get even a single credit you had to spend real money. Newbies do get some starter furniture there now. One piece per day throughout a week, but you get the idea.
• In Virtual Magic Kingdom, the otherwise lackluster MMORPG based on the Disney Theme Parks, had a pretty nifty room-decorating feature. The rooms, furniture, and accessories were themed in accordance with various park attractions, and you could use "teleporters" to link up different rooms. Eventually, they added a feature where you could actually buy sections of ride track and set up rides in your rooms.
• A majority of virtual worlds have this nowadays. Toontown Online, Pixie Hollow, Fantage, just to mention a few...
• Animal Jam allows you to do this with your den. If you have a paid membership, you can also buy additional dens and upgrade them into various things for more space, such as cottages, bounce houses, and fancy restaurants.
• Armageddon (MUD) takes this trope to the extreme. Not only can PCs hire apartments and stuff them with all kinds of furniture and items, most objects in the game can also be arranged as to be placed in just this or that manner using the arrange command.
• City of Heroes lets you decorate your Supergroup base as you see fit, with both functional and purely decorative items. This may end up costing a lot, especially for solo and small group attempts.
• Club Penguin lets you, if you're a member, decorate your igloo with items you buy from the catalog, and you may also upgrade it to things such as a bigger split leveled igloo, snow igloos, candy igloos, backyard igloo(s), a halved igloo, stone igloos, a cozy cottage and some weirder stuff, such as a gingerbread house, a fish bowl, a gym and an estate igloo. Of course, there are loads of furniture to choose from, though a lot of it has been clearanced from the catalog. Oh, and let's not forget that feature which lets you put various flooring in it, such as various wall-to-wall carpets, bamboo flooring, phony-lawn, snow, tiles, cobblestone and even a disco floor. Which is quite laggy when you've got loads of random furniture scattered around your igloo. Especially when the aforementioned furniture is animated. Lag, lag, lag...
• Dragon Quest X.
• In EVE Online, you (or your corporation, which is pretty much a clan) have the ability to buy and anchor a player-owned starbase, abbreviated POS, starting with a control tower. You can then add on modules such as turrets, auxiliary power arrays, shipyards, refineries, or moon miners, as well as other things.
  • If your alliance claims sovereignty over a solar system, they can put their efforts together to produce an immensely expensive and useful Outpost -essentially a player-built space station. Just be prepared to defend, because hostiles can attack and take over your hard-earned station.
• EverQuest II offers housing suitable for a wide range of budgets, and certain tradeskills allow players to make furniture and decorations. And that's not even getting into the sheer number of quest rewards that can be used to spruce up your quarters. The Lore and Legend quests are all over this: research a particular type of creature, and you're rewarded with a trophy weapon to stick on your wall, and a placeable (and readable) book on the subject.
• Final Fantasy XI lets you do whatever you want with your Mog RoomHouse. The furniture also gives a special enhancement for you. Oddly enough, you could customize as much as you want, but you couldn't let anyone in for years until a patch was made. Furnishings became even more popular after the Storage system (a free room for gear from furniture) was drastically improved, allowing 80 Storage without causing your Mog Safe to have a heart attack. No sane Adventurer would go without a snazzy living space.
• Final Fantasy XIV lets you purchase a space ranging from a single room to a mansion, then fill it with an amazing array of furniture, many kinds of which can even be repainted. There are no game benefits to doing so, but it's nice to have a place to invite guests, and copies of certain vendors can be installed to save you a walk. With recent updates, free companies (guilds) who own living space can unlock minigames and special crafting options.
• Gaia Online's house feature has several models, an expansion option, and a furniture store with Ridiculously Human Robots as attendants.
• The Lord of the Rings Online lets you decorate your house with trophies from your many kills. Nothing says cosy hobbit hole like a dragon's head on the front lawn, and a barrel full of tentacles in the bedroom.
• The MMO version of Monster Hunter lets you do this. As per series tradition, most of the furniture is made from monster bits (hide, shell, scale, etc).
• Neopets had "Neohomes," which you could fill up with furniture. The furniture was quite small compared with the rooms. Emphasis on was. They've made "Neohomes v2" which are isometric, and everything is now carefully scaled... if it was lucky enough to be upgraded for v2 compatibility. Petpet Park also has this now.
• Factions in Nexus Clash can deck out their home bases with such things as art galleries, daycare centers and racquetball courts. It'd be Lighter and Softer than the general theme of the series if one of the options wasn't a torture chamber.
• Pangya has a "My Room" feature with furniture and decorations and such... which serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever since you are the ONLY one who can even SEE it.

• Phantasy Star Universe provides players with the ability to decorate their rooms with all sorts of rare trophies, common dolls, and various seasonal knick-knacks. Players can also choose the basic theme (up to and including the perceived planet for their home) as well as what music plays in their room. This all serves a real purpose as players go to each other's rooms to buy stuff. There is even a Gachapon decoration which allows players to vend items to each other in sort of a gambling mini-game.
• Phantasy Star Online 2 has the Personal Quarters, which starts out as a tiny "Mini Room" that only holds a small amount of furnishings; just enough for a chair or two. If you pay for a pass (or get a 3-day one for free from somewhere), you'll be able to expand it for more floor space, add two more additional rooms, and alter the outdoor landscape. The furnishing offerings vary from the classy to the quirky, with some interactive ones to make your own Rec Room if you'd like.
• Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis has the Creative Space, which does away with rooms entirely and gives you an entire sandbox to play around in. You could make a sweet home with stylish interior, but you can also make it into a storefront, a jump puzzle, a parkour course, or just gigantic pieces of art.
• PlayStation Home is all about this.
• Among the things you could buy and/or win in Puzzle Pirates is furniture, with which you could decorate your home or your ship if you so desire.
• Runescape has the Construction skill, which revolves around building and furnishing a personalized house. Rooms include a "costume room" for extra storage of clothing items, rooms for hosting various combat and party games, trophy rooms for showing off rare drops and special equipment, a menagerie for showing off various pets, and a giant aquarium that can be filled with rare drops from the game's Fishing skill. It's also an incredibly expensive Money Sink, given how expensive the materials can be. However, unlike many other examples, there is very little player choice on where to place furniture.
• Runes of Magic uses free (and, for all intents and purposes, immediately available) player housing as a marketing bullet point. Decorations can cost a lot of money, but some of them have practical uses.
• Second Life is what it's made for; user content creation is its crux, and so is the world spaces you can create.
• Spiral Knights allows Guild Masters to customize their Guild Halls with furniture, extra floors, alchemy machines, a recipe vendor, an auction house, a PvP reward station, a personal training center, and a trophy room with an alchemy machine used to produce rare-quality trophies.
• Star Wars: Galaxies had one of the robust interior decoration systems in any game ever (particularly impressive given that this was only one facet of the larger game). Players could put down houses on most of the game's planets, could run businesses out of them, and could even found cities. It should say something that rewards for difficult quests were oftentimes just new furniture for your home and no one batted an eye (if anything, the desire for more and more varied furniture seemed to be an omnipresent request from the players).
• Similarly, Star Wars: The Old Republic allows the player to buy several strongholds, which start off completely bare. Decorations can be gained in numerous ways, from vendors, to quest rewards, to random drops from certain bosses. Fully unlocking and decorating a single stronghold can cost tens of millions of credits.
• Travians gives you a small house to start with, which you can upgrade into bigger and bigger houses as you gain the currency to do so. Each house has a set of rooms you can decorate with wallpaper, furniture, and even plants and streams for the backyard. What's even cooler is that they use contests to solicit player designs, so some of the larger house blueprints and some of the furniture collections were actually player-crafted.
• Warframe
  • Players can decorate their Orbiter with a variety of items, some of which are purchased with Platinum (real-money currency), while others are obtained from vendors around the solar system. Progressing through the main quest line will eventually unlock a personal room for the Operator, specifically for decorating.
  • Clans can design their very own hideout for their Dojo. Certain rooms and objects provide various functions to players, such as enabling trade between players or unlocking new weapons and Warframes, while others are merely aesthetic.
• Webkinz allows you to design rooms for your pets with items from the W Shop.
• Wildstar gave every player a house in an oxygenated bubble in an asteroid field for pocket change, with very good snapping and tons of decorations, it stood out amongst the competition of its era for the detail and modability of its housing system. Sadly, it wasn't meant to be.
• Wizard101 lets you decorate your dorm room with furniture you get from quests and the like.

Platform Game

• Kirby's Epic Yarn lets you furnish Kirby's apartment with items found in different levels, or purchased from shops.
• LittleBigPlanet does this of course, not only by a level editor, but by being able to decorate your pod.

Puzzle Game

• Another Case Solved has you spend "detective bucks" and/or candy on office furnishings.
• Babblix's Excuse Plot involves playing a word-themed game show to earn money to spend on furnishings for your four-room virtual house.
• Homescapes has this as its central premise: you need to help the butler Austin renovate his parents' old home to convince them not to sell it. For some reason, doing this requires you to complete Match Three puzzles.
• After raising enough money at certain plot points in Love & Pies, you can choose between three different customization options for each part of the café as you help Amelia rebuild it. They can be changed any time by long pressing on a café section.
• Professor Layton and the Curious Village: As you progress through the game, you can collect items to furnish Layton and Luke's rooms at the inn. Finding the best combinations of items to max out their happiness levels unlocks extra puzzles.
• In Unpacking, you help the protagonist move into different houses and decorate them, learning more about her as you unpack her things.

Real Time Strategy

• In Age of Empires III, you can buy purely cosmetic items for your home city to characterize it. This ranges from patriotic bunting for the buildings to having a town drunk staggering around the dock.
• The base-building aspect of Executive Assault takes on this trope, with interior defenses available as well as exterior ones.
• Almost every quest in Little King's Story gives you new pictures to hang around the halls of your castle.

Rhythm Game

• Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA has a "Miku's Room" feature, which lets you decorate Miku's room with items unlocked through the game. You can also watch Miku interact (mildly) with the stuff and take snapshots of it. This is continued in the sequel with the DIVA Rooms, where each Vocaloid in the game has a separate room.
• THE iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls Starlight Stage has a wide variety of items to use for decorating the two rooms the player has available, many of which come in themed sets. Each event also has its own exclusive item, and pulling SSR cards will give the player posters.
• Lego Rock Band allows you to decorate your band's den with various knick-knacks.

Roguelike

• Elona lets you collect a large variety of furniture for your house (which starts as a cave and can be upgraded all the way to a small castle), and you can also redesign it with a variety of walls and floors. Each piece of furniture has a specific value, which increases your house rank, which increases the salary you get each month.
• Hades allows you to furnish the House of Hades with various furniture, decorations and whatnot. Whenever you purchase something, Hades will gripe about how you're wasting money on unnecessary things.

Role Playing Game

• In Cyberpunk 2077 you will get some items for V's apartment after you complete certain sidequests (like a scuba diving set from Judy, an Aldecaldos jacket from Panam or a poster from Lizzy Wizzy). They appear automatically in set places. The only exception is a figurine you get from Mitch, which is a normal inventory item that has to be manually put in its respective place.
• Justified (and part of the gameplay mechanics) in Dark Cloud and Dark Chronicle.
  • In the first game, parts of the world have been sealed away to protect it from a malevolent genie, and It's Up to You to find all of these bits of world and reassemble them. Setting everything out correctly so that everyone is happy (next to people they like, or near a bridge, and so on) nets you extra shiny things as well.
  • In the second game, the Big Bad has gone around destroying the Origin Points of various strategic places, erasing their existence in the future. You have to gather tools and designs in order to rebuild the world, save the future and stop his evil.
• In the first Deception, you can add rooms onto your castle. Most rooms are purely cosmetic, but special strategic rooms exist as well which grant you some additional features.
• The third game in The Denpa Men series lets you decorate the house of every single Denpa Man you can catch, you can catch around 200 men which means you have 200 different rooms you can decorate!
• Dragon Age: Inquisition allows you to do this in Skyhold to a limited extent; you can't rearrange the placement of things, but you can pick up different banners, windows, thrones, beds, curtains etc. to customise the appearance.
• DragonFable allows you to purchase and decorate a house, even customizing it down to the point of choosing the setting and house style, but there isn't too much houses can do for you unless you shell out money for in-game special currency (or get lucky with item drops). If you do have enough Dragon Coins, however, you can have a lot of useful items, such as easy access to almost all armors/classes, a convenient way to save your default weapons/armor, and even a little practice arena to farm in.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • Daggerfall is the first game in the series in which it is possible to buy a house to use as your Player Headquarters. There is a system in place allowing you buy furniture and containers for it, but it is very buggy. Additionally, it lacks the "Super Hero Trophy Shelf" effect of later games in the series as items placed on the ground simply look like miscellaneous treasure piles.
  • Morrowind, being the first game in the series following the 3D Leap, makes this process much easier. Whether it's your own stronghold you've built through one of the Great House questlines (or the Factor's Estate in the Bloodmoon expansion) or a residence you've simply taken over, you can easily place and display all of your questing treasures. (With plenty of Game Mods available to give you even more options.) Unfortunately, items like furniture and containers are static and cannot be moved (although, once again, there are mods which help with that).
  • Oblivion is similar to Morrowind in most ways, however, it also adds a physics engine to the series for the first time. This unfortunately makes it extremely difficult to place items, as attempting to place items next to other items has a tendency to knock them around, if not send them flying across the room. (Once again, Game Mods exist which make this process far easier. In fact, some of the modders were hired by Bethesda to improve the system for Skyrim.) Further, this also leads to a case of Mundane Utility, as Telekinesis spells (Mysticism school) are very useful in interior decoration if mods aren't an option. Still, don't expect to place more than 3 books on a shelf...
  • Skyrim:
    • Skyrim continues the tradition, with the welcome addition of bookshelves-as-chests that automatically arrange dozens of books on their shelves, display racks for storing weapons and shields, and mannequins for your favorite suits of armor or clothing.
    • The Hearthfire DLC expands greatly on this, allowing you to build your own house, with several options of additions to choose from on each wing, and the ability to add decorations and furniture as you see fit.
• You can buy houses in Fable. You can't customize them much, but you can increase the quality of the furniture and hang trophies on the walls.
  • Fable II allows a bit more customization, with the ability to buy furniture and use it to replace the furniture a house came with (though only the same kind of item in the same place).
  • Fable III allows a choice of furniture in various places, placement and choice of carpets, and choice of wallpaper. You can also have John Cleese arrange the furniture for you.
• Fallout series:
  • In Fallout 3 you can purchase decoration themes for your house as well as useful upgrades such as a workbench, lab table, and a soda machine (It makes your soda cold, improving its HP restoration ability). And any clutter (Old books, dinner plates, teddy bears, etc) you can pick up around the game world can be placed in your house.
    • Trying to do the last thing can cause much frustration thanks to a rather wonky physics engine.
    • At least one mod allows you to build a settlement from the ground up, decorating it with whatever you want and populating it with people you recruit. So it's really this, but on steroids.
  • In Fallout: New Vegas, you can purchase various decorations and upgrades for the Lucky 38 Presidential Suite such as containers to put items, vending machines and workbenches for Item Crafting.
  • Fallout 4 takes the aforementioned settlement building mod from Fallout 3 and makes it a central game mechanic. All that junk littering the wasteland that in earlier games was simply Shop Fodder can now be used as raw material to build your own settlements from scratch, which you can populate with settlers who follow your recruitment beacons. You can throw together shack houses, place furniture, put up decorations, build generators and power lines, plant crops, set up water pumps or purifiers, construct Sentry Guns for defense, make crafting stations, build stores for your settlers to work in, establish supply lines between your settlements, and if you help rebuild the Minutemen, set up artillery emplacements your settlers can man to provide fire support, potentially even using them to destroy the Brotherhood of Steel's airship, the Prydwen. With the right DLC, you can build automated assembly lines and conveyor belts, or even build your own Vault. A well-built settlement can replenish your resources, but the more productive they are, the more likely your settlements are to attract the attention of Raiders, Super Mutants, and other threats.
  • Fallout 76 reuses the settlement system from 4, with each player having a C.A.M.P. that can be built up with all kinds of decorations, trophies, and useful furniture. Part of the game's fun is wandering around and seeing all the crazy constructions other players have made.
• Fantasy Life lets the player have a home and vacation houses, each of which can be decorated. Those playing carpenters or tailors can even make part of the furniture themselves. Getting high enough in jobs also earns the player trophies that can be used as decoration.
• Hero & Daughter: You can buy houses in House Park and fill them with furniture that's gotten through encountering Dungeon NPCs, or some Village NPC encounters.
• Early in Hogwarts Legacy you'll be granted access to the Room of Requirement to use as your private study hall. You can collect or purchase multiple items to decorate the room with, including workbenches that will actually produce ingredients and potions.
• Legend of Legaia 2 had this as one of its minigames: you had to redecorate the main heroine's room with various items you can find around the world, with some of them only gotten from an auction or a vending machine, or in other words, a Luck-Based Mission. The reward for finding all the items and decorating the room in one very specific way was an ultimate crafting material for both of them though.
• The Mass Effect series:
  • In Mass Effect 2 Shepard can customize his/her quarters with souvenirs from various shops - ie: fish (that you could feed), a hamster, model starships - as well as various trinkets found during subquests (a Prothean relic, Shepard's old N7 helmet, etc.)
  • In Mass Effect 3: Citadel, Admiral David Anderson gives his apartment to Shepard to use as a place to relax during shore leave. The player can then buy new furniture and decor to spruce the place up.
• The Sky Room in Mega Man X: Command Mission which display (to the player's liking) the various figurines, posters and sketches collected throughout the game.
• New Worlds Ateraan, a text-based RPG, allows you to purchase a home (ranging from cottage to castle and more in-between) and various ships. Although only Merchants can implement designs, you're free to write the descriptions.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Gold and Silver/Crystal let you decorate your room. While you had relatively limited options as to where you could place things, a decent number of collectibles were available. If you let your mom keep half your money, she will occasionally use it to buy an item for your room.
  • Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire/Emerald let you not only decorate your room (with dolls), but also a "Secret Base" in a tree, cave, or bush, which you could fill with tables, chairs, mats, toys, plants, and other various decorative items. If you "mixed records" with friends, you could also visit their bases and battle them.
  • In Pokémon Diamond and Pearl/Platinum, you still have a Secret Base—but now it's underground, and there are more furniture options. Bases are also now used for a Capture the Flag mini-game. Platinum added a Resort House with different furniture from the bases. Your in-game friends occasionally come visit you there.
  • In HeartGold/SoulSilver, they took out the room decoration as featured in the original game, and instead allow you to customize the Safari Zone by putting items in it to your liking. Some of the items summon or increase the odds of finding certain Pokémon; other items are purely decorative.
  • In Pokémon Black and White, the Dream World allows you to decorate your Pokémon's home with various furniture.
• In Ravensword: Shadowlands, there are two houses in the town that you can buy and then fill them up as you see fit with furniture that you can buy in a dedicated shop. Although this can prove difficult without the Rune of Winds, which allows you to move objects around, and which isn't acquired until late in the game.
• In Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, you can customize your shop with different wallpapers, flooring, and countertops. It's justified in that the decorations attract different customers.
• In Skies of Arcadia you can customize your entire base with either a Western or Eastern feel, including fountains and what kind of food is served in the mess hall.
• Suikoden game let you customize a few areas of your castle, mainly the bathroom. Later games follow this trend — you can hang paintings and wall scrolls, place statues, plants and pottery, all in the designated areas...
  • In Suikoden IV, the player even recruits Penelo, an interior designer who promptly takes over a room on your Nice Boat and lets you spruce it up with furniture, wallpaper and carpet... and putting together a full set nets you special comments from certain characters.
• In Terranigma, you can buy a house and kit it out with increasingly fancy furniture. This serves no useful purpose to the game, except that you can sleep in the bed (which worked as a free inn).
• You could do this in some of the Ultima games, most notably Ultima VI and Ultima VII. The former page quote (now in the quotes tab) is from Ultima VII Part II, and is about an extra-dimensional transport hub accessible via the Serpent's Jawbone. The player went through the area often, so it made sense to set up headquarters there.
  • In Ultima VI, you could use pretty much any house near where a red moongate would drop you off. Killing the home's occupant was optional - however the beds in the game are unusable items by the PC so if your party wanted to sleep to get health back you had to go into the wilderness or use an inn.
  • Chairs could be moved but not turned, so decorating-minded avatars would search the world for (for example) an east-facing chair to complete a table setting.
• The Way (RPG Maker) Chapter 6 lets you purchase a house and fill it with furniture.
• In White Knight Chronicles the player can customise their own Georama essentially acting as their avatar's hometown for the online aspect of the game though it can also be viewed and visited offline as well.

Simulation Game

• Pretty much every Facebook farm game, including FarmVille, Farm Town, Island Paradise, etc. includes the ability to decorate one's farm with items of various prices.
  • Not only farm games. several business managements games like Restaurant City, Hotel City, Café World, etc. are essentially test grounds for wannabe interior designers. Restaurant City has it so bad, that the game designers implemented several "layouts", so people can display all the cute furniture and decorations they had bought, and rotate them.
• Animal Crossing:
  • The majority of Animal Crossing revolves around collecting and placing furniture. Even non-furniture items can be used to decorate your house. In addition, you can design your own clothes, wallpapers, and floorings, among other assets. New Leaf takes this even further, as Tom Nook now sells items that allow you to customize your house's exterior, and as mayor, you can also place decorations around town, effectively making you An Exterior Designer.
  • Happy Home Designer takes this to its logical conclusion by stripping away all other aspects of the game, leaving nothing but interior design as the entire gameplay.
• In APICO, you can build your own house by laying floor tiles and building walls and decorate it with furniture as you please.
• In Bear & Breakfast, you are encouraged to decorate the rooms with nonessentials to boost your inn's Prestige in order to attract more lucrative visitors. You can buy decor at Took's Dumpster by exchanging "valuables" aka trash for them.
• Decorating your dwarfs' living quarters in Craft The World is actually an important game element: if a home's "comfort level" is higher, your dwarfs will heal faster when they rest.
• Disney Friends lets you customize your castle room with wallpaper, carpets, curtains and plants given to you by your friends and Tinkerbell.
• Dream House for the Commodore 64, which is the only feature of that game. It provides a few houses to decorate, but won't keep items if you change houses or switch between the interior and exterior of a house.
• Dwarf Fortress allows decorations in range from "rock statues" to "iron thrones" to "hapless goblins that blundered into a cage trap for your dwarves to poke with a stick". Many items have an in-game purpose, but others simply provide a morale boost to the inhabitants of your settlement as well as looking damn cool. It's also possible to order sections of wall and floor engraved for a similar effect, and there are medium to long-term plans to enable the player to commission an individual statue or engraving of something.
  • Artificial waterfalls created by channeling and pumping water are also popular cave decoration element: dorfs enjoy mist drifting onto adjacent squares and floor grates allow walk-through variant, which doubles as a Decontamination Chamber.
• Elements of this can be found in Evil Genius, where you play a campy 1960s Bond villain. It's something of a sandbox game, so you get to build your evil fortress and stock it with necessary items, traps, and trophies you've stolen from around the globe.
  • In fact, the game keeps hinting that the best place to put your ill-gotten gains is in your private Inner Sanctum. The problem with that is that your minions need to be around your loot in order to have a high morale.
• Harvest Moon:
  • Harvest Moon: Magical Melody allows you to customise your house with different television sizes, beds, kitchen appliances, and other details.
  • Harvest Moon DS Cute allowed you to buy different wallpaper and carpet themes for your house, as well as offering a few different kinds of furniture. Most of it, like the kitchen and the big bed, was necessary if you wanted to get married, but others, like the bear "Dachan" and the vase, were optional.
  • Harvest Moon: Animal Parade gives you outright control over the layout of your house, with lots of optional furniture.
  • The Rune Factory offshoots of Harvest Moon all have some type of home for the player. Besides the many essential pieces such as a stove, there are often things you can buy to decorate the house, such as paintings. This is most evident in Rune Factory 3 where you can buy large stuffed animals, plants and paintings, none of which have any in-game benefit except house decorations.
• For many Harvest Town players, the main draw of the game is not the farming simulator, or romancing the NPCs, but the ability to customize the manor and farmland with the many, many decorations and skins that can be purchased from the in-game market or won from the Harvest Cup events.
• One of Harvest Town's main draw is its relatively flexibility to move around buildings and furnitures around the manor and farmyard, alongside the beautiful decorative items and skins that can be purchased in the in-game mall or available as rewards during seasonal events. The community pages have a subsection dedicated for players to show off pictures of how well they've beautified their manor.
• The entire point of House Flipper, you buy a house, clean up everything from the previous owner(s) and proceed to give it a (literal) fresh coat of paint with brand new furniture and installations before auctioning it to the highest bidder depending on how you designed it. The only limitations are the outside walls and doors (and previously, plumbing locations for items like toilets but now you can add and remove plumbing systems as you please).
  • The aptly named Garden Flipper DLC takes this to An Exterior Designer Is You by allowing you to build pools, ponds, decks, patios and gardens with all the appropriate decorations and plants you can think of. You can enter a contest in four garden categories (American, Crop, British, and Modern) which increases the house's value when you put it on auction.
• Littlewood: One of the game's objectives is to make furniture requested by the town's various residents and place it in their respective houses. The requests are considered fulfilled as long as the piece of furniture is physically inside the right house and nothing is keeping the player from adding extra items they think might go well with the mandatory items. In addition to this, the Player Character has their own house, in which the player can put what they want among the available interior decorations.
• The Konami game Magician's Quest: Mysterious Times also allows you to decorate your dorm room.
• No Man's Sky: The Foundation Update allows players to build and decorate bases, with Creative mode allowing access to unlimited resources.
• In Potion Permit, you can buy furniture at Bulk and Build and decorate your house to your heart's content, as long as you don't block the path between the bed and the doorway.
• As RimWorld takes many cues from Dwarf Fortress (listed above) for its feel and mechanics, general base layout is obviously an important consideration. Roomy and well-decorated living spaces make your survivors happier, while cramped and ugly rooms affect their mood negatively.
• In Roots of Pacha, you can buy house decorations from Reese and place them inside your home. You can also decorate pots and canvas by painting them.
• In Shop Heroes, players can arrange furniture in their shop. Some of the furniture is practical - you need work-tables for your craftspeople, for example. Other stuff is purely decorative, however.
• SimCity lets you do this with a city.
  • And SimEarth lets you do it with a planet. Raise the land in funny shapes, artistically bombard a continent with meteors, or why not tamper a little with the ozone layer and start a new ice age for that art deco "huge walls of ice crushing all life" feel to the place?
    • And Spore lets you do this with - AN ENTIRE GALAXY! But not plants.
    • You can access the plant editor which is buried deep inside the game with a little bit of code inputting.
• The Sims qualifies (indeed, it's much of the point of it) as well as MySims and MySims Kingdom. The latter even gives you your own island to build on once you earn enough of the king's favor.
  • The Sims were actually meant to be just this trope at first. Well, more of An Architect Is You, really, but close enough.
• Space Colony lets you play interior design in your colony. Interestingly, things like noise pollution are taken into account.
• Spiritfarer lets you craft furniture upgrades for your passengers' houses, which usually gives them a mood boost. Sometimes furnishing a house is required to advance a passenger's story. However, one passenger is a strict teacher type and actually wants a plain, undecorated house, and will get a temporary mood loss if you give them decorations anyway.
• Stardew Valley lets you decorate your house, but outside of the TV, calendar, and (as of 1.4) dressers, nothing else serves any practical purpose. With the catalogues you can purchase from the general store and carpenter, you can spawn any piece of furniture, wallpaper and flooring. Secret and festival merchants will sell you exclusive furniture items that the catalogue won't give you. You can also decorate the rest of the map, though most items will get destroyed if an NPC walks over them.
• Starmancer lets you unlock various styles of furniture, place decorations, and change the appearance of floors and walls. Each room has a Beauty stat that affects the morale of colonists working there.

Stealth Based Game

• In Assassin's Creed II, your Monteriggioni town and villa could be upgraded to give you a massive income and discounts.
  • And in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, a City Planner Focused On Urban Renewal Is You, as you can now do this for the entire city of Rome.

Third-Person Shooter

• In Splatoon 3, every player has a locker that they can decorate with various items. This is primarily done with objects bought from Hotlantis, a general store, but players can also show off their clothes and weapons in them. In one room of the lobby, the player can see the lockers of people who they've recently played with. The developers have said that this was done in a bid to get players to acknowledge that there's another human being on the other end of the screen.

Time Management

• Bella Design has a house which you can fix up using points from achieving expert level.
• Papa Louie Arcade: In games starting from Papa's Freezeria, you can customize your restaurant's lobby, changing wallpaper or flooring, putting up posters, and placing furniture.

Visual Novels

• Many mobile Romance Games, like Ikemen Sengoku and the Shall We Date? games, give your in-game avatar a room and/or garden that you can decorate with items earned from main routes or events.
  • In Court Of Darkness your in-game avatar room can be decorated with furniture items won from events and draws.

Wide Open Sandbox

• The Dead Linger allows you to enter every building you can find the zombie-ridden world, from suburban homes to prisons. Not only can you barricade them to you liking, you can also find all kinds of decorative objects like chairs, tables, sofas, microwaves, refridgerators, trashcans and haystacks to make your hideout not only safe, but homely. You could even build your own little makeshift hut!
• Dragon Quest Builders has this as a major gameplay mechanic, where the objects the player puts in rooms affects what kind of room it is, what bonuses they give, and how the NPCs uses them. This is expanded greatly in the sequel, with every NPC given their own personal preferences ^note measured by the size of the room, the theme of the items in it, and how fancy it is that affect the amount of Gratitude Points (essentially XP for leveling up towns) they drop and item sets like swings and eating areas that can be placed outside as well.
• Endless Ocean 2: Adventures of the Deep: Nineball Island lets you purchase various upgrades that provide access to sidequests.
• Minecraft: This is an important gameplay element, combined with "An Exterior Designer and Landscaper Is You." Pretty much any place anywhere can be decorated to your liking. Want to build a base inside a cave? Go for it. Want to make a house entirely out of dirt and sand while the inside of it is made out of bricks? It's possible. Do you want to fill your basement with a pool of lava? Go nuts! It's also possible to build structures and the like in the Nether (a place mostly made out of fire and lava) and in The End (an alien world pretty much). Creative mode gives you access to every single block and item, allowing you to literally make anything you can think of.
• Necesse has many furniture items that can be crafted. Settlers' morale can be improved by decorating their room, which will make them work faster.
• No More Heroes: The first two games have this. In the first, every trading card and wrestling mask you find adds a new mask hanging up on the wall in your room. In the second, you can find chests with actual decorations in them, most of which is anime merchandise and miniature replicas of the boss' equipment. An Old Save Bonus is also in effect, so every mask you found in the first game will still be there in the second. Additional mask/decoration chests appear in New Game Plus, so you need to play both games at least twice to fully pimp out your room.
• Saints Row 2 allows the player to purchase about a half-dozen "cribs" in various places and upgrade to a limited selection of new furniture. Also, the gang's headquarters is renovated automatically as missions are completed.
• Scarface: The World Is Yours has a "Pimp Your Mansion" mode. While actually placing the things you've bought is unnecessary and unrewarded, buying ostentatious and expensive junk is more or less essential to increase your respect level.
  • Unfortunately, in some versions of the game, placing your kitsch can become buggy, with pieces disappearing from where you place them after leaving the mansion. However, there are a few different decor selections that alter the mansion's overall look, from the classic '80s movie style, to a tastefully modern style complete with shark tank, all the way to a quasi-Roman villa.
• Scrap Mechanic features this in addition to building vehicles. The same materials and parts you can use for moving creations, you can just as easily attach to the ground to create impressive houses, garages, and workshops.
• Starbound has many items that exist purely for decorative purposes, such as bookshelves and chairs, and functional furniture, such as beds (for recovery) and stoves (for cooking). Your spaceship is your Player Headquarters and the one most obvious place to decorate, but you're also free to build houses or any other structures you like on planets.
  • The choice of decoration is actually important when it comes to tenants, as it will determine what people will move in. If you set up a room with Floran furniture (hunting trophies and primitive plant things), a Floran will move in. Put in kitchen furniture and Hylotl-specific items, and a Hylotl chef will show up. Set up some lab equipment from a Miniknog lab, and a (non-hostile) Miniknog scientist will be assigned. Since tenants can be persuaded to join your crew, this can be very useful for getting the people you want (although race is purely cosmetic).
• Terraria actually requires you to decorate your house with reasonably sized rooms that contain at least a chair and table in order for helpful NPCs (who sell you equipment) to move in. In general the game gives you a lot of freedom for decoration, but most items have an ingame purpose as well as just looking nice.

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