Lem is one of my favorite authors!

I worked with Will Wright on The Sims and SimCity, and I think it's more accurate to say that Lem predicted SimCity in "The Seventh Sally" of Cyberiad. Or at least that's what Will says inspired SimCity, long before he developed The Sims, which was just an elaboration of that original inspiration.

But Philip K Dick predicted The Sims in "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", with its "Pre-Fash Consultants" and "Perky Pat Layouts":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_E...

>Layouts are physical props intended to simulate a sort of alternate reality where life is easier than either the grim existence of the colonists in their marginal off-world colonies, or even Earth, where global warming has progressed to the point that Antarctica is prime vacation resort territory. The illegal drug Can-D allows people to "share" their experience of the "Perky Pat" (the name of the main female character in the simulated world) layouts. This "sharing" has caused a pseudo-religious cult or series of cults to grow up around the layouts and the use of the drug.

That describes the cult-like Sims user created content community to a tee: online pre-fash consultants share elaborate downloadable layouts with minned versions of real world objects and architecture, for players to incorporate into their own fantasies:

http://sas.woobsha.com/CulturalHF/CulturalHeritageFoundation...

>Conservation projects of the magnitude you will find here usually requires the contribution of many skilled professionals, vast amount of time and almost unlimited budget. But not in your Sim Neighbourhood! Thanks to The Bunny Wuffles Cultural Heritage Foundation, all you need do is sacrifice some Simoleans, a few moments here at the Foundation and a few MB of your hard drive.

http://sas.woobsha.com/CulturalHF/PalmHouse/PalmHouseTheme.h...

>With the permission of the Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, this theme celebrates the wonders of not only the Palm House, but the Temperate House, Dome and Formal Gardens of Kew in this prestigious time of it gaining World Heritage Status. You can read more about this important event here.

https://musculoskeletalkey.com/when-adam-dalf-and-eve-span/

>Another lesson in the practice of moral authority can today be derived from The Sims (Electronic Arts 2002), a computer game in which players create and manipulate families of individuals in an environment that is also designed by the player. If the player fails to endow the characters he or she creates with life skills, they have accidents, fail to eat or drink, and die. Their ability to participate and respond to events in their virtual environment depends on their ability to interpret the phenomena around them. Without being able to understand how what they do affects their world, their behaviour quickly becomes chaotic.

>An antecedent to The Sims occurs in Philip K. Dick’s dystopian novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Dick 1973). Here the players are linked to each other through taking a drug that enables them to assimilate the roles of the figurines that are used to play the Perky Pat game in a simulated environment. The Perky Pat layout provides an exciting and absorbing alternative reality to the occupationally deprived conditions of the protagonists, whose main motivation in life becomes the pursuit of the game and the accessories linked to it. This dystopia explores a recurrent theme of Dick’s novels, a view of social participation being largely centred on the pursuit of trivia to the extent that it becomes hard for the characters to distinguish what is significant and meaningful in their lives from the fantasies in which they are enmeshed. [...]