The Sims, like most transcendent games, feels natural, like it always existed. It’s almost hard to wrap your mind around the idea that very complex and very painstaking design had to go into making something that is so elegant and so parsimonious, but of course, it did. Don Hopkins, a progammer instrumental to the creation of the game, has posted the original design documents on Scribd, and they are fascinating. Here’s an early description of the game from 1997, when it went by the internal name “Jefferson”: Jefferson is a “family simulator” in which you arein charge of the creation,…