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• Probably the single biggest drawcard for most people seems to be designing their own furniture and other three dimensional objects for the game.
• Architectural design/interior decoration. The Sims 2 has a fantastic three dimensional house building mode, and unlike the first game you can now go up around 10 storeys or so. Many people absolutely love designing houses or building community centres inspired by real-life international landmarks. It's also possible to do landscape design...and of course, a big draw for many people is submitting their work to sites such as The Sims Resource where other people can then download it for inclusion in their own games.
• Clothing/makeup design.
• 3D humanoid modelling - creating Sims based either on famous people or extraterrestrials.
• Storytelling or amateur computer-generated filmmaking. (machinima) You might have heard of a series of films built with the Sims 2 called The Strangerhood. If not, you might want to check it out to see what the engine is capable of...it's pretty amazing.
• An interactive episodic soap opera/reality TV show where you get to be the director. You might not record all of it as AVI files, as that would get somewhat prohibitive, but each household can have a photo album/journal where you can have snapshots and captions talking about various incidents in their lives. One thing I really liked early on was that although I liked the idea of the show Big Brother, I often didn't like some of the people they had on there...The Sims 2 lets me stage something like that which is completely run by me...I can either direct and control everything that happens, or I can let the Sims loose and watch them interact.

So as you can possibly see, the game doesn't just have one use...there are a lot of different things that can be done with it, depending on the type of creativity that the person in question prefers to engage in.

How about hooking up a "Quake" type engine with a Sim type mapping engine so you could zoom in and enter buildings and interact with characters? Just thinking out loud...

Check out the videos from http://www.strangerhood.com/home.php which use the Sims2 game engine to generate the movies. They look very "Quakish" or at least the camera can get down in there and interact.

And it's by the same guys who do Red vs Blue! Very funny material.

I'm surprised nobody (at my threshold?) has mentioned Rooster Teeth Productions' The Strangerhood, an online series done using The Sims 2.

Personally, however, I prefer their Red vs. Blue, a series done using Halo, and more recently Halo 2.

Don't they already have one?

The sims? Realism? You're kidding right?

We're talking here about simulated "people" who will quite happily beat the crap out of someone one second and talk about the weather to them the next. "people" who will moan and whinge when the bathroom is in use when there are three other free ones in the house. "people" who will happily stuff their faces whilst their kid is crying it's eyes out after shattin itself. "people" who, when they see a fire, go as close to it as they can manage and burn themselves to death instead of calling the fire brigade as any sensible person would do. "people" who play *exactly* the same game of chess every time (technical limitations, I know)

The actual actions they do are vaguely convincing but overall the sims is *not* realistic!

You were right though, it does have a video recording dooby which the strangerhood has used and with some fiddly work you could create a story.

To create any movie you'd need to know what the engine(s) can do inside and out, and if you're using existing characters, you'd need to know their capabilities inside and out too. So to answer, I think anyone could create something half decent but you're looking at a lot of studying and some very careful planning to get it just right.

Oh, just as a complete sidenote and to make this post as worthwhile (debatably) as possible, for anyone who's interested fraps lets you record pretty much anything happening on your screen such as games etc. so you're not limited to in-game recording to capture footage.