While S&S is harder to say and sounds distinctly dirtier than D&D, it's actually a genre mashing that I think goes fairly well together. Run around and do anything? Check. Do it realistically, or within some very tight bounds? Well, that's all the difference between a sandbox and a simulator.
Sandbox games, for those who have been devoid of an Internet connection until just now and therefore don't know, basically allow you to do anything you want. This is generally a core aesthetic or gameplay component, and may actually be the entire point of the game. If this sounds awesome, the rest of the world agrees with you. GTA, being one of the first decent ones that achieved popularity, spawned a multibillion dollar franchise and numerous clones. The imitators, however, were not as good. More recently, however, some better ones have been made, but I don't know that they have the ability to challenge the giant. One might argue that Saints Row is a knockoff, but the less pointed gameplay appeals to me more.
Simulators, for the purpose of juxtaposition, generally give you a very specific set of rules to follow. Additionally, there tend to be concrete goals and not a whole lot of do-what-you-want-ery. There are simulation games for basically every activity, from trucking simulators to fishing games.
While I generally dismiss games of this ilk as boring and poorly made, at least as far as videogame standards are concerned, there are a few good ones. One that we'll likely get to eventually, and one that filled quite a bit of time in my youth, is Pilotwings 64. Basically, it's a light density flying simulator. It gives you multiple vehicles and a fairly expansive terrain to explore, and sets you loose. You have to accomplish some missions first, but the rewards for many of them simply give you access to a new vehicle to cruise around aimlessly with.
While this game is neither a true simulation nor is it dense enough to be a real sandbox, it's pretty fun. Thinking about this recently, however, has gotten me to think more about what makes a simulator distinct from a sandbox game.
After much pondering (about 5 minutes), I've decided that simulators are only called such when the game mechanics are so incredibly detailed that they're no longer an abstraction of reality. With videogames, some actions should be incredibly complex for the character to perform. The player, however, shouldn't need to know how to do these things. That's the point, really. So, to make it easier to engage the player, we map crazy backflip-sword-swipes to a single button. Bam! Instant abstraction.
Simulators make individual actions easy, but there are about 500 things you need to keep track of, making more complex tasks scale at least linearly, if not exponentially.
Sandboxes, by contrast, have the same open worlds that simulators sometimes show, but they're much more dense. There are a lot of things for the player to interact with, usually in the form of destruction and mayhem with modern incarnations. Minecraft, for example, can be treated as a sandbox game. You can do basically anything, especially in creative mode, and every single block can be interacted with. Barring bedrock, I suppose.
I was basically just thinking about how a simulation is really different from a sandbox game, but I don't think they are in terms of mechanics or gameplay. I think the focus is mostly on aesthetic. In sandbox games, the emphasis is placed on a feeling of empowerment and expression. Simulators focus more on immersion. It's really a matter of taste, but the popular preference is almost overwhelmingly for games oriented to be sandboxes.
I wonder whether this would change if simulators had higher production quality.
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