There's an old game called "the sims" where perhaps tongue in cheek the criteria for how much your Sim loved the house it lived in was the McMansion criteria of the linked articles, nothing matches nothing balances no 90 degree corners no flat surfaces proportions are very weird.
Ironically the house being awful results as a side effect in being very expensive to build, so from a conspicuous consumption standpoint its simultaneously hard to avoid noticing none of the windows match at the same time as its noticed clearly no one got a Federal style bulk discount on those windows, or the floor plan and roof line being, well, insane, was likely very expensive to build. You might have to live in an ugly house, but everyone will know you have money. Oh the fed dropped interest rates again so we have an extra $100K to spend, well, if you already have five dormers why not seven and toss in some columns on the side door entrance?
Wow, I never made this connection but the McMansion you described sounds remarkably like my humongous fancy houses I used to pride myself on in Sims! Do you have any sources discussing this? I have some friends who would appreciate it :)
Well, like a decade ago people would illegally download software with titles like "The Sims 3: Katy Perry Sweet Treats" (unfortunately not making this up) and buy or otherwise obtain the 3rd party guidebook. I just read how to max out your house score in SIMS right out of the guidebook and it had those hints like listed as bullet points, which even back then made me LOL that SIMS3 gamified mcmansion design.
And I remember it a decade+ later because it pissed me off quite a bit that hardcoded into the game software was the value judgement that a mcmansion was superior to my designs for log cabins and castles. What do you mean my sims characters will suicide if I don't put a bay window in my log cabin, this game which had promise is such BS. Well maybe I didn't expect much from the "Katy Perry Sweet Treats" add on but I expected better of the original.
There are aesthetic value judgements built into sim games like Dwarf Fortress but they're weird enough that they don't feel as constraining.
People were wasting time building useless things in computers a long time before minecraft, after all.
Ironically the house being awful results as a side effect in being very expensive to build, so from a conspicuous consumption standpoint its simultaneously hard to avoid noticing none of the windows match at the same time as its noticed clearly no one got a Federal style bulk discount on those windows, or the floor plan and roof line being, well, insane, was likely very expensive to build. You might have to live in an ugly house, but everyone will know you have money. Oh the fed dropped interest rates again so we have an extra $100K to spend, well, if you already have five dormers why not seven and toss in some columns on the side door entrance?