Tag Archives: Sims 4

The Sims Just Binned Gender-Specific Character Restrictions

Last week, Maxis – the studio behind long-running life simulator series The Sims – announced a small change to their current title, The Sims 4.

The free update, automatically rolled out to all users, would apparently make changes so

…female Sims can wear suits like Ellen [DeGeneres], and male Sims can wear heels like Prince”.

976

In reality it did much, much more than that.

The game, has removed binary gender categories for clothes, hairstyles, accessories and physical characteristics – such as voice pitch – in its customisation options for characters.

blogpost from Maxis announced the changes and focused on the game’s history of LGBT support and the freedom it wanted to offer players.

The Sims is made by a diverse team for a diverse audience, and it’s really important to us that players are able to be creative and express themselves through our games”, the post reads. “We want to make sure players can create characters they can identify with or relate to through powerful tools that give them influence over a Sims gender, age, ethnicity, body type and more.”

The Sims has allowed same-sex characters to kiss and fall in love since the game’s original incarnation in 2000.

This progressive gameplay stance, rare for its time, was originally unintended. When demoing the game at the E3 games show, two female characters began to kiss in a live simulation.

In a New Yorker piece, entitled ‘The Kiss That Changed Video Games Forever’, Patrick J Barrett, one of the game developers, recalled:

No other game had facilitated same-sex relationships before – at least, to this extent – and some people figured that maybe we weren’t the ideal ones to be first.”

But the developers decided not to alter the game code and to keep same-sex relationships in place.

The option for same-sex marriage was introduced in The Sims 3, released in 2009, while the first offline same-sex marriages did not happen until March 2014 in the UK and June the following year in the US. The option for gay couples to adopt was also introduced in the game’s third iteration.

Sims 4 Get’s LGBT Filter Fix

Shortly after  the launch of Sims 4 last week, players noticed the game would not allow characters with names that contained the words gay, homosexual, lesbian, queer, or other LGBT terms to be shared through the game’s online Gallery system. When the words are entered into the name or description, the game does not allow the character to be uploaded or shared online.
According to the error message, the character “contains a forbidden word”.

Electronic Arts (EA) has since issued a fix for the banned words. An EA spokesperson has said the gaming giant is aware of the issue, and is preparing a fix to remove the issue…

“The Sims has a long history of supporting stories that players want to tell, irrespective of gender preference. The Gallery uses an automated filtering program that filters out certain words, including some of the ones you mentioned below. We are aware of have been working on a fix, which will be out soon.”

Electronic Arts

On launching promotional material for the game’s release, EA boasted LGBT-specific ads telling users to “Be Proud”.

The Sims is a video game franchise that has been inclusive of same-sex romance since the first instalment was released in February 2000. EA Games has been quick to let players know the LGBT filter currently being encountered in the game isn’t a change in policy but a bug plaguing the system that the company is already hard at work fixing.

EA’s response stands in sharp contrast to the statement made by Nintendo of America after the company experienced a wave of backlash for releasing its own version of a life simulator game, Tomodachi Life, which excluded same-sex couples.

“The relationship options in the game represent a playful alternate world rather than a real-life simulation. We hope that all of our fans will see that Tomodachi Life was intended to be a whimsical and quirky game, and that we were absolutely not trying to provide social commentary.”

Nintendo