Sims Petition Created By Fans for Gender-Neutral Pronouns
Anyone who has played a The Sims game knows how addictive it can be. People regularly make memes about going on a Sims binge and playing no other video games for days while they work on creating the perfect family and home. The allure of The Sims is creating a world of your design and watching the humans you make learn to adjust.
It remains an incredibly popular and talked about game in 2021. The Sims 4, despite being released in 2014, still averages thousands of players every month. As new packs and updates roll out, fans seem to want fewer boundaries regarding gender identities.
There’s History of Representation in The Sims Game Thanks to Fans
The Sims game has added gender identity representation in the past due to fans’ opinions and preferences. Fans wanted more variety of skin tones in The Sims 4, and the developers delivered — with 100 or more new skin tones and a slider to allow players to select the perfect tone. Fans were understandably delighted that the developers of the game listened to them, and the constant diversity that The Sims game churns out could be why they still retain so many monthly players.
Currently, The Sims game has much diversity when it comes to gender identity. For example, you can choose whether you want your Sim to present as feminine or masculine, and then you can fine-tune aspects of their identity — such as whether your Sim can use the bathroom while standing up, if they can bear children, both or neither. While incorporating these diverse options is an excellent step toward gender diversity, the game still has some gendered dialogue in older packs and some issues with pronouns matching the gendered bodies. Gender-neutral pronouns are the next step in making The Sims representative of its diverse player base.
Will a Petition Help Sims Game Players?
Since the developers of The Sims game have a history of listening to fans of the game, you might be seeing more diversity in your game soon. Adding the slider for skin tones was an excellent step toward skin color diversity. Allowing gender barriers to be broken down to a degree has been a massive win in the name of representation.
Petitions remain a great way to get the developers’ attention and direct it to something that should be implemented, changed or removed entirely. A few years ago, fans created a petition for players to pet cats in the game Red Dead Redemption 2 since the player can pet every dog.
The petition to pet cats in Red Dead Redemption 2 gained traction and is still discussed, despite being an open case. Petitions can bring awareness to an issue, no matter how serious or frivolous, and get fans and players talking about the quality of the game, encouraging developers to take their thoughts seriously.
Even if the Red Dead Redemption 2 petition didn’t bear fruit, the chances are that this one from fans of The Sims 4 game will. The petition calls for updates to old gendered dialogue and the inclusion of more gender-neutral pronouns so that a Sim’s pronouns do not have to match the basic body style the player chose for them. With thousands of signatures and counting at the time of writing, likely, players may soon see an even more inclusive version of The Sims 4.