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Image: Maxis/Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts is adding customizable pronoun choices to The Sims 4, the publisher announced Tuesday. The feature was first introduced to players in January, but the update is now live. In The Sims 4’s Create-a-Sim feature, players will be able to choose pronouns — they/them, she/her, or he/him — or create their own, albeit with a tiny bit of extra work.
The pronoun options are only available in English right now, but Electronic Arts said in a blog post that more languages are coming.
A brand new update to The Sims 4 is here ✨, & with the help of the @ItGetsBetter Project & @GLAAD, players can now add custom pronouns to their Sims in Create A Sim pic.twitter.com/D5N1gvfNNc
— The Sims (@TheSims) May 24, 2022
Creating or customizing a Sim’s pronoun is as easy as changing other details about a Sim. It starts in Create-a-Sim. The “Hello, my name is …” button up top is now “Hello, my name and pronouns are …”. If you click on that, an input screen will pop up where you can choose pronouns or make your own — if you choose the second option, you’ll have to input a few different forms, like subjective and objective forms, of the pronouns. (Electronic Arts said it’s got a guide to help with that.)
The Sims 4 will automatically input those pronouns for respective Sims. Previously, the game used pronouns attached to body type — using either the male or female gender symbols to choose. Custom options in that panel, however, allowed players to be more flexible with gender, choosing whether a Sims prefers masculine or feminine clothes, can get pregnant, or sit using the toilet. These updates were added in 2016. The options were important to gender-diverse players, but players that created Sims that were neither male nor female had to repeatedly have their Sim misgendered during gameplay, in pop-ups and in-game messages throughout The Sims 4. For instance, every time a Sim comes home from work, pronouns are used in that popup, and the game sometimes calls Sims by gendered terms. With the new update, players that adjust pronouns will see them changed throughout these spaces in the game.
The Sims 4 still has gendered words like “Policeman” or “Policewoman,” Electronic Arts wrote in an FAQ, noting that the team has “work to be done to make the game more inclusive of all genders.”
Source: Polygon
