We finally have some information on the Pronoun Update for The Sims 4. Fans are really excited for the big news as this is something they’ve been waiting for a long time—there were 22,000 signatures for a petition for The Sims Games to be more gender-inclusive.
As some backstory on pronouns in The Sims, when a player opens the Create a Sim window in the game to make a Sim, they can select female or male. When they pick clothing, it’s either masculine or feminine. As of right now, these limited options make The Sims 4 very gendered. The devs made steps to improve that, as players can change the filter now to can pick any of the clothing options—which is a huge step compared to older Sims games—as well as in general, compared to games right now. Players can also customize their Sims’ gender a little bit more, however, in the way the game works, gender is based on the Sims’ physical frame—they’re either masculine or feminine. And this seeps into the gameplay, into the pop-ups that happen while playing, for example, “Your Sim got promoted!” or “Your Sim got engaged!” which uses the default pronouns. Some steps have been taken on making those pop-ups more inclusive language-wise, like, using ‘they’ pronouns or the Sim’s name instead of saying ‘he’ or ‘she’, but most of them are still gendered.
The Sims 4 is getting Customizable Pronouns
Last year, Twitch streamer and The Sims player MomoMisfortune made a petition for the Sims game to offer pronoun options for trans and non-binary Sims in The Sims 4. It garnered a lot of attention and got 22,000 signatures, as a result of which The Sims team responded. They acknowledged the issues The Sims 4 has right now with gendered language, they talked about how they have plans to fix it. With a large update like this, they communicated to the fans in a display of transparency behind-the-scenes about how they want to get it right, and that they’ve had a lot of people working on this update for a long time.
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The hour-long livestream also showed the Work-in-Progress with the new features in development.
As of right now, when you open Create A Sim, it says “Hello, my name is…” but in the new version it will say “Hello, my name and pronouns are…”
This enables players to pick their own pronouns. There’s a drop-down option for pronouns that has some defaults, like they, she, and he, but also an option for custom pronouns called neopronouns.
Something to note is that this update is only for the English language right now. The shift is easier since English already uses ‘they’ as a singular neutral pronoun, and isn’t very gendered. The same does not go for every language; The Sims gets translated into 18 different languages. There is a completely different solution to trying to have more gender-neutral language in the game. For some of those, there might be an easy solution again, but for others, for example, Spanish, the entire language is gendered.
The Sims team is going to be doing a lot of research and working with people from different places and trying to figure out what the right solution is for the game—so they’ve explained that it’s gonna take some time. They don’t currently have a timeline for when this is going to come out, but it’s definitely a step forward for the non-binary community.