The Sims 4 finally adds customisable pronouns for all Sims

25 May 2022, 14:10

The Sims 4 allows players to add custom pronouns to their Sims

By Jazmin Duribe

Choose from they/them, she/her, he/him or your own custom pronouns.

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The Sims 4 has released a free update that allows customisable pronouns for all Sims.

If you're anything like us, The Sims practically raised you. The Sims 4 launched back in 2014 and has allowed us to build homes, have families, and even learn a new language (Simlish is 100% a real language, ok?) Come on, who wouldn't want to have the chance to play God in a completely virtual world?!

Well now, The Sims is becoming more inclusive. EA and Maxis updated the much-loved game to include customisable pronouns on Tuesday (May 24), having worked with LGBTQ+ organisations, It Gets Better Project and GLAAD.

Players will now be able to change the pronouns of their Sims in Create a Sim. Choose from they/them, she/her, he/him or custom. You can also change your Sim's subjective, objective, possessive, and reflexive pronouns.

The Sims 4 launches customisable pronouns for all Sims. Picture: EA, @TheSims via Twitter

At the moment, the update is only available for the English version of the game. However, developers are planning to roll out the feature for other languages in due course.

The Sims 4 pronouns update was confirmed after a fan campaign for the feature. Streamer Momo Misfortune launched a petition, which received almost 25,000 signatures, to create more pronoun options in the game. The Sims 4 heard loud and clear and conducted research to ensure that the game would include trans and non-binary people.

"As with our vibrant community of Simmers, our development team is an extremely talented and diverse group of folks that brings various perspectives into the content that we create. So, we decided to come forward with information about our investigation into the addition of customizable pronouns in The Sims™ 4," a blog post about the change stated.

"We began our research in two ways. First we started looking into the game itself to see how we could approach the addition of customizable pronouns. We went through a couple of different explorations, but ultimately where we landed was to create a system that allows for pronouns to be defined by the player and have those then be used in multiple different text strings. This was achieved through creation of new tokens, or bits of text that are reused, that support custom input from players."

The post continued: "The other aspect of research that we did was around the importance of including customizable pronouns to be more inclusive of folks from different lived experiences.

The Sims 4 Pronouns Update. Picture: The Sims 4 via YouTube

"We reached out to the It Gets Better Project and GLAAD and worked with them to learn more about how pronouns are used, particularly by trans and nonbinary people. Through this research and through doing a deep dive into the game, we’ve learned about all of the different complex areas that binary gender was present in The Sims 4. From here we then worked with our team to come up with some wireframe designs to help us work on making this feature a reality."