This article will go in many places, but at the end of the day, here’s my most prevailing opinion: The Sims is one of the most LGBT-friendly games on the market.
It isn’t to say that the franchise hasn’t had its mishaps, such as separating marriages into heterosexual marriage and gay “unions” in The Sims 2, with the unions giving less satisfaction to sims. But for the most part (and just in the main four games so far, I’m not playing obscure spinoffs), same-sex love is put on equal footing with heterosexual love. And it’s an aspect of the game that’s been constantly improved upon too. The Sims 3 did away with any differences between marriages, wishes, fulfillment, etc. The “worst” part was that sims still had to be gender-conforming in their fashion and behavior, barring mods and custom content of course. The Sims 4 lifted the restrictions on gender too. Anyone can fill their save with butch lesbians and drag queens, make everyone trans, and let their gay couples have biological children between the two of them.
There is no doubt that being LGBT-friendly was a deliberate move from the start for The Sims. Full stop. It was a move that was fought for in the late 1990’s in the face of opposition and uncertainty. And the mechanism for determining a sim’s sexual orientation has never changed either.
“If you created a household with two same-sex Sims, they would always become gay just from the fact they were around each other the most,” recalled [Patrick J. Barrett, game developer for The Sims]. “That’s when I came up with the system that determined a Sim’s sexuality through user-directed actions…certain social interactions were tagged as romantic…the game kept track of whether these were performed by same-sex or opposite-sex Sims. The formula was a little more complicated, but, over time, as a Sim developed a relationship, his or her preference was set.”
Although I wasn’t able to find concrete info on how a sim’s orientation works in The Sims 4, the system is very well known in The Sims 2 and The Sims 3. TS2 uses an averaged total of romantic interactions performed by a sim and TS3 does exactly the same. Sexual orientation is a simple, fluid score. Any romantic interaction will raise their preference of the sex they’re flirting with by +2 and lower the other by -1. Autonomy can change it, but player intervention will change it even more.
Sexuality is fluid. I barge in to say that’s not how it works! At best, it’s a feel-good saying that sanitizes what is often painful soul-searching and fighting societal pressure among gay people. It’s a slap in the face to closeted gays, loveless marriages, or the reality of bisexual people existing. But hey, that is just my opinion. And my other opinion is that The Sims, built off the fluid orientation of sims, is using the best model for virtual sexuality and doesn’t need to change it.
I don’t follow those who want to divorce The Sims from all real-life implications, as if the game was made in a vacuum. But sometimes the best programming choice is one that’s agnostic to real-life demographics. There aren’t gender and race quotas for careers, income, etc. and the idea of set expectations and roles for those are laughable. The best part about this game is molding sims to your expectations and not crossing your fingers and hoping that the devs are on your side.
The real world sucks, and I don’t expect it to be teeming with gay people. I’m often the only one in the room. And to be cynical, I don’t think a game dev setting a cap on how many gay sims would reflect the weird escapist fantasies I have. Tired of all the conversations about how many gay people it takes for a fictional setting to feel “unnatural”, I know that it would be talked about at Maxis if they set a quota.
But they don’t, and that’s the best part. Some sims have their sexuality set as gay or bisexual from their very beginnings (at least according to rumors), but that’s rare while setting a sim’s sexuality with a bit of flirting is as common as you want to make it. Free of any dev’s potential limitations, my gay utopia is achieved. My sim marries her wife next to a pile of dirty laundry.
I am aware that the flipside is sims players using the same tactics to exclude gay romance from their game, whether exclusively or just saving it for a token spare. It haunts me whenever I read a promising legacy and then get bored reading and feel very bad about that but maybe it’s the price I pay for my own games. Maybe it’s the price I pay for a sandbox game in general.
About a year ago I conducted a poll on Twitter about you choosing a sim’s partner or letting the game’s AI decide to…extremely poor results. 6 votes and one of them was me. So that’s why there’s a poll in this post too. How much do we balance sim autonomy versus our input? Is it on a broad spectrum? Probably. This might not be about the politics of sim sexuality at all, but about the value of leaving choices to the player. The Sims is in a unique place as a video game centred around playable characters yet with no script (no I don’t think Strangerville/Eco Lifestyle/World Adventures/any Sims 2 worldbuilding/etc. count as scripts) That’s the only opinion it explicitly has.