Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Gaming
  3. News

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

The Sims 4 now lets players use custom pronouns

Cristina Alexander
By

EA and developer Maxis have announced they added a new feature in The Sims 4 that finally allows players to customize pronouns for their Sims characters.

EA and Maxis wrote in their blog post on Tuesday that they have been working to add custom pronouns since last year, after receiving feedback from the Sims community. To make that feature a reality, they worked with two leading LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations, GLAAD and the It Gets Better Project, to research and understand how pronouns are used among transgender and non-binary players. In doing so, they learned the contexts in which binary gender pronouns were used in the game and worked to develop a means of customizing pronouns to make the gameplay experience more inclusive for everyone.

Recommended Videos

Previously, players were only able to select she/her and he/him pronouns during the Create-a-Sim phase of their gameplay, which trapped non-binary and transgender players into a binary gender system that didn’t reflect their lived experience. Now with custom pronouns, players can go beyond the binary confines and select they/them pronouns or create custom ones that are not included in the pronoun drop-down list. Pronouns can be added in their subjective, objective, possessive dependent, possessive independent, and reflexive forms.

Customizable Pronouns in The Sims 4™

As of this writing, the custom pronouns feature is only available in English, and it will be expanded to more languages in the future as Maxis continues to tweak the feature.

Related

The custom pronouns feature comes three months after EA released the My Wedding Stories content pack in The Sims 4, which sparked controversy in Russia because its promotional materials featuring same-sex couples broke the country’s “gay propaganda law.” EA initially announced it would not release the content pack in Russia in compliance with the law, only to backtrack and release it there anyway after listening to concerns from players in and outside the country.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Cristina Alexander
Cristina Alexander
Gaming/Mobile Writer
Cristina Alexander has been writing since 2014, from opining about pop culture on her personal blog in college to reporting…
The Sims 4: For Rent expansion pack pits landlords against tenants
A shot of a Sims 4 building that shows a Sims home broken up into different rental properties.

The Sims 4: City Living, one of the game's many expansion packs, first introduced livable apartments in 2016. For longtime Sims players, this was a welcome addition to the most recent iteration of the long-running series. But since then, players have asked for far more freedom in both apartment gameplay (i.e., playing a Sims family that lives in an apartment) and building.

The Sims 4: For Rent expansion looks to step up and provide players with some long-requested features that haven’t been available before. In a preview event, lead producer Rebecca Doyle and lead designer Jessica Croft took press members through the expansion pack’s features, and even provided the opportunity to play as a property owner.

Read more
Starfield bet on FSR, and now Nvidia players are paying the price
An astronaut explores a planet's surface in Starfield.

Starfield is a great change of pace for PC releases in 2023. The game is very stable, relatively bug free, and it's optimized to run on a wide range of hardware. That doesn't mean the game isn't demanding. It is very demanding, and it's clear Starfield leans on AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR 2) to push frame rates higher.

As I was gathering my best settings for Starfield on PC, it became clear that the game is designed around having FSR 2 turned on. That's not inherently a problem. For a game as demanding and visually impressive as Starfield, though, leaning too heavily on a singular feature can make some players, especially those on less powerful hardware, choose between performance and image quality. And in the case of Starfield, that's not a decision they should need to make.
The reality of the situation
AMD is Starfield’s Exclusive PC Partner

Read more
Red Dead Redemption is coming to Nintendo Switch and PS4 this month
red dead redemption switch ps4 release date key art

The original Red Dead Redemption is coming to two new platforms, PS4 and Nintendo Switch, later this month. It'll retail for $50 on both platforms.
Red Dead Redemption and Undead Nightmare Coming to Switch and PS4
Rockstar Games' open-world western game first launched in 2010 for Xbox 360 and PS3. It was critically acclaimed and a smash sales hit, creating a new franchise for Rockstar that could stand alongside the likes of Grand Theft Auto. It received a sequel, Red Dead Redemption 2, in 2019, but the original Red Dead Redemption remained stuck on older platforms outside of backward compatibility support on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.
That's why fans got excited when a rating for the game from the Game Rating and Administration Committee of Korea popped up. We've now learned that this rating is for new Nintendo Switch and PS4 ports of Red Dead Redemption by Double Eleven Studios. Red Dead Redemption will release across both of those platforms digitally on August 17, with a physical launch to follow on October 13.

It will cost $50 and includes the base campaign as well as the zombie-infested Undead Nightmare expansion; the Red Dead Online multiplayer is not included. This is the first time Red Dead Redemption will ever be on a Nintendo system, although it doesn't look like the port will have much in the way of Switch-exclusive features. That said, a press release does reveal that this will be the first version of the game to include Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Latin American Spanish, Polish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese localizations.
Red Dead Redemption comes out on PS4 and Nintendo Switch on August 17. 

Read more