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

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.

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
Gaming/Mobile Writer
Cristina Alexander has been writing since 2014, from opining about pop culture on her personal blog in college to reporting…
The best single-player games

It's never been a better time to be a multiplayer gamer, with fantastic titles such as Fortnite, GTA Online, and Call of Duty: Warzone taking the industry by storm. However, the same can be said about single-player experiences, especially in recent years thanks to the PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Dedicated single-player games are some of the richest, most beloved experiences in the medium, and in this list, we'll go through the very best. These are the best single-player games.

Read more
Rock Band 4 gets its final piece of DLC next week after over 8 years of support

Harmonix revealed that the January 25 DLC tracks for Rock Band 4 will be the final new ones added to the game.

This ends a streak of more than eight years of weekly DLC for the rhythm game. Ever since Rock Band 4 was released in October 2015, new DLC songs have been made available for purchase every week, giving the game one of the most impressive live service tails in the industry. Ultimately, Harmonix says it will have released nearly 3,000 songs as DLC for Rock Band 4 after the final content drop next week, and that live service support for seasons and online play will "continue as normal" after next week.

Read more
The Sims 4: For Rent expansion pack pits landlords against tenants

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