The Sims 4 finally gave fans a glimpse of how customisable pronouns could be introduced to the game in an official livestream. Customisable pronouns have been on The Sims‘ radar for some time now, having announced their plans to pursue non-binary language back in May 2021.
While The Sims 4‘s customisable pronouns feature is still very much a work in progress, so don’t expect to see them in the game just yet, the livestream did give us a glimpse of how they may work. John Faciane, The Sims Producer said: “Our research and design will continue until we feel the feature is in a good place to be launched into the game.”
The livestream did have a handy demo to give fans an idea of how pronouns may play out. As it is a work in progress, the layout and process may be subject to change. However, as of writing, it appears you will be able to customise your pronouns through an additional drop-down box when creating your sim.
On the main Create A Sim dashboard, the livestream revealed the sentence usually saying ‘Hello, My Name Is…’ has been changed to ‘Hello, My Name And Pronouns Are…’ From here, you will see the aforementioned drop-down option. There are already the prefilled defaults of ‘They/Them/Their’, ‘She/Her/Hers’ and ‘He/Him/His’ as well as an added custom box. If you click on the custom option you can fill out the three fields which are also populated into example sentences so you can check you are happy with them and that they make sense.
The team went on to address potential concerns about customisable fields by adding that there will be profanity filters in place to prevent the misuse of the feature like there is in the gallery. Alister Lee, The Sims Experience Designer acknowledged: “We do want to be much more inclusive than exclusive here.” It’s also worth noting that during the course of creating the pronoun feature, the team have consulted with external experts.
The Sims 4 is available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.
