After announcing it early this year, EA and Maxis have finally gone live with The Sims 4 pronouns update. Now players can choose she/her, he/him and they/them pronouns during the Create a Sim screen —and if players don’t see their pronouns in the list, they can create their own.
How to Change Your Pronouns in The Sims 4
Choosing your Sim’s pronouns is done through a new, simple menu in Create a Sim. The “Hello, my name is…” button in the top left is now “Hello, my name and pronouns are…”. Clicking this will open a box where you can type your Sim’s name and select their pronouns from a drop-down menu.
If you select the “custom pronouns” option here, another box will open where you can tell the game how you’d like it to identify you. This essentially involves completing a variety of sentences the game gives you, like “They would like a grilled cheese,” “Grilled cheese is their first love” and “Eliza made the grilled cheese themself,” with your custom pronouns replacing the “they/their/themself” examples.
You can change your pronouns in The Sims 4 at any time by returning to Create a Sim. This means you can change your pronouns in an existing game, without needing to start over to take advantage of the pronouns update.
The developers worked with the It Gets Better Project and GLAAD to learn about the importance of pronouns and how letting players set their Sim’s pronouns could make the game a more inclusive experience.
“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,” the developers said in a blog post. “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.”
The Sims 4 pronouns update is live now, but only for the English version of the game. EA says it plans to roll the update out to more languages over time, with improvements being made along the way.
