The sims gay
The Sims Knew I Was Queer Before I Did
WORDS Megan Elliott
Before coming out a year ago aged 25, I appeared very straight to the outside world. I had been in a long-term relationship with a man and had exclusively dated boys at institution. But behind closed doors, my teenage self was playing out my queerness on The Sims, long before I would admit it to myself.
The Sims was my verb from reality, a place where I could forget about my anxieties and immerse myself in a fantasy world. I started out playing SimCity with my dad as a kid, developing thriving towns and managing natural disasters. By the period I was a teen, I had graduated to The Sims 2, which is where I first started experimenting with same-sex couples.
In the Create-a-Sim stage of the game, I never made lesbian couples. Instead, I often made two ‘straight’ couples in one household and embarked on secret lesbian affairs during gameplay. When the women got together, I often got bored with the men and moved them out into a separate household so I could focus on the women. Chatting to my therapist about why I never m
The signs that I would end up gay have always been obvious &#; and nowhere was it more plain than when I was playing The Sims 2.
Everyone who has played The Sims has one version that they grew up with and The Sims 2 was mine. I was so excited to deliver home my second-hand version from CeX, put it into the CD journey of the laptop, and play with the digital dollhouses.
There was a lot I didn’t really understand about the game when I first started playing: from the cowplants and the Bella Goth mystery, to what the adults really did when they ‘Woohooed’.
And why I so often made the girls fall in devotion with other girls.
The Sims 2, the only version I played until around , originally came out in This was barely a year after Section 28 of the Local Government Behave , which had banned local authorities and schools from ‘promoting homosexuality&#;, was repealed.
In , same-sex couples were finally allowed to adopt and have a recognised civil partnership. The Sims 2 allowed the explicit same thing.
But while equal marriage still wasn’t quite there,
Lately, I&#;ve been really enamoured by The Sims 4. It&#;s far from being as complete as The Sims 2 and even The Sims 3, but there&#;s still a lot to passion about it &#; especially with the modding community as active as it is. One thing that I didn&#;t even realize is that the series, but especially The Sims 4, has LGBTQIA Sims that you can see and interact with as you leave around town!
I, for one, thought that the Sims you met throughout town were only attracted to the opposite sex. So, you can verb my surprise when I first met Brant and Brent Hecking and saw them Woohoo in a bush. At first I thought it was mods because I had indeed added an Attraction meter mod, but nope. Brant and Brent are Hecking gay! That&#;s awesome!
So down the rabbit hole I went, researching everything I needed to know about the LGBTQIA characters that I could detect in The Sims 4. And I&#;ll be honest, I was shocked at just how many I found.
Brant and Brent Hecking
While I could verb included these two lovebirds separately, who am I to break up this loving &#; and not to bring up adorable
How 'The Sims' helped a generation of LGBT+ gamers
I was 13 and I had a secret.
Unbeknownst to my parents, I&#x;d started a relationship with an attractive, black-haired guy named Zack. Not only that, but we&#x;d built a two-storey mansion together, put in a pool, and were considering adopting a child together.
It was the early '00s, and The Sims had become one of the world&#x;s most popular video games.
The advanced-for-its-time household simulation game allowed players to design characters, build homes for them, and manage their lives. Under their creator&#x;s guidance, &#x;sims&#x; would cook, clean, explore, swim, work, and paint their way to domestic bliss.
There was no winning, no losing. It was a virtual dollhouse which turned life into a game.
But for a generation of LGBT+ gamers in the early noughties, the game offered something extra special: freedom.
Unlike other games, players were free to pursue relationships with any gender combination they liked.