And one of the first was 2013’s Gone Home from The Fullbright Company. Walking simulators – or first person narrative games – have become a major genre of video game storytelling. To this day, The Sims series remains hugely popular within the LGBT+ community for its willingness to progress over time. Fans have capitalised on these advances with mods to add further complexity to the game’s gender and sexuality options. The overall choice is still binary, but within that further attributes can be customised – not just voice and clothing, but whether they sit or stand to use the toilet and whether they can be pregnant or impregnate another Sim.
Most recently, The Sims 4 allows for gender customisation. In The Sims 2and 3, each Sim has a gender preference that reflects how they will react when not controlled by the player – this can change over the course of play, meaning gender preference is fluid. And right from the first game Sims were bisexual, able to fall in love with – and, ahem, WooHoo – Sims of different genders.įrom there the series has expanded its LGBT+ representation.
One of the best selling series of all time, they are sandbox games in which players can create a house and live out their lives as Sims.
The first Sims game was released way back in 2000 and, for players of a certain age, was a way of exploring queer identity virtually.
