YouTuber reveals amazing anecdote about sexual orientation in The Sims 4
The Sims 4 (and the series as a whole) is well-known for its accepting and open-minded perspective and portrayal of sexual orientation. Regardless of which way you swing (threateningly, with a baseball bat), The Sims team has often made it clear that they respect and cherish your decision to portray that within their simulated worlds.
As for The Sims 4 community, there are plenty of modders out there that have helped contribute in making the game a better place for people to explore both their gender and sexual orientation. Indeed, there are a handful of LGBTQ+ mods to help improve the game for queer Simmers – including picking the orientation for individual Sims.
Yet one YouTuber has proven that mods aren’t necessarily needed in trying to find out more about your Sims sexual orientation. Petey Plays It, the YouTuber in question, explores whether Sims have pre-defined sexual orientations or if there is a way that players can manipulate it without the use of mods. He conducts his research in a video titled ‘A Look into How Sexual Orientation Works in The Sims 4.’
How it works is simple: Petey uses two vampire Sims – one male and one female. Both have the highest upgraded ability which allows them to let out an aura which attracts Sims to them, meaning they both have an equal chance to seduce and flirt with others. He creates a female Sim, Henrietta, that has never interacted with anyone before and sets both vampires loose on her. Despite never interacting with her before, the attraction ability only works for the male vampire, meaning Henrietta is immediately attracted to him and not the female vampire.
This first step already proves a few things: Sims are seemingly defined as heterosexual in their most basic state – straight after character creation. Petey takes the experiment one step further by having Henrietta go off and flirt with a few other Sims, all of them women. Then he tests Henrietta against the two vampires once again and finds out that this time the male vampire’s ability doesn’t affect her, but the female vampire’s allure does.
But Petey doesn’t stop there either. He sends Henrietta back out into the wild, flirting with men and women to see if this means the game will see Henrietta as bisexual instead of either being straight/lesbian. Petey performs the experiment again – with his Sim now being allured by both vampires. With this reaction, Petey comes to the conclusion that The Sims 4 examines your romantic relationships and interactions and puts you the Sim on some sort of scale that measures their sexual orientation.
To further prove his point, Petey uses two of his Sims (one a gay man, the other a heterosexual man) to flirt with complete strangers in his worlds and see what plays out. He makes sure neither of his Sims are feeling flirty or are surrounded by flirtatious decor, and then first uses his gay Sim to hit on multiple women he has just been introduced to. The reaction is that nobody wants anything to do with him, and he is often turned down. The straight man, however, excels.
So this leaves us with the question: does The Sims 4 have a sexual orientation system? While we can’t confirm it (just yet, anyway), the research from Petey does seem to imply that there is something within Maxis’ biggest game that does acknowledge sexual and romantic attraction between Sims.
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