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A huge part of the appeal of long-running video game series The Sims has always the ways it lets you translate your own lived experience into those weird little gibberish-spouting monsters. Over the years, the EA-published series has slowly added more tools to allow players who were not cis, white, and straight to get their hand on this ball, following the series’ basic dictates of trying to get a decent slice of the human experience represented in simulated form. But what if your identity is rooted in being incredibly fragile and pissy about the identities of others? How are you supposed to enjoy your video game in a world where people both look, and are, ways that you do not like? Why has no one thought of the whiny babies in all this?
Enter this new Wired report, which states that a moderation war of sorts has broken out between EA and modding sites posting what are referred to as “DEI Remover” mods for The Sims 4. Install these mods, and you can basically MAGA-fy your Sims world with a couple of clicks, with all characters suddenly becoming white, straight, and thin. (Same-sex married couples will suddenly find themselves rebuilt as siblings, which we don’t think reads as wholesome as the creators of the mods presumably intended.) A canonically trans person of color who was added to the game in 2023? Now a white woman. It’s like a miracle, but as instigated by people who exclusively reply to Elon Musk posts on Twitter.
But while The Sims 4, originally released back in 2014, has benefited mightily from its prolific modding community, EA is clearly not happy about this one, especially after it was publicized (unhappy version) by well-known Sims content creator @DanielleBuilds. EA (which allows modding of the game, but reserves the right to shut down projects it doesn’t like) reportedly sent a takedown notice to forums hosting the mods—only to have them get swiftly re-posted, because you’ve presumably met the internet and how it works. The mod was actually released last year, but for some reason, people are now feeling much more vocal about either their desires to erase the identities of others, or about calling out how incredibly infantile such behavior pretty clearly is. EA will never clear the mod out entirely, of course, so this mostly serves as a bellwether of sorts: One more indication of how certain deeply entitled brands of intolerance continue to invade even the most anodyne of spaces.
