If the only Black content you ever see comes from mods, then you already know the game isn't giving Black players what they want. In The Sims's community, diversity is sometimes seen as an issue that must be remedied by the players.
The Sims has slowly added more skin tones to the game as free updates, but at its current state it doesn't hold a candle to what Virgil does with The Melanin Pack.
“And that was when people were kind of like, 'Oh no, these skin tones are really ashy and gray and this is not good.'" " weren't able to tell a big difference between the darker vampire skin tone and the darker human skin tone,” she noted. The absence of realistic skin tones was highlighted by the release of The Sims 4: Vampires, Virgil said, referring to a paid add-on for the game that added vampires, as well as goth-y accessories, clothing, and decor. I can't make Sims that look like me without it. The Melanin Pack is a series of skin tone mods that add hundreds of tan, medium, and dark skin tones to the game. But when it came to The Sims 4, which included a limited number of dark skin tones in the base game, Virgil started making custom content herself. It only makes the pitfalls they step into all the more frustrating.īecause The Sims has always had a vibrant mod community, the lack of Black hairstyles and fashion in The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 didn't necessarily bother Virgil, who created the forum The Black Simmer to help Black simmers find custom content they liked. It's clear in talking to her how much she loves these games. Virgil has been playing games in the The Sims franchise for two decades, starting with console games like The Urbz and The Sims: Bustin' Out, before playing The Sims 3. Sims fall in love, meet their nemeses, get promotions and get fired, go to university and become astronauts, all under the control and watchful eye of a player that guides their experiences. This is a game where you can make any kind of person that exists in the world, and then run the course of their entire life, including raising the next generation. The Sims is often referred to as a digital dollhouse, but it's more than that. "Despite how much influence we have on the world." "It just seems like in gaming and in everything else, we Black women are always the foundation, but we're always forgotten where we're always left out of everything," Virgil told Motherboard over a Discord call.
In the case of The Sims, Black women often can't even see themselves in the communities that they have devoted large portions of their lives to. Despite the value that Black women have as voters, or in the case of The Sims franchise, consumers, Black women don't always see their worth reflected back on them.
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