“Unfiltered and True to Itself”
How Content Creators Represent theBlack Community in The Sims 4•
Abdah St Fleur and Jennifer deWinterUsing interview data from six Black content creators for The Sims 4 (2014),
the authors consider the politics of representation and self-expression incomputer games. Black content, the authors find, consists not merely of
depictions of skin tones, but also of the diverse global cultures of Black lived
lives and Black experiences—including hair textures and styles, fashion, andobjects and assets. These Black creators, the authors find, are filling the gap
left by The Sims 4’s predominantly white designer group and engaging in
playbour, or work that resembles play. The authors highlight Black players’
motivations to create, diversity of Black identities, creative skill development, and creative identities. The authors call for the industry to include
Black designers and creators from the beginning of the creative process andoffer a gallery of Black content created by those they interviewed—a snapshot of the diversity of representation in The Sims 4 community of modders(players who make changes—“modify”—the game). Key words: diversity inelectronic games; playbour; Sims 4 modsT

hat Black people are underrepresented in video games is well documented. The 2009 virtual census (Williams et al. 2009) found whites, males, andadults overrepresented in games, especially when compared to the U.S. population. Further, although Black characters in games accounted for 10.74 percent of
the 8,572 characters analyzed, the number significantly decreased when sports
games were excluded. The updated virtual census (Harrisson et al. 2020) foundlittle change regarding the representation of Black characters as either playable
or nonplayable in games developed in the intervening years. Problematically,
when game designers include Black characters in their video games, they create characters that rely on and reinforce racial stereotypes emphasizing poverty
and violence (c.f., Burgess et al. 2011; Yang et al. 2014), and characters who are
297
American Journal of Play, volume 13, numbers 2 and 3 © The Strong
Contact Abdah St. Fluer at aastfleur@wpi.edu

298

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY • WINTER & SPRING 2021

trapped in environments troublesome at best and often downright appalling(see Russworm’s [2017] discussion of Black identity in dystopian narratives and
DeVane and Squire [2008]). For example, Dickerman, Christensen, and KerlMcClain (2008), in the article “Big Breasts and Bad Guys: Depictions of Genderand Race in Video Games,” explain how people of color are often represented ingames: “Recently, video games have made some progress: More games feature
African Americans as the main characters. However, these main characters arealso portrayed in negative, racially stereotypical ways. Grand Theft Auto: San
Andreas . . . portrayed a young African American man trying to get rich and succeed through violent and criminal gang activity. . . . The majority of games thatfeature African Americans as main characters have a limited range of themes:
The characters are typically criminals or sports stars” (24–25).
There is as well a dearth of intersectional Black identities when it comes togender, economic status, education, and career in games, which further exacerbates a real problem. As Higgin (2009) explains, “Black characters withinvideo games almost exclusively function as synthetic sites of racial tourism andminstrelsy, wherein white fantasies and desires of hypermasculinity and sexuality can be inscribed on the Black body and performed without punishment.
Almost all leading Black men are sports players or gun-toting gangstas, andBlack women are completely invisible. Blackness, as it is culturally rehearsed
within games, does not fit into the heroic world of the MMORPG” [massively
multiplayer online role-playing games] (16). Scholars have linked this to similar
demographic data in the game industry itself, arguing that the lack of diversity
among people making games is replicated in the medium (deWinter and Kocurek 2017; Williams et al. 2009). Regardless, the erasure of Black identities ingaming spaces occurs through what Dietrich (2013) calls normative whitenessor “white habitus”—the racial constraint of whiteness on all avatar creation.
We begin with a review of representational problems, then we pivot to echo
Gray and Leonard’s statement of hope in their introduction to Woke Gaming
entitled “Not a Post-Racism and Post-Misogyny Promised Land: Video Games
as Instruments of (In)Justice”: “While current gaming culture systematicallyembraces ideologies that make clear that white males lives are the only ones thatmatter,” they write, “it’s clear that games can show that all lives matter, representationally and materially” (Gray and Leonard 2018, 8). We build on the importantwork of Gray, Russworm, Leonard, among others, to look to additional sites ofBlack representation, expression, and community, specifically content creatorsin the modding (player-made modifications) community of The Sims 4.

“Unfiltered and True to Itself”

We explore these explicit and implicit arguments from Black content creators of The Sims 4 for more inclusive representation in game space, which helps
address the representational gap left by the game designers. Through the voicesof content creators, we explore such topics as playbour (i.e., work that resemblesplay), skill development, community representation, and creator activism thatdemands more from Sims creators and its manufacturer, Electronic Arts (EA).
The initial Sims 4 game shockingly contained a lack of Black content, and its
created worlds did not reflect any Black neighborhoods. Since the game’s release,
Black content creators have been working tangentially to the game industry,
filling the creative gaps left by production houses, inserting their voices andfighting for a diversity of representation to reflect a diversity of lived Black
experiences. To give voice to these creators, we conducted a series of interviews
that illuminate the same hope Gray and Leonard highlight and that echo Tanya
DePass’s “#INeedDiverseGamesWork”—a recognition that race matters, that
representation matters, and that the means of production are available to meeta pent-up demand.

The Sims 4 and Modding for Diversity
On September 2, 2014, the fourth major title in The Sims game series, The Sims 4,
was released in North America by Electronics Art. Although this was the fourth
title in the life simulation game franchise that allows players to tell their own
stories, many spin-offs and one online games also exist. Available in eighteen languages and with over twenty million unique players worldwide as of 2020 (Jovic
2020), The Sims 4 can be played on many platforms—PC, Xbox, PlayStation—and has eight expansion packs with numerous game and stuff packs. A gamepack gives the players extra content on a specific theme, and a stuff pack has extra
items like outfits and new hairstyles that people can play with. Like previous Sims
games, players can use stories that replicate their fantasies or replicate their reallife in both single-player mode and in online multiplayer mode. However, theevolution of the franchise has seen significant changes: The Sims 4 introduced
emotions as a game play mechanic. Developers also introduced sliders into the“create a sim” design process, enabling the player to use a mouse-like interface
to click and drag physical assets to change the appearances of characters, likethe shapes of their faces, their hair lengths, and so forth. Further, significant
for our purposes, The Sims 4 constitutes the first Sims game that does not offer

299

300

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY • WINTER & SPRING 2021

players official tools to create worlds, relying instead on player-creators to create
assets and import them into the game, predominantly on Python script mods.
Since its inception, modding has been an important part of The Sims franchise. As Sihvonen (2011) notes in Players Unleashed! Modding The Sims andthe Culture of Gaming, “It is therefore through modding that the players haveto create diversity and produce the kinds of body images that proliferate inother games as well as real-life; paradoxically, the Sims’ bodies, especially thenude ones, are reconstructed as more ‘realistic’ through add-ons provided by
the modders” (283). Germane here, however, is the simple fact that modding
proves essential for diversity in The Sims 4 because it is one of the few ways
Black Simmers can create Black content with Black bodies. Everyone is different physically. For example, although The Sims allows the creation of slim andcurvy sims (player-created characters), the curvy sims can look unpleasant andunrealistic. When that happens, players who want Black bodies represented
tend to look for content creators that do “skins,” or a downloadable overlay thatchanges the look of an object in a game. This is not a revolutionary sentiment.
Collins (2020) notes the importance of representational aesthetics identification: “For women, including queer women, disabled women, and women ofcolor, mods are a way to obtain representation and give voice to people who aresorely underrepresented in gaming development. Through modding, they can
see themselves and create narratives for themselves that game developers do not
anticipate. . . . Some mods improve the aesthetic of characters, thereby making
them easier for a player to identify with” (32).
Shaw (2010) echoes this sentiment, noting: “First, people want to see people
like them. This is part of the market logic reflected in interviews I have done forthis and other projects. If you want people to watch/play/read something, you
put people like them in it.” Yet market logic does not hold without the hard workof the modding community. In The Sims games, for example, players want to see
sims that look like them; they want to see worlds that look like the neighborhood
they live in. Importantly, every community has its own style, hairstyles, andclothing—there is no universal “Black” identity that represents the polysemous
cultures of Black experiences. In The Sims 4, something as simple as clothinglacks markers that differentiate it among various communities or ethnicities.
Whether the character is Black, white, or Hispanic, the options remain the same,
creating a white Habitus in the practice of play.

“Unfiltered and True to Itself”“I Will Continue to Create Content that
Represents Us”—Content Creators Interviews
and Black Representations
To understand better why Black content creators work on The Sims 4 and how
they feel about its lack of diversity, we conducted interviews with six of them:Complex Sims, Diversed King, Ebonix Sims, Xmiramira, xxBlacksims, and Kiko
Vanity. We compiled a list of thirty Black content creators who create skin tones,
hairstyles, clothes, shoes, makeup, and accessories from searches on Instagram,Sims 4 forums, and YouTube, and we emailed them to ask for an interview (so,20 percent answered our queries). We were interested in what they created andwhy, and we used our interviews to search out their motivations and politicalengagement. We also wanted to understand Black content creators’ sense of
self and their work in relation to EA and its formal designers. And because weunderstand the cost of labor and tools in the value of content creation, we asked
questions about their developmental processes and skills.
Interviews took place online. We sent in questions ahead of time and we
conducted the interviews using a messaging application that enabled us to ask
follow-up questions. Interviewees requested that we use their professional content creator handles here to identify their work and words. For each interview,
we previewed the content these creators posted to understand their work. Thispreview helped focus many of our questions. We then talked with each of thesecontent creators for thirty to sixty minutes. Here, we represent the voices ofeach creator concerning our four major themes: motivations to create; diversity
of Black identities; creative skill development; and creative identities. We end
with the pointed call for the industry to include Black designers and creatorsfrom the beginning of the process. The themes are fluid, with echoes of each in
the four sections we use, yet we felt it important to see how the ideas related toeach other as a whole.

“Black People Exist in Every Space”—Motivations toCreate Diverse Representation of Black Experiences
The motivation for all six of our interviewees to create content came down to a
predictable yet poignant point: They were responding to the lack of representation of sims that looked like them and their communities. For a game system

301

302

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY • WINTER & SPRING 2021

that bills itself as a simulated representation of daily lived life, this very lackof representation echoed an erasure of Black bodies and Black experiences in
the larger culture. For example, Diversedking is a Black Sims 4 content creatorfrom London who has been playing the game since 2016. He enjoys controlling
his sims and dressing them up with different kind of clothing. He explains why
he started creating content: “I started making content for The Sims 4 because,
when I started playing the game, I noticed that I wasn’t able to express myself
or make sims of my own race.” He continued, “Most of the content EA werebringing out were mainly targeted towards Caucasian races. There was lack ofdiversity and ethnicity and I felt that maybe with my talent I could fill in that
void, especially as a young Black gamer who wants to see a lot of representation
for his community.”
Diversedking also explained his definition of a Black experience in The Sims
and what type of experience he is looking for: “To me Black experience is when I
can create melanated sims who look more like me, same race group as me, same
hair type as me, and being able to express myself through them. I am looking fora diverse experience in The Sims 4, where everyone can feel as they are welcome
to express their roots and culture. Where everyone is equal and not ashamed of
their background. Where we can all play without being questioned or bashed byother simmers just because our sims are a certain color.” Here, Diversedking sees
the inclusivity of representation in the game space not just in having an avatar thatreflects a real self, but in an avatar that can participate in an inclusive environmentthat does not perpetuate the negative racial interactions of his lived life.
Xmiramira echoes this sentiment. Although she has recently risen to fameby participating in the Sims’ reality television show Spark’d (where her team,Team Llama, won) and now acts as an advisor for EA, at the time of our interview, she was merely a twenty-six-year-old content creator from New York. She
began playing The Sims on the console when she was ten or eleven years old.
Shortly afterward, she graduated to playing The Sims 2 on PC. She enjoys playing the game “because it allows me to create characters and stories, and evensometimes live out things that I would like to do in real life, like own multiple
businesses, etc.” She reminisced about why she started creating content for The
Sims 4: “I began making content for The Sims 4 on Twitch, Tumblr, and thenYouTube. I was told that my content would be interesting, so I tried it andended up loving it. The thing that drove me to continue to create was the lackof diversity in the content creation space and online sims community. Most of
the stories all consisted of white sims with one body type and one look, and I

“Unfiltered and True to Itself”

wanted to help change that. Even when it came down to downloading custom
content online, the content was severely lacking for Black sims, and a lot of the
top creators didn’t care, are racist, and weren’t interested in diversifying the CC(custom content) they created.” To her, a Black experience in The Sims is “being
able to create yourself. Being that we are all different people, from different walksof life, who hold different perspectives and beliefs. I feel like just being able tocreate a character that looks like me can help set the foundation of what I want
my experience to be like.” This is the very definition of an avatar creation—that
Hindu religious form adopted in games to define the character who stands in forand represents the player. Representation here is not tokenism; it is a mimesis of
the physical by the digital self that constitutes an experience.
Such creativity and representation validate life experiences, as Kiko Vanity explains. Kiko Vanity has been playing The Sims for thirteen years, and sheshared that she enjoys playing the game because it allows her to live a life thatcan be both real and fictional. She did not begin by making content for The Sims4, but she has recently done so because there is “a great absence of Black ppl withBlack features, and it was disheartening being a dark-skinned woman and not
being able to create a character in my likeness.” To her, the “Black experiencein the simming community is very parallel to the IMVU [online metaverse andsocial networking site launched in 2004, eds.] community in the beginning. At
the game’s initial release, there was a great lack of Black phenotypes especiallyfor Black women. Throughout the six years, there has been great improvements
to show Black individuals. But without Black creators, I don’t think that would
be our reality. I’m looking for an experience that is similar to my community.
I’d like to play the game, and it sparks nostalgia (not only because I’ve been simming since I was ten) that validates my life experience.” Interestingly, in Kiko
Vanity’s observations we find a recognition that change happens on the margins,pushing the center to adapt and adopt. Kiko Vanity’s understanding seems to bethat Black content creators and consumers compelled The Sims developers toattend to her community more (albeit imperfectly). Even so, the Black content
creators and modders provide the majority of the assets and builds needed for
Kiko Vanity and others to have a meaningful experience in the game.
The complexity of inclusive and diverse representation gets reflected in theinterviews as well, challenging the idea of Black culture by recognizing Black
cultures as a geographically, historically, and culturally diverse lived practice.
Complex Sims, who has been playing The Sims since he was seven years old,reflects on why he enjoys playing the game: “I enjoy playing the game because I

303

304

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY • WINTER & SPRING 2021

can develop stories within the game play that make it an individual experience.
My characters typically have a back story and go down a path that makes everything come full circle.” We wanted to know his definition of Black experience in
The Sims and the type of experience he is looking for, and he stated:
A Black experience in The Sims mirrors your experience as a Black person.
Black people can relate to one another on a lot of things, but there is not
one uniform Black experience. I feel like it would just be at least having theopportunity to see what you can connect to as a Black person playing thegame. I’m looking for the same experience as anyone else and by that, I meanthat I can get on the game and see myself without pushing for it constantly.
For the type of music and pop culture that my community indulges in to
be available.

He explains what he would include if he were one of the developers: “Iwould add what I could without making it stereotypical. Black people exist in
every space, so my goal would probably be to add content that focuses on various Black cultures. Seeing content in-game that mirrors Caribbean and African
nationalities would be great.”
Such an observation echoes much of what the research tells us as well. Black
people’s problem with the game industry’s Black characters ultimately lies in thegame itself—such characters are almost always stereotypical.

“Accurately Represent Our Culture”—
Black Representation Is More Than Skin ColorAs we have recorded, the content creators explicitly state that inclusive anddiverse representation involves more than skin tone and color; it involves a
representation of daily lived lives. For example, Ebonix Sims, another Black
content creator from London, who has been playing The Sims since the original
game was released in 2000, explains, “The Black experience in The Sims for me,
is being able to accurately represent our culture, unfiltered and true to itself. Our
many shades of brown, our different hair textures, our many, many ways of styling our hair, our unique style of dressing and trendsetting ways” (see figure 1).
For Ebonix Sims, the absence of Black bodies in The Sims virtual spaceis explicitly a political action, which drives her sense of mission. In her own
works, she says:

“Unfiltered and True to Itself”

Figure 1. Hairstyles by Ebonix Sims

There is so much about Black culture that isn’t represented in the game, that
content creators like myself make it our mission to rectify. Without us, theBlack experience in the game without custom content and mods is a sorrowful one. Our brown skin tones have gray undertones or are patchy; andwithout any expansion packs, out of sixty-four hairs for women you can only
count six that have a kink or coil (excluding the buzz cut). It’s a similar story
for the male sims where eight of thirty-six hairs are Afrocentric. I’m looking
to feel represented in the Sims in looks, gender, sexuality, and personality.

If she were a developer on The Sims, she would “definitely incorporate morehairstyles and introduce a color wheel for skin tones, so that we aren’t limitedby the selection we currently have.” Underneath the interview with Ebonix Simslay a constant emotional undercurrent of loss or sorrow. Psychologists havenoted that racism (both hostile racism but also passive racism that erases groupsof people) lead to racism-related stress (Harrell 2010; Jones et al. 2020). Suchstress manifests in different forms, so when we encounter explicitly emotional
responses, such as sorrow, we note that they are stress-based responses to built

305

306

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY • WINTER & SPRING 2021

experiences that purport to cover a range of actual experiences. And taken inits larger context, these representational stresses form part of a larger narrative
about the experience of race-based stress, which lies outside our scope here,
although it arose in conversations about these interviews.
The missing fashion cultures of Black communities as expressive representation took on broader significance for Complex Sims. He observes: “I feltthat The Sims was missing a lot of fashion that mirrors the Black experience. We
have had so many Black people who are fashion icons like Nicki Minaj, Virgil
Abloh, Beyoncé, and Rihanna that have made an impact on how Black people
style themselves. So we needed something that matched that level of fashionthat has always made us stand out.” Evident here is a simple observation, yetlargely absent in discussions of racial diversity and inclusion. Black is more thanthe color of skin; it is the cultural practice of clothes, or food, or homes, as theexample included in figure 2 shows (Bernard 2002; Davis 1992). Such diversity
needs to consider intersectional Blackness to highlight the nuance of representation (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013). Fashion as cultural self-expression

Figure 2. Black fashion from Complex Sims

“Unfiltered and True to Itself”

sees both a cohesive expression within certain Black communities—such as hiphop fashion or the more historicized “dandy” fashion—while having broader
impact on national and international communities (Wilbekin 2020; Baily 2008;
Way 2021).
More expansively than those in previous interviews, Kiko Vanity notes thatwere she on the development team for The Sims, she would “add in different
cooking recipes from all Black cultural backgrounds and incorporate more pop
culture-like games like Fortnite has done.” Race has expanded markers in her
design and thinking process, both in what she creates but also in her personal
creative subjectivity: “I want everyone who downloads my cc to know that I’m a
Black woman and I make content for other Black individuals that sees themselves
in my content. (Not to say nonBlack people can’t use my content). I choose tocater to the Black community because I understand what it’s like to not feel seen
and to feel like an afterthought. I want to let every Black person who downloads
my content to know that it was made with them in mind.”
She believes that the Black community is an afterthought for the developers

Figure 3. Detail-oriented content by Kiko Vanity

307

308

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY • WINTER & SPRING 2021

when they are creating the game. “I think that Sims gurus should go throughours tweets to them and consider our requests.” Similar to the other interviewees,
she believes that there is “a lack of diversity in The Sims game creators, and I
also believe that since Black ppl aren’t showcased in our media like other racial
counterparts.” In her concluding statement, she said, “I’d like to add a moredetailed and diverse catalog [so] that more people feel more seen.” And indeed,this catalog is already growing in her library, as can be seen in figure 3. The focus
on detail, from skin tone to hair styles and down to fingernail shapes, provides
different options for her and the community that she aims to work within.

“Opened Many Doors and Unlocked Many Skills”—
Modding, Skill Development, and Creative Identities
In a short interview with XxBlacksims, we found a story of the need for content
compelling her to develop the necessary creative skills from scratch. Like others,
XxBlacksims wanted to create content because of need: “The main reason why I
started making content for The Sims is because there was a lack of Black creators,
and EA did not fully let me represent myself in-game without cc, because there
is a lack of hair and skin tones to choose from for people of color.” We asked her
what she did to create her characters: “When I first started making cc, I started off
recoloring. I was making hairs that are blue or that are more European looking,and I would turn them fully Black for me and others who wanted to make a simthat looks closer to us as Black people in game.” The limitations of reskinningor recoloring soon frustrated XxBlacksims. Black character creation, in otherwords, is not just a case of changing color. Such colorism effaces the cultural andphysical differences of Black communities and Black aesthetics.
XxBlacksims let her own ambition but also the demand from her community drive her to develop the artistic and modding skills needed to create new
assets. She explained, “I still felt like recoloring wasn’t enough to fully represent
us as Black people, so I started learning how to use Blender by watching YouTube
videos. I learned how to make braids and curly hairs, 4c hair, and everything that
I feel represents me and other Black girls and boys in game, and I’m still learning
how to make the game better not just for me but for every other Black simmer
as well.” XxBlacksims’s experience speaks to a strong community motivation.
She started making new characters for herself and others. As she learned new
skills, she saw it as an opportunity for change, for world building, for inclusive

“Unfiltered and True to Itself”

design for a marginalized group (see figure 4). We could mention something
about skill development and playbour (again, a hybrid form of play and labor,
especially in modifying electronic game) here, but more importantly, we see
stronger arguments about inclusive representational activism that is not about
individual representation (I want to see myself in the game) but rather collective
or community racism (I want us in the game).
Ebonix Sims likewise reflected on the role of being a creator in the same community in which she plays. In fact, it was the community aspects of creation thatdrove her enjoyment of the game. She notes that “there are endless possibilities toyour game play and sim creations. It has opened many doors and unlocked manyskills that I didn’t know that I had!” Although she has been playing the franchisesince it was first released, she started making content specifically for The Sims 4.
The broader tool set, the larger community, and the online Black player communities were all important considerations for this transition into creator.
Creative identities are not just about learning new skills; they are about
larger subjectivities, and they are political and racial. Throughout her creative

Figure 4. XxBlacksims and a broader palette of design

309

310

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY • WINTER & SPRING 2021

practice, Xmiramira has had to explain and sometimes defend her racial focus
in her design. She explains: “When I first started, race played a huge factor in
the content I created. I was met with a lot of push back, a lot of racism, andit began to make me ask questions. People would come into my streams andconstantly ask me why are all my sims Black. And my question to them wouldbe, ‘Do you ask every other popular simmer why are all of their sims white?’”As has been noted by Gray and Leonard (2018) among others, just being Blackis a political statement, a political body in games. With white characters as theunmarked category, Black characters are marked as different, as questionable.
Xmiramira continues,
Now, after all these questions have been asked, conversations have been had,content has been created, I will continue to create content that represents
us, but I know that I’m not alone anymore. Now you can go to YouTube andfind hundreds of different stories from different Black simmers all over theworld, showing off their game play and who they are. I just didn’t see enoughof us making content and being visible. There were some Black simmers
making content but most of them either weren’t making Black sims or they
only made really light sims. There wasn’t enough plus size or dark-skinned
representation in storytelling.

Here, we call out the visibility of the modding community and not just theassets that they create. Being a creator can often feel solitary and isolating. The
act of always needing to defend the characters that emerge from the creative
process compounds these feelings of isolation. In this interview, we discussedwith Xmiramira the importance of being part of a creative community both tofeel connected but also to continue to diversify, to see the needs and gaps andbuild off of each other’s successes.

“Lacking the Tools to Properly Capture Our Essence”—
A Call to Include Black Developers in the
Design and Development Process
The modding cultures that we see exacted among these six content creators
are in direct response to an absence—the lack of representational material thatreflects the Black experiences they or their communities want to create. Thisabsence was designed into the system, and all six interviewees strongly noted“Unfiltered and True to Itself”

the need to diversify the EA team. For example, Diversedking strongly asserted:“If I was a developer I would firstly change the EA team. I feel as if their team
isn’t diverse, so they’re unable to give us our full experience and what we wantbecause they don’t have people to tell them this and that.” More concretely,
however, Diversedking offered suggestions about skins and textures in the game:
Another thing I would change to help the Black community for The Simsis the hairs and skins that come with the base game [see figure 5]. Firstly,
the hairs for the Black community look dry, ashy, and have no texture at all.
However, when you compare the hairs made for us Black simmers to all theother hairs made for whites and Asians you can see that it has a lot of detail,shine, length, and even looks more appealing in the eye. Sometimes we aren’teven able to represent ourselves fully and have to change something of ours
just to make our self happy when really and truly we don’t have the resource
to make us who we are.

We pause here to highlight an important observation about a lack of digital resources. Black communities are statistically underresourced for a vari-

Figure 5. Hair and skin examples from Diversedking

311

312

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY • WINTER & SPRING 2021

ety of socioeconomic and material reasons. However, we see the same politics
of resource scarcity playing out in online, digital spaces. Modding, then, is a
resource-generating project, but one that once again must be provided outside
traditional market logics. The previous complaints about representation can be
reframed within this design and market logic. Diversedking continues in thisvein: “The skins given to us Black simmers are very sad. They aren’t even theright tone, some look blue, some look yellow, and it’s actually quite sad, because
when you look at the other races it’s like they have everything you could thinkof, but when it comes to us, we are so limited. If I was to be a developer, I would
focus on these main things as well as game packs for us Black people.”
In addition to modding, Diversedking discussed the role of fan community
activism to effect change among formal developer communities.
I feel as if the developers do not care about the Black community. We’ve
tried so many things to try and get their attention. Such as filling forms andeven bashing them on Twitter. It took one tweet for them to realize that weare really serious and need a change in the game. They only care about theirimage and the content they make for people not of color. I really and truly
feel as if The Sims need to listen to us and what we have to say about the gameto make it more fun to play. We feel as if we’re getting ignored and don’t evenhave the opportunity to have our say.

The tension between formal developers and consumers represented, in thiscase, by modder and informal developers becomes palpable, especially in lightof the labor of representation. One group, the developers, is allegedly concernedwith corporate reputation. The other group, the consumers and modders, isself-defined and concerned with basic rights to representation in a game that
purports to simulate our lived lives. The absence of these lives, of these representations, speaks to an absence or erasure that modders actively fight against.
Again, the lack of racial representation as a motivator for both creative
activity and critique becomes a significant consideration in the content that
Ebonix Sims notes, “mainly because we are very limited on the content that isavailable for Black sims and sims of colour. So, I make content primarily forthese groups.” Ebonix Sims believes for The Sims to help the Black community,
developers should focus on “reaching out to Black creators and creators of colour
as a focus group to help bring ideas together on what kind of content they could
bring to the game.” According to Ebonix, one reason it seems hard for The Sims
team to give Black people a Black experience “could be not having many Black“Unfiltered and True to Itself”

people on the actual Sims team to feed into the development of the game.” She
wants to emphasize that “the need for more diverse content hasn’t changed in
the five years that I have been creating content. The fact that the need is still
so high goes to show that there is still a lot of work to be done via EA in orderto help people feel heard, but most importantly SEEN and represented in thegame that they love.” Thus, Ebonix Sims, Tanya DePass, her organization, I
Need Diverse Games, and the market are all asking for diverse characters, evendemanding it. Whole submarkets are thriving, yet we find that content creators
remain frustrated.
This same sentiment was echoed by Complex Sims, who believed thatdevelopers needed to change how they thought to help Black communities represent themselves. “I think white privilege plays a factor in why they’re lacking
the tools to properly capture our essence. Most of the developers are white, andthere’s typically not a lack of representation for white people so they probably
lack the passion to make everyone feel included and seen, is that they can’t relate
to being underrepresented.” We would contrast this observation with Potanin’s(2010) “I Design Methodology”—a design method by which game designers
create games that they would want to play, and which attract more people likethem (in this case, white male adults). Rather, what Complex Sims suggests
is a design methodology more akin to that which Laurel (2003) developed inher work for game manufacturer Purple Moon. For example, Complex Sims
offers this as a form of participatory design: “I think they should speak to theirBlack audience and invite more Black YouTube simmers to their Game Changer
program so they could receive proper feedback from Black people with a large
Black audience. That would also help avoid any potential negative feedback fromracists and people who have no interest in seeing us represented.” The present
team is not diverse enough to understand what the Black communities needand talking to these communities would help.
Xmiramira directly challenges nonnaturalized Black communities in Western locations. When we asked her what would she change or add if she were partof The Sims team, she responded,
If I worked on the team, I would like to be involved with choosing what CAS(create a sim) assets get shipped with each pack and directing them to create
better makeup and more hairstyles for people to make Black sims. I would
also redo those dark skin tones. I would like a hand in the characters thatcome with the packs. I would like to see more representation from acrossthe African diaspora. some African American families, a Nigerian family, a

313

314

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY • WINTER & SPRING 2021

family from Guyana. I feel like the game is pretty diverse until it comes toBlack people; then it tends to fall flat in that respect.

Her call for expanded representation might be reframed to imagine players
from Africa or the Caribbean or African diasporas in non-Western nations. The
Sims can be and likely is consumed by Black bodies in a variety of locations. And
as Xmiramira suggests, cultural and aesthetic practices move with the people.
Nigerian families hybridize their identities when they immigrate to Seattle, forexample (see figure 6).
Here, Xmiramira’s observations about developer communities help us
think through EA workforces and how they could engage the Black community when creating The Sims. Specifically, we asked her whether the developers
thought of or represented the Black community. She responded, “In the earlystages of developing and releasing this game, no I do not. I don’t think that Black
consumers were thought of. Now? Yes, but there is still so much to be done andso much to be fixed. I think the team should create all of the things I listed above,
better skin tones, better and more hair options, makeup, clothing that compli-

Figure 6. Diverse Black design and the Melanin Pack

“Unfiltered and True to Itself”

ments brown skin, cultural items, etc. So that more of their Black consumers
can feel seen and be able to create and share their experiences.” Similar to theother content creators, she believes the main problem to be that there are no
Black people working on the team: “I literally only know of one Black woman.
The stories can’t be told if the people there can’t tell them. The content can’t becreated if the people aren’t there to create them. This is an issue all across thegaming industry. These companies need to hire more Black people.”If, in fact, Xmiramira is correct and there are only one or two Blackdevelopers, then the danger becomes that their voices will be easily dismissed.
DeWinter and Kocurek (2017) discussed this in a chapter about sexism in theelectronic game industry, noting that isolated voices are easily dismissible,
whereas teams saying the same thing carry weight and meaning. Such lessons need to be extended to more inclusive design and broader representation.
Indeed, the developers need to include more people of color in the design anddevelopment process. Of the twenty-three designers credited on The Sims 4,seventeen of them presented as male in their online identities with the othersix presenting as female, and the racial demographics of this design group was
fourteen white designers, six Asian-identifying designers, one Latinx designer,and two about whom we were unable find clear data. To be clear here, of thetwenty-three credited designers, there were zero Black designers. The design
team’s demographics did not, in fact, reflect larger player demographic trends
within the national borders of the United States let alone its global market. Thus,
while the modders and content creators work to develop diverse assets andcontent within their own communities, what they call for—indeed, what manycall for—is a diversified development team that can think about complex representation based on lived experiences. This would not eliminate fan communities
and content creators. It would provide broader communities of engagement,
more opportunities for player engagement across multiple player bases, andthe chance for historically marginalized communities to be seen within games.

Conclusions
We were drawn to interview content creators and engage them with the same
design seriousness that game studies scholars engage with designers, developers, and players. These creative modders work at a liminal place in The Sims
community, both and neither players and developers. Driving all of them is a

315

316

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY • WINTER & SPRING 2021

simple truth: representation matters. And more specifically, their representation
matters. This is not revolutionary. In their conference paper “The Privilege of
Immersion: Racial and Ethnic Experiences, Perceptions, and Beliefs in Digital
Gaming,” Passmore, Birk, and Mandryk (2018) conducted a mixed-method
study that looked at how a lack of diversity affects BIPOC (Black, Indigenous,
People of Color) and white players, measuring specifically effects on behavior,emotions, satisfaction, engagement, and beliefs. They found, unsurprisingly,“Players of color generally agreed that accurate representation improves theirexperience and want to game as themselves, freed from everyday social restrictions and stigmas” (9). More importantly, however, “Players of color experience
the absence of meaningful racial-ethnic representation as negative representation. Thus, there is little room for neutrality in the digital creation of experiences”(9). To be clear: A lack of Black representation is not “no representation.” Rather,
it is negative representation, an erasure, a negation. Thus, these Black content
creators are stepping in to provide positive play experiences for themselves but,equally as importantly, also for their larger Sims communities.
Black people struggle to find accurate representation in video games. The
Sims 4 is one of those games that does not have enough content to help theplayers represent themselves. The interviews help us understand how deeply
rooted and yet obscure this problem has remained historically. We do not mean
to suggest that this is intractable. In late 2020, The Sims 4 developers released
new content, which included over one hundred new skin tones and sliders,diversifying the skin color representation and improving the quality of these
tones. Enacting a design goal of a more inclusive and representational experience, this is a far cry from the very first Sims game, which offered only threeskin tones. In their tweet announcement of this upgrade, EA recognized thework of Black content creators as a voice in the community but also as a voice
for the community: “A huge thanks to @Xmiramira @EbonixSims @MiaZaff1@RaonyPhillips & @catherinegYT for the candid conversations & constructive
feedback! Their input representing their viewpoints alongside their player communities was instrumental to current & future improvements. #GameChangers!” (Dec 7, 2020). We collected data for this article in 2019, and within one
year—a year during which the political spotlight fell on Black lives in the wakeof George Floyd’s murder—and this community of creative activists was readywith a transformational vision. From an uneasiness about skin tones, we see
developing in these interviews a need to further address the representation of
bodies, hair, styles, and objects.

“Unfiltered and True to Itself”

Ultimately, in the interviews, all six content creators echoed one another.
They all liked playing The Sims because it allowed them to tell stories and customize their sims. Most of them started making content for The Sims 4. To
them, a Black experience is being able to relate to the content in the game, toits clothes, hairstyles, culture, and beliefs—not all Black people look the same,
have the same culture, the same beliefs. Their feedback to game developers seems
ultimately pretty simple. What they want the game developers to add to the gameis accurate skin tones, accurate makeup, accurate hairstyles. They want content
that represents diverse Black identities, whether American, Nigerian, or British.
Content creators want more options on things as simple as recipes. If indeed“The Sims 4 is the only game where new sims with unique personalities open
up deep, rich, and sometimes weird possibilities in the stories you create” (TheSims 4 FAQ), then the political and creative practice of these content creators isquite simple: It is to create the representational library that explores the stories
that Black communities want to make.

References
Bailey, Eric J. 2008. Black America, Body Beautiful: How the African American Image isChanging Fashion, Fitness, and Other Industries.
Bernard, Malcolm. 2002. Fashion as Communication. 2nd ed.
Burgess, Melinda C. R., Karen E. Dill, S. Paul Stermer, Stephen R. Burgess, and Brian
P. Brown. 2011. “Playing with Prejudice: The Prevalence and Consequences ofRacial Stereotypes in Video Games.” Media Psychology 14:289–311. doi:10.1080/
15213269.2011.596467.
Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. 2013. “Toward a Field
of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs 38:785–810.
Collins, Jennifer. 2020. “‘And Nothing He Has Wrought Shall Be Lost’: Examining Raceand Sexuality in the Mods of Dragon Age: Inquisition.” In Women and Video Game
Modding: Essays on Gender and the Digital Community, edited by Bridget Whelan,
9–35.
Davis, Fred. 1992. Fashion, Culture, and Identity.
DePass, Tanya. “I Need Diverse Games Work.” https://ineeddiversegames.org.
DeVane, Ben, and Kurt D. Squire. 2008. “The Meaning of Race and Violence in Grand Theft
Auto: San Andreas.” Games and Culture 3:264–85. doi:10.1177/1555412008317308.
deWinter, Jennifer, and Carly A. Kocurek. 2017. “‘Aw Fuck, I Got a Bitch on My Team!’:
Women and the Exclusionary Cultures of the Computer Game Complex.” In Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, edited by Jennifer
Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm, 57–73.

317

318

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY • WINTER & SPRING 2021

Dickerman, Charles, Jeff Christensen, and Stella Beatríz Kerl-McClain. 2008. “Big Breasts
and Bad Guys: Depictions of Gender and Race in Video Games.” Journal of Creativity in Mental Health 3:20–29. doi:10.1080/15401380801995076.
Dietrich, David R. 2013. “Avatars of Whiteness: Racial Expression in Video Game Characters.” Sociological Inquiry 83:82–105. https://doi.org/10.1111/soin.12001.
Electronic Arts. 2021. “The Sims 4 FAQ.” The Sims 4. https://www.ea.com/games/thesims/the-sims-4/faqs/base-game.
Gee, James Paul, and Elisabeth R. Hayes. 2010. Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21stCentury Learning.
Gray, Kishonna L., and David J. Leonard. 2018. “Not a Post-Racism and Post-Misogyny
Promised Land: Video Games as Instruments of (In)Justice.” In Woke Gaming:
Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice, edited by Kishonna L. Grayand David J. Leonard, 3–23.
Harrell, Shelly P. 2010. “A Multidimensional Conceptualization of Racism‐Related Stress:
Implications for the Well‐Being of People of Color.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 70:42–57. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0087722.
Harrisson, Annie, Shawn Jones, Jessie Marchessault, Sâmia Pedraça, and Mia Consalvo.
2020. “The Virtual Census 2.0: A Continued Investigation on the Representations of Gender, Race, and Age in Videogames.” AoIR Selected Papers of Internet
Research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11229.
Higgin, Tanner. 2009. “Blackless Fantasy: The Disappearance of Race in Massively
Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.” Games and Culture 4:3–26. https://doi.
org/10.1177/1555412008325477.
Jones, Shawn C. T., Riana Elyse Anderson, Ashly Louise Gaskin-Wasson, Broderick A.
Sawyer, Kimberly Applewhite, and Isha W. Metzger. 2020. “From ‘Crib to Coffin’: Navigating Coping from Racism-Related Stress throughout the Lifespan ofBlack Americans.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 90:267–82. https://doi.
org/10.1037/ort0000430.
Jovic, Jovan. 2020. “The Sims 4 Has Become the Best-Selling Base Game in the Franchise.”		
SimsCommunity. https://simscommunity.info/2020/01/30/the-sims-4-hasbecome-the-best-selling-base-game-in-the-franchise/.
Laurel, Brenda. 2003. Design Research: Methods and Perspectives.
Passmore, Cale J., Max V. Birk, and Regan L. Mandryk. 2018. “The Privilege of Immersion: Racial and Ethnic Experiences, Perceptions, and Beliefs in Digital Gaming.”
In CHI ’18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–19.
Potanin, Robin. 2010. “Forces in Play: The Business and Culture of Videogame Production.” In Fun and Games ’10: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on
Fun and Games, 135–43. https://doi.org/10.1145/1823818.1823833.
Russworm, TreaAndrea M. 2017. “Dystopian Blackness and the Limits of Racial Empathyin The Walking Dead and The Last of Us.” In Gaming Representation: Race, Gender,
and Sexuality in Video Games, edited by Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M.
Russworm, 109–28.

“Unfiltered and True to Itself”

Shaw, Adrienne. “Identity, Identification, and Media Representation in Video Game
Play: An Audience Reception Study.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2010.
https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/286.
Sihvonen, Tanja. 2011. Players Unleashed!: Modding The Sims and the Culture of Gaming.
Way, Elizabeth, ed. 2021. Black Designers in American Fashion.
Whelan, Bridget, ed. 2020. Women and Video Game Modding: Essays on Gender andthe Digital Community.
Wilbekin, Emil. 2020. “Great Aspirations: Hip Hop and Fashion Dress for Excess andSuccess.” In Fashion Theory: A Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Malcolm Barnard, 355–60.
Williams, Dmitri, Nicole Martins, Mia Consalvo, and James D. Ivory. 2009. “The Virtual
Census: Representations of Gender, Race, and Age in Video Games.” New Media& Society 11:815–34. doi:10.1177/1461444809105354.
Yang, Grace S., Bryan Gibson, Adam K. Lueke, L. Rowell Huesmann, and Brad J.
Bushman. 2014. “Effects of Avatar Race in Violent Video Games on Racial Attitudes and Aggression.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 5:698–704.
doi:10.1177/1948550614528008.

319