Did The Sims make you gay? - a video essay.
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ต.ค. 2024
- Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deal... - Enter promo code AVILA for 83% off and three extra months for free!
Patreon: / aretheygay
MERCH, LEARNING, AND BUSINESS INQUIRIES: www.itsall.gay
Twitter: / aretheygay
Music: www.itsall.gay...
Tumblr: / aretheygayvideos
Discord: / discord
It's no doubt The Sims is an influential video game. In this video essay, we're going to talk about its GAY influence, particularly the role it plays in queer people's identity development. Enjoy the presentation as we go over how the Sims influenced a generation in letting them live out their Tumblr dreams...
SOURCES------------
Clips from How Videogames Changed the World
• Charlie Brooker's How ...
Sociological Definition of Ideology
From John J Macionis, Sociology
Information on Althusser
cla.purdue.edu...)
Gender/Identity Performativity
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
The Term “Homosexual”
Judith Takacs, The Double Life of Kertbeny
Power and the Identity of Homosexual
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality
Gameplay footage:
The Sims - BarakaPlay
The Sims 2 - Giraffe Goober
The Sims 3 Gay Wedding - Cahos Rahne Veloza
The Sims 3 - angelarts
The Sims 3 Women Kissing - Jane Tyn
The Sims 4 - Lucca
The Sims 4 (second clip) - Its Frosty
The Sims 4 CAS - Coolnickyd
Toilets
Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies
Secondary Literature studying the Sims:
Miguel Sicart, “Family Values: Ideology, Computer Games, & Sims” - บันเทิง
![ลองสั่งของจากแอพ temu ถูกจริงหรอ?? ( part : 1/2 ) [โกงไหมครับ ep.89 ] | DOM](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/RTcZSQTiDZw/mqdefault.jpg)
I never made my sims do gay things because I was too busy spending 5 consecutive hours placing couches.
Placing furniture is way more fun than doing anything else in the sims imo
Which is a way of doing gay things
I mean… that’s pretty gay in itself.
My sims are never able to live gay bc I’m too busy creating gay sims
Ain't that the truth. Move out of the way, mouse slave! I have more furniture to place and aspirations to complete. You will have no time for "best friends".
When I came out to my sister, the very first thing she said to me was “……. Is that why all your Sims were gay?”
Hhahahahahahah
Yes it did, I used to make wlw families in my Sims 2 games and make their homes lower than the ground level bc I thought it'd hide them from my parents 💀
Bunker lesbians
Edit: wow that’s a lot of people who liked my comment
@@Max3110 bunkermates
@@fabianshedenhelm2986 o my god they were bunkermates
Edit: see edit of my other comment here lol
I DID SOMETHING LIKE THIS. I made the bedroom downstairs so when they slept, cuddled or whoohoo, my parents would not see.
😂
The sims 4 basically boiled gender down to "Can you get pregnant?" "Can you get others pregnant?" and "Can you pee standing up?"
aliens
honestly they're kinda real for that
that’s pretty much it
this is a joke don’t cancel me- i don’t own a ukulele
no one will cancel you bud @@sayonarameaninggoodbye
@@sayonarameaninggoodbye "I don't own a ukeulele" BAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I remember my parents got divorced and so I made them get married in the sims, then my mum yelled at me 👍
HELPP NOOO THATS SO SAD 💀💀💀😭😭
i'm sorry i laughed so hard at this 💀
That's sweet and sad. 50/ 50.
damn
the resigned thumbs up emoji lmfaoooooo
My wife was a huge fan of The Sims and your video on its impact on sexual orientation made her laugh out loud. She would watch it over and over, always finding something new to enjoy. Though she is no longer with me, the memories of her laughter while watching your video will always be a source of comfort. Thank you for creating something that brought her so much joy. Rest in peace, my love.
My condolences. RIP
Im glad there's a bit of her memory that lives through this video
Making my sim flirt with/date/kiss a female sim every day before quitting without saving so my parents wouldn’t find it and so it didn’t count is one of my gayest experiences
Ah yes, the time old saying. "It's not gay if you don't save the game."
THIS. In the Sims 3 you can see the last played family on the main menu before loading the save file, I was happily living with a wife and our kid, and out of fear of my mom founding it out I got so far as cloning myself, marrying the sims version of Jake Gyllenhaal and kept on saving the game specifically in this household so there would be a picture of me and that guy 💀
@@tyanann WHAT THE HELL
@@spaghettilover2156 for more comedic value I have the urge to mention that my wife was a silent hill 3 protagonist (I was 13 cut me some slack)
also my game glitched and our toddler son had an arts degree (love the idea of gays just spawning children with arts degree). wild times
@@tyanann Heather Mason supremacy
my first sims save file was an accidental lesbian couple
they were besties but then they had crushes on each other so i was like well damn i guess they gotta get married
and that's how i discovered that wlw relationships existed
Same! Well, kinda. My very first Sims family was a brother-and-sister pair in Sims 1 (at least, that's how I thought of them--you couldn't actually do family trees in Sims 1) and on their moving in day, Bella and Mortimer stopped by and Bella...instantly started dancing suggestively close to the GIRL of the couple.
I was like "Oh! Cool. Well maybe not right in front of your husband, but..." and was happy with their budding relationship, until the stove burned the house down later that day. :P
I love how The Sims backstory is just "Unexpectedly... Lesbians"
"And then the fire nation attacked" type of thing lmao
That reminds me a story of my childhood:
Me and my cousin playing the sims together.
Making two sims (me: a female, he: a male) and controlling them in turns.
My cousin controls his sim and gets him a girlfriend from some of the neighbor households.
Then he says: "Yay, I started dating her! And who are you going to date?".
And I answered, without a second thought: "I am going to steal your girlfriend".
He: "What? Is it even possible?"
Me: "Let's try and see."
And it worked, my sim successfully stole his sim's girlfriend.
That's how we discovered the sims can be gay. And how I discovered I prefer girls. So I quess The Sims made me gay? :D
I remmeber playing my first sim game (3) alone at the age of 10 and my two characters, one rich old man and one surfer bro who started out as roommates, eventually fell in love and started cuddling on their own and at the time I was so unfamiliar with gay content in any of the media I consumed I remember being absolutely astonished that the game would let them do that at all. not in the angry reactionary way but in the "holy shit... they can just DO that????? and it's FINE???????!!!!" kind of way
Nice
The best king of holy shit :P Also very wholesome
That's actually kinda sad. Good for you though you played Sims 3! Happy someone knocked on your closet experience :D
Stop that's so cute 😭😭
I remember making a mtf sim one time and being VERY surprised that that was an option
A few years later, I'm ftm LMAO
@@berri2785 congrats, dude!
I 100% made gay sims but the pattern actually started way earlier. When I was five had a pair of polly pockets who were "married" and lived in the same little pocket house. My parents thought this was very cute and were equally sweet (and completely unsurprised) when I came out 10 years later.
as someone who spent a cold winter day decorating a house together on sims with my "straight bestie", yeah sims definitely made me gay. Also, no hetero but you look so good here king, slay
No hetero (affectionate)
im stealing that phrase its mine now
Lemme steal this 🫦
I love no hetero
Oh of that's the requirements then I was spending way to much time in my houses in Wizard101
In the Sims 2 there was also a chemistry panel in CAS that let you choose between turn ons/turn offs such as "facial hair" and "makeup" which kind of helped to set the preferences of your sim
I was surprised the chemistry panel didn't come up! Really, the Sims 2 had the (as close as it could be to) perfect balance for sexuality imo. The innate interest in "beards" or "makeup" plus the performance based gender preference. I would be able to say, as the 12 year old god I was, "this sim prefers women" and so if she did then fall for a man, it felt true to her, something that bypassed her innate preference for something... More?
Anyway, all this ridiculousness to say: I wish that balance could be found with Sims 4, with all its gender choices etc
confession: when I (bi transmasc) was a kid playing the sims I was not doing anything particularly gender or sexuality related. I was marrying matpat. I would make a sim of myself and famous youtuber Mathew Patrick of Game Therory and we would get married and have kids. bout the straightest thing I could have been doing on the sims I think. I told one of my friends about this and they said this information could not have been beaten out of them.
why cant i have a SINGLE experience to myself
ur so real for that
I would just like to tell you that this comment has brought so much joy into my day holy shit, sir I will be dying on my death bed and then I will remember this comment and smile as death takes me holy shit
@@dragon9261 i think i made him marry me on tomodachi life too
god having an albeit small but still consuming infatuation with random male audio people is the biggest transmasc experience. mine is my schools maths teacher that they had record math lessons for their website
It definitely was a puzzle piece in the whole picture. I made a sim of myself and, when my at-the-time boyfriend suggested making one of him so we could be in the game together, I realized I SUPER did not like the idea... because in another save I was happily married to a female Sim I had already made 😅. Realizing that in a completely idealistic fictional world, I had made myself a lesbian?? And completely rejected the idea of ideal (but fake) Sim-me being with a man?? Yeah the fact I ignored that for 8 months sure was something 🤡
Everyone has their process 💙
Lmao I love this story
Making your sona (or any character that represents you or an existing one you feel close to) gay really is the first step. I always made my characters' gender ambiguous or male as a kid, and as i aged and started feeling attraction they would be gay/bisexual asf so yeah i relate
@@sundaddy1077 TOTALLY AGREE
@@sundaddy1077 same 💀 when I would make myself as a gay guy I felt ashamed and like I was being a weird fujoshi but it turns out im just trans and gay
"I'm not saying the Sims needs to be a racism simulator, we already have Twitter for that"
The way you subtly put jokes into your very deep and analytical presentations makes your videos very enjoyable. I could watch them for hours!
i used to make all my male sims gay, but i felt so dirty afterwards because i made them woohoo all the time 😭😭
Nice
Thats a gay aweaking there
Nothing wrong with that. I did pretty much the same and I questioned it and felt some shame sometimes but I knew it was conditioning.
Yup, I’d do it and hide my households from everyone else. Literally disabled every man from existence in there at some point 😅 so no one else flirted w dudes, sapphic paradise ig
…and I didn’t even think about the possibility of not liking men, it was just that “the game made dudes look weird”.
Once a friend caught me playing though, and made such a big deal out of it it was hard for me to play it cool, still cringe to this day 🤡
@@Wonderlandish ngl this is much better than the time when i was 5, on roblox, and i was doing a really stupid dragon roleplay that we accidentally made spiral into nsfw themes and my dad was standing RIGHT BEHIND ME the entire time the absolute look of terror i had when i realized there was someone behind me will always be remembered 😭
as a kid i used to make gay sims bc i thought it was funny. like "lol imagine if two hot girls lived together and were married and in love haha that'd be so funny". i also made myself "as a boy" a few times.
turned out i was trans and into women. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@Alrightythen-es4gv thank you
@@prageruwu69 im sorry but your user is hilarious
I’m glad I’m not the only one! I also made gay sims as a “haha what if this was real?” type thing. The worst part is they were horribly offensive portrayals and usually based off of the villains from TV shows or movies I was watching at the time. So it would be like “haha, what if Rex Raptor and Weevil Underwood were gay, wore women’s lingerie, had grotesque faces, and also adopted a kid together?”
But you know what? The grotesque gays I made had the most healthy relationships. All my heterosexual relationships revolved around demure women who would be coveted and ultimately abused by these cold-hearted men. Of course, the demure woman would always soften his edges and ultimately “fix” him. They’d get married, have a child, and live happily ever after (aka, I would stop playing, having achieved “the goal” and start over with another couple)
But in the gay relationships, no one was every trying to fix anyone. I would often make their lives miserable: forcing them to pee on the floor, building houses with no privacy, take the ladder out of the pool, etc. And yet those couples would comfort and support one another. They would raise their kids well then watch them go off to college and be successful. They would grow old together.
I’d like to think that, despite the obvious homophobia, I was trying to reject the image of a relationship that heterosexual society pushed on me. I always knew I was pansexual (as in, I always knew I liked “both” genders but, in reality, I had the capacity to love everyone), but I also knew what society expected of me. In a way, both concepts were a grotesque, exaggerated view of reality. The heterosexual couples only endured tragedies that served to provide tension to the “hunt”. Of course, it would always lead to “victory” in the end. The gay couples experienced tragedy that was meant to break them down but through the power of their love, they rose up together. Marriage and family were the end goal for my heterosexual couples but the gay couples had many goals to look forward to throughout their lives. Marriage and family wasn’t the end, it was the just the beginning.
The more I think about it, the perfectly manicured heterosexual tales of conquest seem more like the nightmare than those grotesque gays I made. Maybe, I was trying to tell myself that all along?
Or maybe I was projecting my parents’ homophobia onto a video game. Who knows? All I know is that, while my gay couples are now human proportioned, I still find myself playing much more interesting, less cookie cutter, and less micromanaged gameplay stories with them whereas I struggle not to fall into the suburban ideal with my straight ones.
@@LP-zc4gyI had a somewhat similar experience where I would accidentally make the most transphobic characters whenever I role-played with stuffed animals. I really hope that no one who knew about me and my games back then has reflected and thought “I wonder if they’re transphobic now” because I’m not 😅
Nothing more cis than making a gender bent version of yourself especially if you do it for every game you ever play 100% cis absolutely nothing to question there... *no cap frfr*
One day about 4 years ago I had created myself in the Sims 4 and a neighbor came by to greet "me", and she was in a flirty mood, so I started thinking about if I should let them go on or even encourage som flirtig. I identified as straight at the time but I decided to let the flirtig continue, and I was enjoying it and started to check out the neighbor and thought "she's kinda attractive". All while wondering how accurate it was to have a sim version of me flirtig with a female sim. And suddenly I realizes I actually would enjoy romantic interactions with women. I had to turn the game of and close my computer and I started sobbing. Then I sent a text to my sibling saying something like "I think I'm bisexual". So the Sims maybe kinda made me a bit gay, or bisexual to be precise.
It’s sweet that you seem to be able to tell your sibling such information without issues :)
@@MaticTheProto I'm very close with him and he had been openly part of the community for a few years, so it felt like a safe choice to tell him. 😊 But really I'm lucky to have a very loving and supporting family in general.
@@Neanzo man I wish I could say the same. At least my sis is also accepting, but the rest of my family…. Ehhh
@@MaticTheProto that must be really tough for you. I hope you can feel supported by you family one day 💕
This made me tear up 🥲
My dad was always confused when i used to always create girl only characters in the sims and other video games. I didnt even know why i did it except that girls were just more fun to play as. And then it clicked when i got older and transitioned lol
I'm one of those players that never had a problem with the sexuality system in The Sims. I never felt the need for labels, homophobia, queer history and such in my game. Equal for me was enough. More than enough, it was everything I wanted. No distinction means no hate. Everyone is normal and the same. I love queer history irl, but I long for a world where I don't need to label myself, to come out, to identify with a community and not with another. For me, not having to be different is freedom. As in, I can be as different and unique as I want, but it won't make a difference in how much people love me or hate me; I want walk down the street holding hand with my partner without people looking at us because we're not the pair they expect. Their indifference would mean the world to me. And The Sims gives me that. I don't want no labels, no hate, trauma in my game. Not the real life kind that is. Downloading extreme violence and ending families is a whole different story :)
This is exactly how I feel about it, well explained!
This is exactly how I feel, that's why I never got out of the closet, if you find out you'll ask. Also the idea of trying to find a label that kinda fits me is very tiring, I don't fully align with any, so I'm just me. If that's not enough, then bye bye. ✌
@@Taipansnake Same, I got tired of trying to pin down my gender or sexuality. I’m just me
I agree. I feel the need to reflect upon one's preferences can be very helpful on a personal level but turning that introspection onto the world at large segregates rather than uniting. It's easy to feel the urge to chew someone's head off for saying sexuality is one's one business and should be kept to oneself, when there is inherent societal inequity to fight against. And the right to exist and be afforded the same opportunities is definitely a worthy cause to scream yourself hoarse over, but the focus should be on what the fight is for.
And I think it's fair to say too, that at the end of the day, what everyone wants is a peaceful existence. And the sims has been that utopian refuge for many of us it seems.
Hmm... I kinda wish I could actually get some attention for being different, once in a while.
I was gay before but the Sims make me accept in who i am, because of how gay people in the game is treated as just normal people, it was so heart warming to see my two gay sims kiss each other in public without people harassing them
when i was a kid i remember only strictly playing with female characters in games, so of course all my sims were female. i remember constantly making them flirt and kiss, and form families via adoption, and since my parents never told me there was anything wrong with that i didn't really think much of it at all lol
was i lesbian before i started playing the sims? probably. did the sims make me gay?? also probably.
Progressive since birth real??💀💀
I remember the first time I ever made gay happen in the Sims. As a kid I didn't know sex worked so I made my Sims adopt their children as I was unsure of how to make them have children naturally. I learnt much later by accident when 2 of my Sims were sharing the same bed and the option came up. So the next generation of my Sims family came along. Their offspring was a girl who had a friend throughout childhood who was also a girl. As they grew into teenagehood, I realised the option to do romantic interactions was there. I was really surprised. When I clicked on them I didn't think the two girls would actually kiss. I felt really hot all over, it was so exciting. I made them kiss over and over and over. I didn't know why this kiss felt different from all my other Sims kissing. Quickly, I started to feel guilty and embarrassed (I don't know why because my family have no issues with gay things, seeing as many members are gay themselves). I forced my sim to leave her girlfriend and marry a man so they could have children, because I was desperate to have biological children. My Sims were basically always gay as I got older and older. The Sims actually helped me to realise that I was apart of the lgbtq community myself even if I didn't know it yet.
Not only did it make me gay, it also trans'd my gender!
Same
3 is a crowd :) me too
Me 4 :0
Yeah let's not do that. Thanks. Don't make stupid comments like this.
@@xronann you're making enough for everyone
I remember me and my best friend making ourselfes in the sims, moving in together and labeling our relationship as "Freund" (which is German for Boyfriend but also used as meaning platonic friend) which we misinterpreted and thought it meant we were just friends and not a couple, till my character kissed a woman in the park and his character was mad about that and now im polyamourous and bisexual
wait im german, and i have the same experience with a friend of mine i had back then. i told him that in that case "freund" meant boyfriend, and he didnt want to believe me, and so ive gone through with it, until he saw that our characters were kissing... lol
the sims really just decided your sexuality
when i was like 7 i would play the sims 3, like religiously. normally i would play the family style thing and be super average and boring. BUT! as soon as my teen sims would age up and go to university?? bicuriousity. two female sims?? making out. every 10 minutes. we shall see if that proves accurate to my own college experience next year !
same here! i'd start with a straight couple to try to affirm my nonexistent heterosexuality but then i'd pretty much immediately hit them with a messy divorce and play as their lesbian child in quick succession
Did we have the same childhood 😭😭 I did the exact same thing but it with a male sim, before I realised I was trans
Bicuriosity isn't a sexuality and it sounds like family = heterosexual couple to you
@@nothinginteresting7558 PLZ JUST CHILL MY GOD
@@nothinginteresting7558 you sound like you didn't even watch the video. op is simply expressing how they have experienced sexuality through the sims.
All my sims as a kid were lesbians but I told myself it was because I just didn't like making male sims 🤔 now I wonder why that was lol
OH MY GOD so real I hated making male sims so I’d just choose one random male sim to make babies with and then kill him😭
@@bruh-hr1mt Adoption erasure :/
SJZODJSJSJ ARE YOU ME??
i've always mostly played with female sims and my only male family members were the ones born during gameplay. i often thought something like "ehh the devs just made women way more appealing to look at and play with than men. it's not a ME thing!! i think"
our family computer was in the living room so i was too scared to make the sims I was playing with actively queer, but I would often make neighbor sims that were queer and make my sims friends with them. That way if anyone ever saw over my shoulder and asked I could say they were NPCs and were just "programmed that way."
when i was in 6th grade, i was obsessed with rainbows and unicorns, but i was straight i swear! just a suuuuuper ally! and i remember the first world i created was one where my best friend at the time and i lived together, being besties and totally heterosexual. i even found a boyfriend for my sim! until he cheated. then my sim was miserable, and went to her best friend for comfort. i figured, well, it would make narrative sense for them to fall in love after that.... but i was totally straight, it was all just for narrative purposes, obviously.... yeah flash forward almost a decade and here i am looking at apartments with my girlfriend of 4 years, planning on moving in together next year LMFAO
Congratulations!!!!!! I’m so proud of you random internet person 😭
Omfg looking at different apartments with my future girlfriend is my dreammmmmmmmm! ur my role model. wait also, have you moved into an apartment together now?
@@liiiiich3n0nTheM00n havent found an apartment yet, but we are living together at her mom's house rn! will be moving out this fall together haha. good luck!!
@@dianacutie99 literally squealed and got a look for it. I'm so glad she has a supportive mom! I hope you guys continue to do well in your current and new communities as you find a new place to live xx
Funnily enough, no. My internalised homophobia wouldn’t let me, especially in my teens. Though, a year after coming out and embracing my bi-ace self, I did celebrate by creating a sapphic household. It was awesome.✨
yeah, I always had straight households until I realised. I knew being gay was a thing, and yet I still didn't think I was until a while after.
Based!
I went through the same thing in the 90s. My homophobia was strictly for women, whom I convinced myself all women should be asexual until they want kids. So I became a Fujoshi, & the more I strted to be attracted to women, I would become friendly with mysogenists to get into that woman-hating mindset.Years latter I had to face facts; Women were hot & I was hanging out with toxic losers for the dumbest reasons.
oh MOOD
in my case, growing up mormon certainly didn't help
As a transbian it took me going to a liberal arts college for it to even click that thinking gay/sapphic couples were cute and that I wanted that could be an option for me. Ops
Then it turns out I was bi anyways, well it fluctuates but still.
Hey! I can see you credited a lot of people for using their gameplay footage. 14:17 is from my Strangetown gameplay, so I'd like to be credited too :) Cool video!
I always made two women sims and a husband sim so they could have children. Eventually I would get bored with him and kill him off then had the two women get together to raise the kids.
And I still thought I was straight back then. 🤣
New memory unlocked I also did this
Omg, I did too! 😮😂
I DID THE SAME THING but with men. Hey
I had made a sim, Amara, who had kids with J Huntington III but I got so bored of him that I just had her cheat on him with other old ladies in her free time 💀
I also made them wear the worst clothing ever. One of them actually wore a snake skin dress
When we were 9 or 10 my best friend and I made an all-female prison and since we had heard that lesbians were bad people we made two prisoners kiss, it was supposed to be wrong but for some reason it felt more familiar to me than my sim self's life with a husband and kids. So I decided to give myself a girlfriend and see how I felt, I realized this is how I wanted my real life to be as well when I grew up. Unfortunately, my mom caught me and made me delete my gf and back in the closet I went.
When I was like 7 I used to play a psp sims game and saw the option for 2 same sex sims to get married, so I tried that and was surprised to see it wasn't like a weird insulting thing. When I showed it to my grandma she just confiscated the psp and hid it for actual years which was so confusing
you grandma need go to jail for this in my opnion tho, sad people like this exists.
Awful grandma
Did you ever get it back? Lol
Yeah, I remember one time I watched some random teenage series at Disney Channel and some character questioned other: "Are you a lesbian?". My mother passed near my room and heard this. She started chastising me like I watched something illegal, something unnormal, and later she asked stepfather to remove Disney Channel from my TV. I was at the beginning of adolescence and already knew who lesbians are.
I don't know why older generations instead of talking with children about things, they censor and ban everything they see or hear. Had never understood this.
@@peachesandcream22 Thanks Religion💀💀
i have a really weird relationship with the sims, i think kind of because i have a weird relationship with being LGBT and what thats "meant" to look like. i grew up in a really dysfunctional family, and like a lot of kids in that situation i spent a lot of time fantasising about "perfect" families, using by making and playing them in the sims. before puberty-ish my dream was to marry a nice man and have like twelve kids and be a happy housewife, and my sims families of that era usually looked like that. then i discovered i could put makeup on my male sims... which meant male sims could be housewives! fantastic! and hey, maybe my femme malewife could marry a super buff woman? or maybe another femme malewife? and suddenly all my sims were gnc and gay while still living my dream of being happily married with a million kids.
i actually still want to marry someone nice and have twelve kids and play the housewife, even though puberty kinda forced me to accept that im bisexual and a trans man, lol. i think playing with gender in the sims back then was my way of realising that you dont have to look a certain way to live a certain life - and that accepting being trans didnt have to mean throwing away what i wanted for my life. back then especially, being trans was something we associated with dark alleyways and nightclubs - dirty and trashy and inherently sexual, and i didn't relate to that at all, so putting transness in such a twee environment was really positive for me.
that being said, i dont know how much of my housewife dream is still coming from my bad experiences with my own family. and i dont know how much of it is ultimately an attempt to conform - like an apology for being trans. im weird in this one way, yes, but im totally normal in every other way! and discussions like this bring that up for me, because most of the people in my social circles - mostly trans, mostly poor, all leftists - cant think of anything worse than the housewife lifestyle, and see it as a sort of representation of the hegemony. they see living that life as antithetical to liberation, and i cant really explain why i want that life for myself even though im LGBT.
these days, when i play the sims, i kind of relate to them as if they were my children, haha. its an outlet for my motherly impulses, i guess - and yes, there are a statistically improbable number of seahorse dads :)
I think the dirty, trashy, satanic/nihilist, and sexually active view and role played by queers will be seen in 10 or so years as we see nlogs and pick-mes today. It's a reaction to the role forced upon queer people-- like when a parent tells a child to do a chore that they were already doing, and they respond with "I'm not doing it now!"
as a bisexual sims fan, i view the lack of choosing an identity, and the "utopia" of existing without having to declare a label as something that was helpful to me. to see sims autonomously love each other despite that was one of the things that helped me realise that people having to come out is just strange. And as someone who loves queer history and understanding the oppression and suppression presently and in the past i think having a game where flirting with the opposite sex is the same as flirting with the same sex. it felt refreshing to other games i also like, such as stardew valley.
YES. Major reason I identify as queer and not bi. When I was a little kid, I never felt weird about liking a girl. I just liked her. And I liked boys too. When I got older, having to “pick a label” majorly inhibited my growth as myself, because I suddenly felt like there were all these rules that I needed to follow to make sure I was a “real” bisexual or whatever😒 add imposter gay syndrome (acquired from those stupid tumblr posts disparaging “”straight”” girls who were “pretending” to be bi) on to that and you have one incredibly pigeon-holed teenager. Big fan of liking who you like and not having to make a big deal about it.
exactly!!
@@rVnsunshine yeah i was unlabeled for a while mainly because romance was never a big factor in my attraction and i didn't get crushes as a kid but also because it felt easier than having to explain that because i liked a guy once doesn't mean i don't like women. also i was openly queer (didn't understand what being in the closet even meant) in 2017 onwards so it wasn't a time where a lot of kids my age were finding out about the lgbtq community and tumblr was already pretty dead.
@@rVnsunshine having labels always made me feel wrong and out of place because i didn't fully adhere to the "guidelines" of them. i'm too fluid for that. so when i had to keep "changing" my sexuality (bisexual, to lesbian, to pansexual, back to lesbian...) i felt trapped. also didn't help i was getting recommended and watching very anti-nonbinary and queer content. i'm so much happier with the term queer. sexuality and genderwise!
I'm obsessed with how well this essay was put together. The background information laid a wonderful platform to build off of and put things into perspective, and then call back to as we went and were introduced to new information. Not only that, but it created a sense of tension that led up to and really paid off around the 30 minute mark when the mirror stage was brought up. That whole section brought all the other ideas talked about into a singular, clear focus and made a really compelling argument.
From the title before watching, I thought the video was going to talk about being able to discover your identity through a private experience with a game that allowed queer expression that you might not have seen/experienced before, but damn, it went in hard with the idea of queerness coming from innately within or from external societal ideology and has seriously made me rethink a bunch of things, past just the game and even past the subject of queerness.
Seriously, amazing job. I hope you got great marks for your school essays, because I'd bet my left foot you deserved them.
I also love how the evolution of the sims identity systems kind of mirror real history, especially if you go back to before 'homosexual' was a word/category/identity. It went from 'within' - without label or differentiation, just action - to 'external' where more game elements gave queerness an actual identity that then affected a sim's life, like queer identity has become more and more labeled in recent history, especially in public society. I think there's more to say about the increase of queer labels in real life than fits here, but an amazing analogy overall.
I'd probably say the sims did play a decent role in 'making' me queer. I'd love to know how our experiences differ depending on which game in the series we grew up with. I played the original one when I was a kid and I remember as I was displaying queerness (crushes, attraction, etc) as I grew older, I didn't have a huge 'mirror' moment, it was just a non-questioned part of me that I had queer crushes and didn't fully fit into the gender binary until the people around me started to outwardly identify as different kinds of queer, and I started to do the same. Thinking back to it now, that did create that feeling of 'otherness' that I hadn't felt until that point, and now I'm probably going to have to process that a little bit lol
"...but in quite the 2004 move same sex couples still couldn't get married."
Growing up playing the sims in the Netherlands, this never made sense to me 👀
Lmao same
I didn't realize they actually couldn't until later even though I played the originals. I think my lack of reading skills couldn't tell the difference between the ceremonies? Idk its weird.
Same sex marriage became legal in 2010 in my country when I was about 6 yo, so I guess most of my conscious childhood it was already legal. But It never crossed my mind growing up that gay marriage wasn’t a thing, like I guess I never thought about it being or not legal
Alex I need you to know that your scripts are literally so goddamn funny and I spend at least 50% of every single video laughing. So kudos to you if you write them or kudos to your script writer. But definitely kudos to you for the delivery. 11/10.
I'll have you know all the Sims did was create my obsession with gay vampires
Omg, same!!!
Same.
I always made my female sims cheat on their husbands with a woman and leave him for her 😂 my mom basically did that exact thing for my dad
As a young tween, I didn't really play the sims to mirror my own traits, but "lack of" them. I'm aromantic asexual, and though I am conformed and happy with it now, as a kid I didn't have a grasp on these terms and never knew what was "wrong" with me, because I wasn't like my peers, I wasn't out there having crushes on celebritites or my classmates. It felt very isolating and thus I found solace in things like fictional pairings and, well, creating sims! I was able to explore romance and attraction in a way that made sense to me, because while I was not interested in it myself, if felt comforting to watch it instead, and it helped cope with my own questions and struggles at the time until I was finally ready to realize that "wait, maybe I'm just.. not into that!", so yeah I'd say The Sims had a role in my self-discovery journey, albeit not as directly as other people's experiences
I made my sim myself, and had a husband vampire (I didn’t kill him, but we lived in different places, him in a coffin and my bed alone). However we never woohoo’d and I forgot he existed most of the time. I just became actual roommates with him while I went on adventures. Should’ve been a call on my aro/ace ness
"If a gay tree falls in the forest..." I laughed a lot
I've never gotten into playing Sims, but my barbie dolls were pretty queer - I had way to many of them, and I had, among other unusual couplings, two Ken dolls who prefered eachother's company over any of the girl dolls, and the red-headed version of my barbies was bisexual way before I knew the word or identified as such. The blonde barbie was straight and somewhat clueless, and I had a very middle-class couple with kids who were basically the ideal family from the 50s, very disapproving of everything. I was a lonely kid with a vivid imagination, and come to think of it, I had an analogue sims in my attic.😆
I had an FTM Barbie to Ken and a gay Ken couple. I only had like 3 Ken dolls so 1 straight couple and all the rest were lesbians. And I was never even told about LGBT+ people until I was a lot older. Actually turns out I'm a gay trans so that's kinda funny
I had a Barbie that I just decided was a guy and only ever played as such. I don't think I even knew that trans people were a thing back then.
you just unlocked a memory of mine. I never had any boy dolls so I just made my barbies "very good friends" sometimes lol
Omg I completely forgot about Barbies lmao. Me and my sister played with dolls pretty much always straight, but we had no Ken doll. So I remember me and my sister cutting one of our doll's hair short, pushed his chest flat as well as we could and gave him tattoos. Funny how we never realized that we made and played with a trans Ken lol. I think we played with him all the time too, he had all the dolls after him XD
Searching "sims 2 lesbian love story" at age 7 changed the course of my life
I started playing sims really early. Like before i started going to school and i remember struggling to read the notifications in the game. My homophobic gamer dad introduced me to the game, little did he know that one day i would make two girls kiss outside a nightclub in bridgeport and realize "wait? you can do that?"
I remember playing Sims 4 and creating two gay gals as roommates and matching them up together. They were THE sapphic art couple I'm telling you! Everytime they made out without me doing anything to insinuate that I would be so happy...
Any game or piece of media that has an element of dressing up, makeup and customisation and I knew my Queer Spirit felt charged.
“YES, DAD, I AM CARVING OUT MY IDENTITY ONE BARETTE AT A TIME! Thanks for the lack of support.”
"Why do they walk so fast?" "why are they always in a rush?"
I'm feeling called out
I’ve never had a unique experience I thought I was the only one who’s gay awakening was the sims
I vividly remember watching a youtube video of someone playing sims 4 and she said she usually had 2 girls be together and I was like "WAIT YOU CAN DO THAT???" and since then pretty much all of the romantic relationships in my sims games have been wlw. Still thought I was straight for another like 2 years though...
When I first opened up the Sims 2, I didn't know what "spouse" meant, but since it replaced the "parent" option when I wanted to make my sim an adult child to another, I found out "spouse" did NOT mean "parent." WHY ARE YOU KISSING YOUR MOTHER LIKE THAT
anyway I'm gay now
I remember the first time I kissed Mimi Landgrab on the console version of the game, I didn’t know women could kiss women until then 😳
My male sim in console Sims had a woohoo romance with Dudley. It made me feel funny 😶 I later thought i was trans but Im a straight female woman
You continued to challenge my ideas on what it means to be queer in a way that scratches my brain so good
As someone who has never played the Sims, this is an interesting look into their community
we actually mainly play out tragic storylines, commit murder, and seduce santa/grim reaper/vlad etc
37:20 “has at least one fanfiction bookmarked”
I saw that! And, I mean, you're right, but you didn't have to call me out like that
I remember feeling funny on the inside while playing The Sims 3 and making two female Sims kiss.
"And again, I'm not saying that The Sims needs to be a racism simulator. We already have Twitter for that!"
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
That took me out!!!!
This went so much deeper than I expected it to
My greatest video game accomplishment was getting two sims to escalate a relationship to marriage without actually knowing how to read. I was happy to participate in the study for this video! Glad to see it.
44:45 the way you visualized this genuinely made me cry with emotion. It was beautiful and spoke to me in a way I don’t think just reading about this would have. Thank you
I always joke that every person who plays the sims is gay and every gay person plays the sims so thank you for now giving me concrete reference material 🤺 (/hj)
this is accurate, I'm pan and the only reason I don't play the Sims is because my computer absolutely sucks (I even bought it on Steam but then realized my PC isn't good enough to run it)
Looks like I don't play sims enough to be gay, well that can be fixed
"theres no Macklemore" really got me 😭
I still remember the excitement I felt when The Sims 4 introduced customizable pronouns and preferences last year. I can finally make myself (Nonbinary and aro/ace) like everyone else already was in the game that helped me figure out so much.
I used it to make my silly characters even more silly
Not in a "hahaha attack helicopter hahahaha" way
This is amazingly well researched. I might use this as a key source in my senior thesis for gender/sexuality studies...
Sims 3 let me explore my sexuality and gender identity as a teen and early young adult when I wasn’t in a safe space and that’s one of the reasons I love the game so much tbh. I remember playing in sunset valley and playing as a guy sim ( hmm no wonder I use male pronouns now lol) and dating half the town and settling down with either Zelda Mae or Cycl0ne Sw0rd in the end lol.
I would always play as a male sim and try to date cyclone sw0rd but he was always straight so I'd go for Zelda mae and she'd either be gay or get with cyclone so I had to pick someone else.
@@Awsumatid god isn’t it the worst when the sims steals your girl/man. I didn’t play with mods back in the day so everyone was free real estate lol. Now I got my game ultra modded. I have gender preferences set up for the town and it’s super boosted so half the towns bisexual and gay lol 😆 it’s great.
@@obi-wan-pierogi I have it 95% bi 5% gay now lol. I'm on gen 7 and I've only had my heirs in straight relationships twice (though the siblings I didn't play with were more often in straight relationships...huh actually I think I only had the siblings be gay twice.)
that opening transition gave me whiplash
hi!! i usually never comment on youtube videos but you (specifically your Overanalyzing the Barbie Movies with Queer Marxist Theory video) inspired me to take a Principles of Sociology course this semester!! im loving it so far and i am so grateful that you introduced me to the subject :)
Before the gender update I would only use men for procreation 💀💀💀 My playstyle is like, making really large families starting with one woman I created and some other random guy who lived in the world. The man never mattered lollll. Usually, if he did matter, I made him very feminine and fashionable. Eventually I started changing the sex of one woman just so they could try for baby- now I just click the little "can get other sims pregnant" box. I realized one day that my love for the sims might have something to do with all the hot women I made in it....
YES I made two girls one "Elsa" ice princess style and the other "fire princess" and then i made them live together and made them a couple and pretended it happened by accident. Showed them to my little sister (3 years old at the time) and said "so yeah ummm these girls are kissing each other and that was totally an accident" LOL
I used to think I was aromantic because I denied and refused my romantic interest in my crush as a kid but now I think I was just confusing my platonic/physical attraction wit romantic like Ive done more recently( this has nothing to do with the Sims but it's something I just realized and felt like talking about
The Sims helped me explore my sexuality while I was in the closet. I am glad my parents weren't looking over my shoulder, and I am okay with my bisexuality
Bro just rizzed me with his toilet metaphor and I’m here for it
Definitely middle school me started coming to terms with my sexuality while playing the sims. I always had a feeling, but I remember that when I played the sims, I started playing around with my character that was me, being gay. I think my mom had caught me at one point too since she was also playing the sims, it was one of the few games she ever got interested in. LOL. So she saw that I was creating myself as a gay character.
i remember watching sims 4 lesbian letsplays when i was like 9 and my mum found out and banned me from watching sims vids lmaoaokamwmmw
I do love that all Sims characters are basically pansexual by default :)
edit: in the Sims 4
I prefered Sims 2 and 3, when sexualities were basically real, and my sims had preferences.
Cause that made it more authentic and beautiful. Not just..."everybody does everything cause nobody cares".
Never played Sims 1.
@@honaleripreferences kinda exist in the sims 4 tho
@@Audreyana
Define Kinda?
Like in Code?
Cause in Sims 2 Specifically, when you accessed the cheat codes it would show you your sims sexuality. And in Sims 3 it was obvious that all my gay male sims didn't "switch teams" unless I explicitly made that happen. (And it didn't seem to work out anyway, for the best.) But I never confirmed if in Sims 3 it was explicitly written, like it was in Sims 2.
So.....Do you have more info on what you mean? Cause the Sims 4 was such a downgrade in every way, I never got into it.
@@honaleri In sims 4 you can choose your character's sexuality in the character creation area. (I think OP meant townies are pan by default)
@@honaleri Well... if you're a gender abolitionist...
I definitely can say the Sims 2 made me gay. I saw two women kiss on the game one time. I will never forget looking over my shoulder to make sure no one was watching and went straight to woohooing then marriage smiling the entire time. Then preceded to hide the family away and play only straight families until I got much older. 🤣
My first gay experience was playing Sims Freeplay on my first smartphone, and realizing that I could have to women salsa dance together. I've been a little queer bean since
you know a video’s good when you’re so bust ruminating on it that the patreon list gets all the way to S before you realize you’ve been listening to it
I mean all those hours spent in create a sim making my female sims the prettiest I could and neglecting their male counterparts wasn't just because the male clothing options weren't as interesting.
When the sims 4 came out and my friend got it on her laptop, we were messing around in create a sim and found the lingerie clothing set option for sleepwear. (Unrelated but we also were obsessed with the bunny slippers) Thinking this was hilarious we set it (And the bunny slippers) as the sleepwear for the sim we were currently working on. It was one of those things we thought was hilarious because it was oh so edgy and mature and those funny feelings in my chest were all just because it felt like a sneaky thing for us to do at the time, our parents completely unaware that we were giving our sims risque clothing and making them flirt with literally any sim that crossed their paths.
Bro the Sim in the suit with the word gay all over it looks so funny
The fact that this video exists as a look into the sims is actually crazy. You've got me reconsidering so much and it's because of a video about a game. This video is beyond amazing!
I kinda always have the same path I take... make a wlw pair, have children, start playing these children, romantic stuff comes up...
"oh yeah they look cute together... BUT I ALREADY MADE IT GAY, I CAN'T MAKE IT GAY AGAIN"
so I make it straight but then mysteriously every time... the new partner is trans... and I made it gay again...
whoops
This is such an interesting concept. We often say that we are "born queer." But in reality, we are all born varied human and become queer by the distinction of society. History and ideology are fundamentally important to the existence of a queer identity, being "gay" wouldn't exist without the idea of "straight." Our identity as queer people is directly linked to oppression and history. How we are is from birth, how we identify who we are is an incredibly complex story. And sometimes the way we start recognizing these distinctions comes in the form of a video game. It's absolutely fascinating.
I love how this channel is going from "Are They Gay" to "Is It Capitalist Propaganda That Exists Primarily To Uphold The Oppressive Status Quo"
when i was a 10 i’d fail weird “are you a pervert” videos so i thought “do i like girls?” and then proceeded to make two ugly women sims, make them woohoo, gagged, and concluded my botched experiment with these results. turns out 2 years later i found out i do like women lol
Plot twist you are bi
@@MaticTheProto i actually did evolve into a bisexual later down the line lol at first it was compulsive heterosexuality but then i think i was conditioned to find it attractive due to a certain kind of content you watch in incognito
@@comfortme maybe ig
I saw the title "did the sims make you gay" and i immediately, out loud, said "yes."
Perhaps the homosexual was the friends we made along the way
"if a gay tree falls in a forest--and no one is around to hear it--is it still gay?" i lost my fucking mind at that LOL
Alexander, I really love this new format of a blank space and text inserts.
I'm pretty sure Shakespear's Twelveth Night made me gay, but sims surely didn't straighten me up
watching this while playing with my gay little sims family
The part about the mirror stage of life hit me hard. My very first memory is realizing that my mom was able to tell where I was looking because of my eyes. That feeling of being perceptible and perceived was just so mind-blowing. I'm not sure how much of this is related to being autistic, but I've always felt a huge separation between my consciousness and my physical body and trying to think of the first time I saw my own face gives me some huge weird feelings.
I’m so mesmerized watching you talk 😍 the look, the delivery, the picture, the material 👏🏼
Now I want a whole paper on this topic, congratulations 😭
I feel a little bit like in this discussion we are attributing too much "human touch" in the first iterations of the game, too much of "striving to recreate reality 1:1". When you analyse more games that allow romance, it becomes clear than not coding a gender preference or a queer identity is just easier. The code doesn't have to do more work and as such is preferred from the developer's standpoint. Also, it allows for queerness to be an option, without it being a "feature" that offends conservatists. Verilybitchie has a great video "How Bisexuality Changed Video Games" and I feel like she understands that a bit better.
As someone with a degree in game design, i totally get what you’re saying. A lot of things in games are the result of figuring out a more efficient way of doing something, or may even be the result of a mistake. Recreating life 1:1 is often a fools errand in game development. I honestly assumed the same thing happened with the Sims at first.
However we happen to be super lucky that the development of the Sims is pretty well-documented. There are several first-hand accounts of early sims development, some of which are directly quoted in this video!! There is an interview with Patrick J Barret in which he describes how he implemented same sex relationships. But even before that there is a development document from Don Hopkins where he describes how the first prototype to include relationships actually DID go the extra length to deny homosexuality (the characters would slap you if you tried) and how he disliked the violent reaction. I’m not exactly sure where in the video that “too much” “human touch” is attributed to the early development of the sims because…well, the beginning of the video sounded like an accurate retelling of the development of the game. As far as the team was aware, this was the first game to allow same-sex relationships - despite being easier, there was no preceding example they knew of. In this case, in a game that focuses on relationships, it makes sense that they would go in-depth with systems like this. After all, they had to tune how sims grow closer to eachother, what reactions would they have to certain interactions, etc - already a lot of extra variables. And ultimately it’s humans who work on the code and especially humans that like to flaunt their skills, get obsessed over details, want to create funny interactions etc. “Human Touch” is often inevitable.
huh? how did you get that out of this video? did we watch the same thing?
@@Y-E-R-I I'm using extraneous information to back up what was covered in the video, to prove that a lot of the gay stuff in early Sims development /was/ intentional. Since the comment was saying the video was attributing too much intention to early-development, when it all seemed pretty accurate to me. I was just cross-checking the video. 5:12 is around where the early development is mentioned. 6:00 is where it references the first interview with Patrick J Barret that I mention.
Basically just trying to say none of the video seemed to be attributing "too much human touch" to the early development when it literally just retells the story of the early development that you can find online in the first-hand accounts I brought up.
@@ajet8284 i was reffering to op, i didn't really read your comment, sorry
@@Y-E-R-I Oh sorry! No problem, I just got notified for it and got confused. 100% agree with you then lol
I never played the Sims growing up, but I can definitely confirm that how I used to play in general reflects quite clearly in my identity today.
When I was very young my friends and I used to play ‘Mums and Dads’ or ‘families’ in which I was often the ‘mum’ character, but would refuse to play if someone tried to be the dad.
Similarly with my dolls, even if I had a Ken barbie or whatever I never gave the characters romantic relationships; it was always the single mum looking after the kids or the ‘older sisters’.
When we played with baby dolls there was never a husband or any kind of partner involved; it was just us.
Even though most media and people around me (including my parents) showed romantic relationships as the norm I never played any of that.
Maybe this is looking too far into it, but I think it’s interesting when my friends talked about making their barbies gay or straight and I technically made them aroace like me!