What has given EA’s The Sims such a longstanding presence in the gaming community?

To answer this question, we might first consider why children play with dolls. Here, play is a tool to make sense of the world: enacting fantasies of what their lives might look like when they grow up, experimenting with identity, and stimulating creativity by telling stories with dolls as their vehicles.

Games like The Sims largely operate on the same principle: a digital dollhouse of sorts. Many of us play The Sims to enact idyllic versions of our own lives. We earn our millions, whether that be through honest grafting or spamming the “motherlode” cheat, design our dream houses, and create our ideal partners.

The latter of these provides something which has made The Sims significant for LGBT+ people, and the reason why the games have been such a fundamental part of my life. Realising I wasn’t straight in my adolescence came with the crushing understanding that there was something which marked me as different. I was something my classmates viewed as an insult, an other. I carried what I felt was a shameful secret around with me until I was outed against my will, and for the majority of my teenage years, being LGBT+ brought me little beyond fear and suffering.

Thankfully, there was a world I could escape to.

When I splurged my carefully saved pocket money on The Sims 4 at thirteen years old, the first Sim I created was Daisy Bellamy – the young adult I desperately hoped would blossom from the self-loathing teenager I was. The beloved daughter of Muse frontman Matt Bellamy, Daisy Bellamy’s “bisexual bob” looked chic, not jagged, as mine did at the time. She wore flannel, black lipstick and dyed her hair without consequence, lived in a gothic mansion all to herself, spent long nights faultlessly playing the piano, and had an entire floor dedicated to a library.

Most importantly, she had a girlfriend called Serena.

In my reality as a teenager, having a girlfriend was out of the question. While other girls my age were indulging in first boyfriends and classroom crushes, I was focused on surviving each day. It was comforting to know that no matter how bad a day at school I’d had, or what terrible thing I’d seen against my own community, there was a pristine world waiting on my computer, where Daisy Bellamy could propose to Serena, and the entire neighbourhood would attend the wedding because homophobia didn’t exist in Willow Creek.

For a few precious hours, I didn’t have to worry about anything else; I could just be who I really wanted to be.

And my story is far from a lone case.

The Sims established itself as a trailblazer for inclusivity before I was even alive. During the development of the first game in the late 1990s, programmer Don Hopkins objected to early code which triggered Sims to respond violently to romantic advances from Sims of the same gender. Hopkins proposed a more elegant solution in which attraction was determined by variables over one fixed, heteronormative category, arguing that anyone uncomfortable with it needed to “grow up and get a life.”

As a result, when The Sims launched in 2000, players could explore same-sex relationships without moral penalty or narrative judgement at a time when homosexuality was still criminalised or heavily stigmatised across much of the world.

From there, The Sims developed as a game that not only normalised queerness but actively celebrated it at a time when most other franchises wouldn’t touch such a concept.

As The Sims 2 and 3 were released, queer lives were integrated further into their worlds. NPCs were openly in same-sex relationships. You could marry a Sim of the same sex, and Sims could even be programmed to “dislike romance”, meaning Sims never had to partner up if they wished.

The Sims 4 saw the ability to give Sims preferred pronouns, edit their sexualities, gender, and even launched multiple pride stuff packs, with pride flags and themed clothing – all without a paywall.

This visibility cannot be understated. Even at the time of The Sims 4‘s release in 2014, other social simulation games released in this era, like Tomodachi Life or Harvest Moon, didn’t even allow so much as same-sex couples.

Hopes were high, then, for what The Sims 5 would bring. Instead, a cancellation, likely cementing The Sims 4 as the final mainline instalment in the franchise, left fans disappointed, albeit not surprised. EA has been criticised by many in recent years for prioritising profit at the cost of risk-taking and genuine inclusion.

Fans also worry EA’s recent privatisation, largely through Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, may have a negative impact on The Sims. While this does not necessarily dictate direct creative control, players are not blind to Saudi Arabia’s active criminalisation and discrimination against homosexuality.

Furthering anxieties that The Sims may no longer be the icon for LGBT+ rights it once was, notable queer gaming influencers, including Dan and Phil and Jesse McNamara (Plumbella) have stepped away from their partnerships with EA since the privatisation, citing ethical concerns.

So, where does this leave queer players in 2026?

In some ways, alternative options have improved. LGBT+ inclusion is increasingly standard in life-simulation games. Tomodachi Life 2‘s recent direct shows non-binary and aromantic Miis, while Stardew Valley allows same-sex marriage or the choice of non-romantic cohabitation.

And yet, none of these games are The Sims.

To return to my dollhouse metaphor, The Sims‘ brilliance is its expansiveness. It’s a real-world simulation where we can enact creativity and the mundanity in harmony. Where we can be whoever we want to be, and diversity is celebrated without being treated as a feature. I worry we might never capture this scale of life simulation with an appropriate level of progressivity again.

Whether queer gamers turn to old iterations of The Sims or find solace in other games, all I can hope is that each of them gets the chance to have their own Serena.