The future of EA has looked, well, uncertain since it got picked up in the biggest leveraged buyout in private equity history. For one thing, it’s now on the hook for $20 billion in debt. For another, the buyout came from a group of investors that included Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Affinity Partners—founded by Donald Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner.
LGBT people and women more generally face repression in Saudi Arabia, while Kushner, of course, has strong ties to a Trump administration which has made attacking LGBT rights a cornerstone of its platform.
The presence of such conservative elements in the EA buyout has had more than a few Sims fans worried that the state’s involvement in EA might lead to a clampdown on the series’ more diverse elements. That’d be a terrible idea for a lot of obvious, moral reasons, but one OG Sims designer (via FRVR) says it would be “existential for the business.”
Charles London, who worked as art director on The Sims 1 and creative director on The Sims 2, said that representing same-sex relationships in the earlier games was “everything” for the series. “I think it’s existential for the business, right? It is certainly for society. I think it’s incredibly important for there to be a mainstream, beloved brand that says, ‘love is love and people are people.’”
But it’s also that spirit of embracing all humanity that allows The Sims “to be universally appealing”, says London, whether the audience be “Young, old, male, female, gay, straight, other, right? American, Iranian, whatever.”
(Image credit: Electronic Arts)
Representing as much of humanity as possible is what lets The Sims create an “empathetic and emotional connection to that game” among players, says London. “It’s not that there’s so many pants you can dress them in”. Though to be fair, London does acknowledge the sheer volume of pants options is also an important part of the appeal.
London reckons that a world in which EA chucked LGBT players under the bus is a world in which EA is doomed. “When we are in reactionary periods—to have stalwart, beloved brands that are capable of sending this message is critical to society. But it’s also critical that those brands keep the faith because, if they don’t, they’re going to stop being brands,” as they lose the ability to appeal to wide groups of people.
In London’s recollection, it was this kind of thinking that led to same-sex relationships being incorporated in the original Sims games. He says Maxis wasn’t a “band of fearless social revolutionaries,” but that “When it came to sexuality, we realised that we had to implement it in the game in order for these little humans to be little humans… We chose the [option] that was both technically simpler, but also that was the one where we could look at ourselves in the mirror.”
So he hopes, of course, that those kinds of choices keep being made, and he sounds relatively optimistic. “That includes not just sexuality, it includes body image, it includes race, and it includes the choice of clothing. It includes the choice of architecture, the choice of job, structure, all the magnificent diversity of actual human life, and this is something that the team, I think, deeply understands. Deeply, deeply understands.”
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