On Friday, the gaming world was dispensed with big buckets when Blizzard announced that he would remove a strict sexual division from world of Warcraft and EA said he would add sexual orientations to _The sims 4.
Solid Monitor World of Warcraft Director Ion Hazzikostas told a streamer-tuber Towellie in an interview that players can choose their character separately, regardless of each other.
We want to expand the system in the future and make the game as inclined as possible. We want to make sure that players have ways to express themselves with the help of their character, Hazzikostas said.
In the Alpha version of the upcoming dragonflight extension, the options that determine the look of the game character’s body are no longer male and woman, but are replaced by body 1 and body 2.
In Wow’s character nature, sex icons will soon be history.
The Wowhead site shows that information mining, or data mining, has also received clear indications that players may choose to choose pronouns in the future. The options found by data mining are HE/HIM, She/Her and They/Them.
Free pronouns cannot yet be regarded as a surefire feature, as data mining is from time to time to find material that will only be added to the game much later or not adding to the game at all.
Gender-separated bodies Blizzard will most likely add to the game in the pre-dragonflight-extension update. The publishing times of both the update and the extension are still obscure.
All _the Sims 4: The characters are no longer bisexual
Electronic Arts, or EA, said on Friday that it would add the most common sexual orientations to its The Sims 4 lifetime simulator.
According to the EA, players will be able to choose from what sexes the game characters feel about sexual and romantic interest. The alternatives are a man, a woman, both or neither.
Sexual and romantic orientation can be chosen separately, so the character can, for example, have sexual intercourse with both women and men, but only experiences romantic feelings with women.
The trailer for the upcoming The Sims 4’s add-ons also featured the characters’ pronouns.
EA states in its announcement that only two potential sexes are available due to technical restrictions. According to the EA, it originally designed The Sims 4, which was originally in line with the two-sex system, but the purpose of the developers is at some point to add a non-bis an alternative to something other than a male or female.
Players may also decide, if they wish, that the character is not yet certain of his sexual orientation, so that the idea of the orientation can only be formed when playing.
If the regulation is not affected at all, the characters, according to EA, behave in the same way as so far, that is, are open to both sexes. So, in the past, the game could not officially be heterosexual or gay.
But why?
People of sexual and gender minorities to identify with characters or to realize and express themselves for a long time in the world of video games very limited. Increasing such opportunities makes gaming more pleasant to many minorities and can increase their well-being.
Separating gender and body is a practical feature, at least for non-sex players. For example, such people may feel that they are something other than men, even though they have a biological man’s body. In the future, they can play world of Warcraft with their own body with a character that combines it with a male sex identity.
However, you can also find a problem with the update. If it is published in its current form without pronouns, then the cis-sex, that is, the transgender people who are born at birth, and the transgender people who know a strong male or female identity can no longer combine themselves with their own gender identity, because genders are no longer presented in the game.
EA has taken sexual and gender minorities as a central part of its marketing tactics at The Sims 4.
Of course, increasing inclusiveness also has its financial side. For example, a survey of Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, according to Meta’s survey, more than 70 % of US mobile players in different minority minority would spend more money on games if games were more inclined. About 80 % of British minority mobile players would spend more money.
The Blizzard’s World of Warcraft team is a relatively newcomer to the inclusion train. It added the first sexual and gender minorities to be open to their game in 2020. The following year, for example, developers, for example, made the colors of numerous NPC characters in the story, which are unbeatable to the story.
However, the most significant event for equality and blizzard in recent years is not positive. In 2021, an action was brought against the company, where the company has claimed that sexual harassment and discrimination between female workers.
Some of the persons accused of harassment worked or had also worked in the world of Warcraft development group. People no longer work for Blizzard.
On the other hand, the EA Maxis team, which develops the Sims_ Series, has taken into account at least sexual minorities in their games for a long time. Same-sex marriage was possible already in the 2009 The Sims 3.
From the 2017 The Sims 4’s Cats & Dogs (in Finnish Cats and dogs) extension, EA raised sexual and gender minorities in a very prominent role in all marketing of their game.