I found Consalvo's Hot Dates and Fairy-Tale Romances to be an interesting read. A couple parts of her analysis of The Sims, however, stuck out in my mind, because Consalvo did not discuss the practical considerations which she mentions in other parts of her analysis at all for these important areas.
First, it comes up in the following passage discussing the creation of custom Sims:
Finally, the manual makes and interesting move in conflating gender with biological sex, and reifying both as a primary signifier of identity... Feminist scholars such as Judith Butler have correctly challenged the sex/gender conflation, arguing that genders (and their constituent attributes) are assigned to sexed bodies in an artificial manner... (Consalvo 184)
While this is certainly a valid criticism of the game, for whatever reason, Consalvo omits any discussion of practical reasons for this. As she mentions elsewhere, The Sims is foremost a commercial product from an established large-scale game company, where avoiding alienation of the target audience takes priority over social statements the authors may wish to make. The sex/gender distinction is useful, but unfortunately making it an explicit consideration when creating a Sim would likely confuse or simply be lost on much of the target audience; this is a potentially-contentious topic, which is further from the core themes of discourse than some other areas where the game has already hedged its bets (such as gay marraige).
The presentation (or rather, lack of forced presentation) of homosexuality in the game is another place where Consalvo is purely critical of the game, but omits practical considerations. She raises the issue of gay-window gaming, where homosexuality is permitted, but it is possible (even easy) to avoid seeing homosexuality in the game at all. She writes:
Options not explored will not surface... [The Sims'] appeal is based in part on its attempts to accurately "model" human life... (Consalvo 188)
She then continues on to discuss how the game is more realistic with gays in it, but this is not required by the game. This is certainly true, but it seems there may be another reason for this (which I have no evidence to support) other than simply not desiring to alienate the homophobic portion of the target audience. We've talked a lot about how the game designer's potentially-subjective viewpoint on matters tends to slip through and come across as a message in games. It seems reasonable to expect that the designers of The Sims were aware of this, and made some decisions to consciously avoid having the game perceived as what they (the designers) thought it should be, and to allow the reality it models to be whatever reality the players choose to see, and remove as much subjectivity as they felt they could. This might explain why gay marriage does not exist in the game (when it was released no states had made gay marriage officially/legally recognized), among other things. The result of this tact is sort of disturbing, they they're intentionally allowing people to live in fantasy worlds of their own creation, but seems like a point worth thinking about.
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