I’ve been in the industry for 25 years and I love when I see people buy a PlayStation to just play FIFA… They get exactly what they want out of just that one part. “From a straight representation design side, we want everything to be available for everybody like it would be in the world, and the people who work on it make choices every day” At this point, CAS may as well be its own game. The Sims 4’s flourishing modding community also contributes to the game’s fashion options, as modders have given Sims an incredible library of custom content clothes in a plethora of styles for free. I have spent time and effort giving Sims perfect sets of outfits, hair, and accessories to go with whatever preconceived backstory I’ve given them, only to play with them outside of CAS for maybe an hour or two. In fact, the dressing up and customization is the best part for a lot of players. While CAS is just the character customizer and not an actual game, Simmers will understand that it can take hours in CAS to craft Sims.

The Sims 4’s Create a Sim, or CAS for short, is a good example of a size-inclusive fashion game. It exists in a mainstream game that doesn’t really present itself as a fashion game: The Sims 4. But maybe it’s time for fashion games to move on from the way it’s always been, and the technology is already there. It’s just how it is.” This is the same spiel I heard growing up, that models have to look a certain way because they are meant to be hangers and mannequins for the clothes and not people. Which is unrealistic when most women have boobs. In 2016, model scout Carole White was quoted as saying designers “want their clothes to fall as they designed them. This reminds me of a somewhat similar argument used to advocate against size inclusivity in fashion modeling in real life. If you introduced a new body type into a Style Savvy game, for example, then you would have to remodel each piece of clothing so it fits onto that new body type, so they default to using skinny models.

Both the Style Savvy series and Love Nikki introduced the ability to dress conventionally masculine models over time, but those are also restricted to thin body types. They both only had one kind of model, skinny and conventionally feminine. Consider the Style Savvy series and Love Nikki.

I knew the standard existed but didn’t realize until later that it plagued even my favorite games. Growing up on a steady diet of Project Runway and A merica’s Next Top Model made it clear to me that there was a body standard in fashion, one that most of us did not fit into. Video Game Fashion Week is Polygon’s attempt at covering the fun, silly, and highly important world of character style.Ī lack of body diversity obviously isn’t just a thing in video games.

Sims 4 body type mods