I was the first one to suggest it, and sketched out a straw-man design, but Patrick implemented it himself with his own design, after the design document mentioned it was TBD, but before the production database specified a design.
My straw-man design suggested a two-dimensional representation in the character properties: male attraction and female attraction.
But Patrick's design was actually much better from a game play and exploratory experimental perspective: it didn't explicitly represent the character's sexual preference at all, just their relationships with each other, so it was all up to you to decided who to love and what to do at any given moment, and you could change your mind if you wanted.
Regardless of whether or not sexual preference is something that's set at birth or you can change it if you want to, all human beings deserve the right to love who they choose, and how they behave, just like you get to decide your favorite color or food regardless of whether you're born with that attraction and can change it or not.
In the debate about LGBTQ+ rights, it really doesn't matter whether or not sexual preference is innate, because human beings already have the right of freedom of choice, and deserve to love anyone they want, no matter if they can chose or change their sexual preference or not.
The bigoted arguments against gay rights and marriage based on the belief that sexual preference is a choice (which is pretty presumptuous of anybody who's not LGBTQ+ themselves to have an opinion about) don't matter at all. Nobody even really knows or understands how the human mind and body works enough to be sure, and it's different from person to person, and there are many factors at play, so why bake it into the game one way or the other?
So from a gameplay, family representation, and storytelling perspective, it was better not to explicitly represent sexual preference, and just let the players and Sims be free to love whoever they want. Like it should be in the real world.
>After discussing it with Patrick J. Barrett III, we've determined that the sequence of events that led to The Sims having same sex relationships: The initial prototype implementation did not support same sex relationships, and I noticed that, when I tried to have two women kiss, the would-be-kissee slapped the kisser. So I wrote up my opinion that it should support same sex relationships, instead of resulting in homophobic violence, and proposed a straw man 2-dimensional way of modeling it. Subsequent design documents said heterosexual romance would not be the only kind available, and that Will was reviewing the code and would make recommendations on how to implement it. Patrick was hired soon after that, and was set to task implementing some social interactions. But Will didn't get back to Patrick and the production database didn't reflect his opinion by the time Patrick started working on it. But Patrick implemented support for same sex relationships anyway, but not by explicitly modeling sexual preference as property of The Sims personality -- just as a behavior that was possible at any time for any character.
> So from a gameplay, family representation, and storytelling perspective, it was better not to explicitly represent sexual preference, and just let the players and Sims be free to love whoever they want. Like it should be in the real world.
My straw-man design suggested a two-dimensional representation in the character properties: male attraction and female attraction.
But Patrick's design was actually much better from a game play and exploratory experimental perspective: it didn't explicitly represent the character's sexual preference at all, just their relationships with each other, so it was all up to you to decided who to love and what to do at any given moment, and you could change your mind if you wanted.
Regardless of whether or not sexual preference is something that's set at birth or you can change it if you want to, all human beings deserve the right to love who they choose, and how they behave, just like you get to decide your favorite color or food regardless of whether you're born with that attraction and can change it or not.
In the debate about LGBTQ+ rights, it really doesn't matter whether or not sexual preference is innate, because human beings already have the right of freedom of choice, and deserve to love anyone they want, no matter if they can chose or change their sexual preference or not.
The bigoted arguments against gay rights and marriage based on the belief that sexual preference is a choice (which is pretty presumptuous of anybody who's not LGBTQ+ themselves to have an opinion about) don't matter at all. Nobody even really knows or understands how the human mind and body works enough to be sure, and it's different from person to person, and there are many factors at play, so why bake it into the game one way or the other?
So from a gameplay, family representation, and storytelling perspective, it was better not to explicitly represent sexual preference, and just let the players and Sims be free to love whoever they want. Like it should be in the real world.
>After discussing it with Patrick J. Barrett III, we've determined that the sequence of events that led to The Sims having same sex relationships: The initial prototype implementation did not support same sex relationships, and I noticed that, when I tried to have two women kiss, the would-be-kissee slapped the kisser. So I wrote up my opinion that it should support same sex relationships, instead of resulting in homophobic violence, and proposed a straw man 2-dimensional way of modeling it. Subsequent design documents said heterosexual romance would not be the only kind available, and that Will was reviewing the code and would make recommendations on how to implement it. Patrick was hired soon after that, and was set to task implementing some social interactions. But Will didn't get back to Patrick and the production database didn't reflect his opinion by the time Patrick started working on it. But Patrick implemented support for same sex relationships anyway, but not by explicitly modeling sexual preference as property of The Sims personality -- just as a behavior that was possible at any time for any character.