Twitch star Xmiramira is fighting against lackluster Black skin in The Sims

theverge.com:

Amira Virgil, known as Xmiramira on Twitch and YouTube, felt something wasn’t right with The Sims 4. Virgil, a content creator and video game streamer, is also a storyteller. Her YouTube page is filled with playlists of soap-opera style Sims 4 Let’s Plays in which she crafts narratives to accompany the actions of her characters in the game. She’s like a showrunner, acting as producer, director, script writer, and, ultimately, God, controlling her characters as they move through a world she created using The Sims 4 and its elaborate library of expansion packs. But something just wasn’t right about the characters she was creating. Something was off.

It was the skin.

“There’s like this gray, ashy-like undertone, and looking at it is the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard for me,” Virgil told me over Zoom. “Where’s the undertones? Where is the contrast? Where’s the vibrance?”

There’s a long, rich tradition in gaming communities of modifying a game to add features it doesn’t have. Most times modding introduces some humorous element or small, but impactful quality-of-life change. Black players and players of color have used modding to address when a game fails to account for players who aren’t white. Fed up with the color of her Black characters, Virgil decided to learn how to mod The Sims 4.

The Sims 4 is a life simulation game in which players can build and control their own little world. Players can create characters (known as “sims”), choose their personalities, put them in homes they can customize and decorate, and give them jobs, spouses, and children. There is no objective, no way to “beat” or “win” the game. It is a creation engine equipped with so many options that there’s no limit to the stories a player can craft.