Maxis Partners With Ebonix, Dark & Lovely For Sims 4 Play In Color
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EA and Maxis are teaming up with beauty brand Dark & Lovely and content creator Danielle “Ebonix” Udogaranya for the Sims 4 Play In Color campaign. Play In Color is a multifaceted effort to improve representation in The Sims 4 even further, following Maxis’ addition of vitiligo options in an earlier update and expanded backgrounds and skin tones for Townies before that.
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“Ebonix has paved an instrumental path towards greater representation in The Sims through her many years of dedication and work, from her first piece of custom content being a dashiki, to her many diverse and detailed hairstyles offered to the community,” Anna Huerta, Sims 4 senior creator director, said in a statement.. “We’re thrilled to be teaming up again to have her as a key part of this campaign as we showcase and advocate for the importance of Black hairstyles in our virtual worlds as much as our real one.”
The campaign kicks off with a documentary exploring the importance of authentic diversity and representation in video games with Udogaranya, Sims 4 creative director Anna Huerta, and assistant producer Kaelah Smallwood. A free update in April 2024 will add two dozen new color options for two different hairstyles, and another free update in July 2024 introduces a new locs hairstyle developed in partnership with Dark & Lovely.
“Growing up I always thought that working on video games would be amazing,” Smallwood, who created mods for The Sims before joining Maxis professionally, said. “I never really thought it was possible for me, since I didn’t see many people who looked like me making them. Seeing the diverse group of mod creators for The Sims made it all finally seem possible.”
“I started making mods because I wanted to add more diversity and inclusion to the game. So helping make sure that The Sims is actively working to bring diversity and inclusivity to all players is a really big deal to me. At every step of the process, we’re thinking about ways to make the game more inclusive and diverse Because everyone should be able to see themselves in their Sims.”
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