Sims can have sex—or, rather, WooHoo—in the shower, a pile of leaves, or under a waterfall. More adventurous Sims can get busy in a cow barn, mausoleum, or dumpster. Then there's the classic option, under the covers in a bed: Two Sims toss the bedsheet over their heads and rustle around for a while, hearts and fireworks flying. After a while, the Sims reemerge, exhausted and fully clothed. (Naked Sims, using the toilet or showering, are censored with an abstract blur.) What makes the animations iconic in The Sims is the clever ways developer Maxis comes up with to keep the act modest—and still under the ESRB's T for Teen rating. But some Sims players want to go under the covers and beyond the blur. The Sims is a life simulator, after all, and realistic sex is part of life. And that's why one particular The Sims 4 mod is so enormously popular: Wicked Whims.
Created by a modder who goes by Turbo, Wicked Whims is nearly 10 years old. It started simple, with nudity and sex. Over the years, it's grown to a massive mod with a bustling community. It's got thousands of sex animations, dynamic nudity with pubic hair that grows, birth control, menstruation, and an in-depth relationship system. Hundreds of thousands of people launch the mod each day, Turbo said.
Certainly people use the mod to make porn and get off, but they also use it to explore parts of their sexuality in a safe place, or as a storytelling tool. "I think there's a stereotype assigned to people who use these mods that they're sad, lonely perverts who are deviants in society's eyes," one mod user, Chris, told Aftermath. They turned to the mod because they wanted more than just Sims bopping around under the covers.
"My enjoyment really came from the full range of sexuality being on display rather than being behind a curtain with a 'WooHoo' label and a wink," Brenna, another Wicked Whims user, said. "I like my weird little queer artist polycule being able to have threesomes autonomously because they're just feeling the vibes. I think it's deeply funny when the Landgraabs show up at the lounge and end up hooking up in the bathroom."
Turbo has spent the last 10 years fiddling with The Sims 4 and its systems. He said one of the first things he did was figure out how to get Sims to take off a single piece of clothing. A Sim can't just take their shirt off; if you want a new look, you're changing the whole outfit. "How do you even make a Sim just take off their shirt and keep the rest of the outfit the same?" he asked. "It's just not a feature of the game." Eventually, he got it to work.
Wicked Whims is the X-rated expansion of The Sims 4's core tenet, which is the freedom to create all sorts of different lives, stripped free from the T for Teen rating. The . Turbo presents a lot of options, and players can pick and choose what they turn on. If you're not interested in your Sims sweating while using a bathroom glory hole, you can turn the sweating option off. (Or, more tamely, choosing whether Sims sweat while exercising.) If you don't want to deal with menstruation, that's something you can switch off, too.
Menstruation is not a system Turbo himself particularly wanted in The Sims 4, but when someone mentioned it, he realized it was a good idea. He broke it down into parts, both how to implement it technically but also how to make it fun as a feature. "If I can't understand [why a person wants this], then I won't be able to make it," he said. "That aspect of it being interesting is what made me want to work on it."
You can almost think of the Wicked Whims mod as a sexy framework for The Sims 4. It comes with a ton of stuff embedded as part of the main system, but Turbo also created a community marketplace—where everything is free—in which other modders can upload compatible animations, translations, clothing, or custom body parts. That's where you can download all sorts of extras created by The Sims 4's sexiest community: There's dozens of options for blowjobs, handjobs, and footjobs. You want your Sims to fuck a vegetable? Read a book while having their dick sucked? Have sex on nearly every surface imaginable? You'll find that here.
Turbo invites creators to upload their work there, and curates the experience as a way to create a safe place to download mods. You won't find anything illegal or, as Turbo put it in the content rules, "highly inappropriate," like mods that includes "animals, any form of underage representation, non-consensual actions, necrophilia, gore, feces, vomit, noticeable physical/psychological harm, or discrimination."
"You want to have a game that's playful, and you can have fun and have these elements that are sexual to play with rather than create these dark worlds with messed up things. That's the boundaries that you try to balance,” Turbo said.
A relatively new Wicked Whims user, who goes by azulot online and downloaded the mod within the past year, said she downloaded nearly 3,000 sex animations. "I don't even think I've seen a tenth of it," she said. One of her favorites, she said, is a sex animation that lets two Sims shower together. "That's something I think is so romantic and special," azulot said. "Sometimes my partner and I will have had a rough week and we just shower together before he goes to work. It's not even sexual, it's just a moment we have together. It's special that you can do that in a game. It's something small I wasn't expecting."
That diversity of options is a key part of why Wicked Whims is so popular. Wicked Whims is what you make of it. For Chris, they were able to experiment fantasies—"it's my own perverted doll house," they said—but also with gender.
"I love that I can play as a male or female presenting character which is ideal for my genderfluid self to be able to express how I want to look in any way I could imagine," Chris said.
Wicked Whims lets players center women's pleasure, too—something all media, including video games, hasn't always been comfortable with. Azulot said she's been so involved in her lesbian Sims couple's life that she hasn't seen any heterosexual animations yet. Sex mods and sex in games can get a bad rap for being derogatory towards women, even if that's not always the reality. "It's not something we see a lot of, women being the center of sex but not seen as an object," she said.
The state of sex in games is made all the more worse, continually pushed to the margins, as adult game creators see their work removed from digital marketplaces. It's largely because of payment processors lobbying for the removal of content deemed inappropriate; they threaten a digital marketplace with cutting off their processing power, and a storefront obliges. Turbo said the looming threat of payment processing issues has been around for a long time. "I use Patreon a lot, and Patreon had to fight that a lot as well, and introduce a lot of regulations to, I presume, convince these payment services that they're doing things properly," he said.
"We need mods and games like this," Chris said. "It's an expression of human desire and a part of being human."
