This gamer didn't see herself in The Sims. So she created content to fill the void. pic.twitter.com/kLWIbzXj8n

— AJ+ (@ajplus) July 15, 2017

This video portrays Xmiramira's purposes in creating custom content skin tones and founding The Black Simmer.

It's so easy to make a cute white sim, but to make a cute black sim. I need CC. I shouldn't have to need CC. CC should be an accessory not a necessity. And even WITH CC, I still gotta look around and dig deep. This is why I made TBS.

— Xmiramira 🔜 PAX East (@Xmiramira) February 8, 2018

In this tweet, Xmiramira discusses the events and experiences that led her to take action.

In this video, Xmiramira uses custom content to create sims that fit her artistic vision.

The System of Purposes:

Through contact, the system of purposes influences the ecology's content creation, and Simmers may gain recognition through addressing the larger ecology's voiced purposes or needs.

The system of purposes extends influence into content creation process by organizing the network's needs and intentions. Some needs and intentions are widely recognized, and content that addresses these popular purposes is more likely to gain attention. The system of purposes, according to Marilyn Cooper, is "the means by which writers coordinate their actions...Purposes, like ideas, arise out of interaction, and individual purposes are modified by the larger purposes of groups; in fact, an individual impulse or need only becomes a purpose when it is recognized as such by others" (8). In the Simming ecology, purposes also arise out of interaction and are modified by the group's larger purposes. As such, they are a central component of social interaction and content creation. For Simmers, failing to align purposes in the the process of content creation can result in a lack of reception or engagement with the posted content--in other words, low view counts and few to no commenters. Alternatively, when a Simmer addresses a communally recognized need, they can contribute meaningfully to the ecology and gain more recognition. This process can be seen prominently in the development of mods (modifications to the game by players). In her article, "Playing by Doing and Players' Localization of The Sims 2," Hanna Wirman investigates the motivations and group purposes of modding practices. She finds that the modders who volunteered to participate in her study (the majority of whom were women) are conducting these practices for the benefit of the larger community.

The participants in Wirman's study frame benefiting other Simmers as a meaningful extension of their creative play with the game. She writes "Many of the interviewed players said they make skins to fulfill other players' wishes rather than for their own needs...it offers them goals that open game-play itself does not" (Wirman 60). (The "skins" referred to here are a form of custom content, created by players for use in the wider community's gameplay. Some examples can be seen in the sidebar.) By producing content for other players, modders are able to engage in a deeper and more satisfying kind of creative play.

Additionally, Wirman argues this valuation of bring benefit to the community (an aspect that I claim is a form of purpose): "Value to the community and helping others reflect a kind of gift economy in which players gain cultural recognition through giving, receiving, and reciprocating" (64). Therefore, the value gained through producing to benefit others is motivated by the cultural situation of the players. This demonstrates how the system of purposes in the Simming ecology is developed through interactions with other systems and people.

The Simming ecology has historically failed to represent and incorporate experiences of Simmers of color, and this is also present in the game's design. EA's development choices have historically served to marginalize the experiences of people of color, creating a space that is unwelcoming due to how it constructs whiteness as the default identity.

Therefore, one of the most significant examples of the system of purposes in action within the Simming ecology is that of resistance. Xmiramira, a streamer, modder, EA gamechanger, and community leader for The Sims 4 has spoken about the barriers that led to her compositions and informed her purposes. In the second tweet to the left, Xmiramira describes the difficulty she encountered in trying to create Black sims: "It's so easy to make a cute white sim, but to make a cute black sim. I need CC. I shouldn't have to need CC. CC should be an accessory not a necessity. And even WITH CC, I still gotta look around and dig deep." Here, Xmiramira describes the oppressive structure of The Sims 4's game engine in its original package; options for Sims of color were few in number and poorly designed. Furthermore, she describes the excessive labor required to locate custom content that reflected the identities and bodies that she wanted to create.

Experiencing racism in the game engine's interface and custom content trends online informed Xmiramira's purposes and led her to address the need in multiple ways--through the creation of CC and The Black Simmer forum. According to the TBS blog, The Black Simmer is "a forum created by a simmer who is frustrated by the lack of diversity in the simmer community. This is a place for simmers of all ages to come, meet one another, discuss and share ideas [and] creations" (The Black Simmer). Through solidarity, TBS promotes diverse content creation and discusssion. In the video from AJ+, included on the left, Xmiramira identifies her purpose as for herself and others, which complicates Wirman's claim. Wirman posits that custom content's value is in the act of fulfilling others' needs. While Xmiramira's custom content has certainly added value to the experiences of other Simmers, Xmiramira also purposed to meet her own needs. Xmiramira describes an experience in which she had to work prior to being able to play in the same way that white Simmers can, rather than playing and then working for a deeper play experience, as Wirman proposes. This reversal of order is because the content and texts that Xmiramira wished to construct with the game's engine were not available to her. In the community, Xmiramira's production has placed her in a position of leadership, which EA's developers have begun to follow. However, while EA has since added additional base game content for Sims of color, the ecology still has far to go before the practices and systems that marginalize people of color are fully addressed.

Just as Cooper's framework posits, the purposes behind acts of creative production are negotiated through interaction, and simmers may gain recognition through addressing the ecology's voiced purposes or needs. In the example above, the gap in the game engine's interface served to limit representation options for Sims of color. Xmiramira responded to this communally acknowledged need and was able to fulfill some of her more individual purposes: she was able to represent her Sims and their lives in the way she wanted while gaining more followers and social capital.