Meet the modders making video game characters look "better" — whatever that means

Pick any game with a decently sized playerbase and you’ll be able to find a bunch of fan-made mods to change the appearance of the game’s characters. Even though almost all female characters in games line up with conventional beauty standards, including those that are unattainable for many real-life people, there will always be mods out there that add on bigger breasts, tinier waists, more Eurocentric facial features, and so on. Then again, there are also goofy and fun appearance mods like this Baldur’s Gate 3 one that gives a pair of luscious breasts to the skeleton character Withers.

I’ve always wondered: what goes into the decision-making process for appearance-based mod creators? How do they decide what “beauty” looks like? It’s one thing to make a mod just for yourself, based on your own opinion of what you think would look better on your game character. It’s another thing entirely to put a mod up for free on a public forum like NexusMods, which includes statistics showing how often people have downloaded it and commenting functionality for people to make requests of the modder. At that point, appearance mods are offering a public service, of sorts.

I messaged dozens of modders, including some who have created very specific fetish mods. I heard back from three different creators with very different aims; they each told me about why they make appearance-based mods, the fans they’ve accrued for their work, and some surprisingly heartwarming stories about people who finally got to make characters look the way they’d always wanted.

The best-known creator of the bunch is likely Turbodriver, the creator of WickedWhims, a mod for The Sims 4 that he says gets launched 400,000 times per day. WickedWhims is far from being just about altering characters’ appearances; it’s a huge mod pack that adds a variety of sexual acts and bodily fluids, including menstrual cycles, to the base game. Longtime Sims players know that the T-for-Teen-rated game does include a censored version of intercourse called “woohooing”; nude Sims are always blurred out, and when they have sex, it happens out of the players’ view (e.g. under bedcovers). WickedWhims caters to the players who want to see more than that. This meant that Turbodriver had to do a very specific “appearance” mod: deciding how Sims look when they’re naked.