Regional and Ethnic Diversity in The Sims Mods By Hanna Wirman Introduction Nearly 20 years after the release of the first game in the series, The Sims franchise (2000 onwards) remains widely popular and maintains its active players-creator community. From game to game, the official support for modifying The Sims has fluctuated from in-game texturing tools to official modding community sites to barely any enabling tools from the developers. Similarly, the four main games from The Sims to The Sims 4 as well as the numerous ‘Expansion packs,’ ‘Stuff packs,’ and ‘Game packs’ have offered varied content to play with and therefore prompted altering interest for further improvement and content addition by the players. In earlier focused studies by Tanja Sihvonen (2011) and myself (Wirman, 2011), The Sims 2 modding communities were approached both from the player-developer perspective (Sihvonen) and from the point of view of understanding the gendered dynamics of The Sims modding (Wirman). Studying the series development during the years of its existence, and the relationship between modifying practices and original development cultures in particular, would add a game historical perspective that grasps the changes and continuities thereof. Hence, in this essay, my intention is to take one function of The Sims modding – its contribution to representations and simulations of regional and ethnic diversity – as found in modded content throughout the history of The Sims. Mia Consalvo (2003), Miguel Sicart (2006) and Anne-Mette Albrechtslund (2007) have previously covered sexuality, as another aspect of diversity, in The Sims games and focused on the first and second installations of the series. Given that hundreds of millions of people have played the game and hundreds of thousands have contributed by modding it, this study will not be able to exhaust the phenomenon in its entirety.