'The Sims 4' has added customisable gender pronouns.

The life simulation game - which lets the player operate a virtual dollhouse and oversee their character's lives from creation through to death - is has added an update which will see users able to change their avatar's gender to whatever they see fit.

A blog post from The Sims developers read: "We first announced that we were looking into this feature last year after hearing feedback from the community, however this is something that has actually been on our minds for quite some time before we announced it formally. As with our vibrant community of Simmers, our development team is an extremely talented and diverse group of folks that brings various perspectives into the content that we create. So, we decided to come forward with information about our investigation into the addition of customizable pronouns in The Sims™ 4.."

Developers of the EA game went on to explain that they turned to organisations such as GLAAD (Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) to conduct their research.

EA continued: "We reached out to our partners It Gets Better Project and GLAAD and worked with them to learn more about how pronouns are used, particularly by trans and nonbinary people. Through this research and through doing a deep dive into the game, we’ve learned about all of the different complex areas that binary gender was present in The Sims 4. From here we then worked with our team to come up with some wireframe designs to help us work on making this feature a reality."

Players of The Sims 4 will be able to customise genders for their Sims at the Create a Sim stage by selecting ‘Hello, my name and pronouns are…’ and will be able to choose from They/Them She/Her He/Him or Custom.