How could your Sim ever truly feel real if it couldn’t jerk off on the couch or have an abortion?

There’s arguably no video game franchise more iconic and expansive than The Sims. First released in 2000, the idea at the core of The Sims is that players can simulate the joy, chaos and mundanity of everyday life. In practice, it’s a gleefully lawless game that caters to your masochistic desires. You can set your Sims on fire or plunge them into teeny-tiny swimming pools and then remove the ladder only to watch them slowly drown. Everything from taking a dump to building a mansion is possible in The Sims games — unless you want to get sexy.

The franchise creators have always blurred nudity and used euphemisms to keep the game fairly PG, with the most explicit option being to “WooHoo” another Sim. This leads to moans and grunts in the game’s famed Simlish language, but there’s little to no animated flesh on display — just two Sims writhing noisily under a double bedspread while love hearts float around the screen. Things get slightly more risqué in first-person mode, especially if you choose to “WooHoo” in a hot tub, but the base game still allows surprisingly little freedom when it comes to flirting, romancing or fucking other Sims.

Which is why worldwide communities of tech-savvy gamers have emerged to fill these gaps. The Sims can be endlessly customized if you have the coding knowledge to create “mods,” or unofficial modifications, that can be downloaded online. One wildly popular mod for The Sims 4, called Wicked Whims, unlocks a shockingly detailed smörgasbord of horny Sim interactions.

The creator of this fabled mod is known only as TURBODRIVER, a long-term fan of The Sims franchise who, along with many others, was used to using a popular NSFW mod for The Sims 3. But when The Sims 4 came out in 2014, TURBODRIVER claims there was little interest in the game within the fandom. “People just didn’t like it at the time,” he tells me. “The game was lacking in features, so what would be the reason to move on from The Sims 3? You have this game that’s been developed for years, and you’re already invested in it, but now you have to switch to this new game that’s pretty clearly worse.”

TURBODRIVER played the new edition briefly upon release, but he didn’t revisit it until 2016. At the time, he couldn’t find any explicit mods made specifically for The Sims 4, so he set to work.

“I liked this idea of exploring a video game world with the freedom of The Sims,” he explains, wanting the option to “tell a story in your own world, with your own characters, with no limitations.” He says there wasn’t much information on how to build a mod, and it’s pretty complex — it requires technical knowledge, and the willingness to try out new codes that might or might not work. “It took about two months to make something that actually functioned,” he continues. Not that it funcitoned well, he laughs, “but people got excited, because it was something new.”

In the nine years since the mod first emerged online, countless players, creators and animators have worked alongside TURBODRIVER to expand the features. It only takes a quick scroll through PornHub to see the hardcore sex scenes in action. Sims jerk off on couches to hyper-realistic porn, seduce each other with sexy poses and eat each other out on love seats. There’s everything from missionary to double penetration, and even porn performers like OnlyFans star Amouranth have streamed themselves creating horny, naked likenesses.

The level of detail is truly impressive. Players can grow out and style their Sim’s pubic hair, get their bodies covered in cum and sweat and peep through windows at exhibitionist neighbors. There’s the option to build and manage a Sims strip club, and players can buy “Wicked items” such as birth-control pills and menstrual-cycle trackers. There’s the option to have an abortion, and Sims have “attractiveness preferences,” which creates a layer of complexity in Sim-on-Sim romances, allowing them to have a certain “type.”

In today’s world of sexy dating simulator games and endless animated hentai porn, the novelty of a Sims 4 gang-bang wears off pretty quickly. As such, TURBODRIVER says the most popular requests are for “romance that’s more spicy, more racy, because the game doesn’t provide that. They’re not necessarily looking for hardcore animations that are basically porn; they mainly want more storytelling animations to show love between characters.” He’s keen for the community to grow, so that animators with lived experience can drive these developments. “If a straight man makes lesbian animations, women can tell it isn’t right — the vibe is missing,” he explains. There’s a limit to the level of kinkiness available too, but there are kinky, BDSM-led mods out there.

Millions of players have downloaded the mod, so TURBODRIVER takes content moderation seriously. There have been incidents of child porn on other Sims mods, but users were promptly discovered and removed for using them. Electronic Arts, the video game company that makes The Sims, has also officially stated that players who use Wicked Whims won’t get banned for using the mod, and there’s a disclaimer on the Wicked Whims website reiterating that everything is safe and players have the option to report issues with the mods.

It’s clear the demand for horny Sims content is sky-high. “If you look at a lot of these games that concentrate on sex and nudity, they’re just that — that’s all there is to it,” says TURBODRIVER. “It’s shallow; it’s kind of boring.”

Sure, there’s the possibility of jerking off an alien or running a Sims strip club empire, but most of us just want the option to consummate our budding Sim romances with something a little hornier than the floating love hearts of the “WooHoo.” And so, Wicked Whims isn’t so much an NSFW novelty as it is a way to allow for our gaming lives to mimic our real ones — cum shots and all.