I was recently browsing the Sims 3 community forums, when I ran across a thread about race in The Sims 3.  The player who started the thread (Cecesaun1) says that she did so after hearing someone say that "she felt people didn't make Blacks or Asian sims."  Cecesaun goes on to invite other players to share images of their non-white Sims, and boy have they!  At this point, the thread goes on for 27 pages, and I'm sure it will go farther before it finally settles.

I remember a long time ago, when I was playing The Sims 1, noticing that all of my neighbors and NPCs (which the game creates) were non-white.  It was a little hard to tell specific ethnicities back then, but they were all distinctly tan.  

I puzzled over this for a while, before I learned that the game was designed to institute a balance of skin tone.  This meant that if you created only white Sims, the game would balance out the population by creating darker Sims, and vice versa.  

This was a startling and embarrassing discovery.  I felt like my own hidden racism had been suddenly exposed by a computer game.  When really the truth is that we tend to create Sims in our own image.  No doubt there was an African-American player somewhere in the world wondering why all of her neighbors and NPCs were white.  

Ever since that time, whenever I create a Sim, I am careful to not create only white Sims by default.  Actually I hardly ever build my own Sims anymore.  Partly because I'm not drawn to the Create A Sim process, and partly because I prefer playing legacies.  I find that legacies are more fun when you make your Sims find and woo their own mate from the town's population.  Ethnic lines quickly blur in this situation, and everyone just ends up being tan to various degrees.

But reading through that thread on the Sims 3 forums, I was surprised and delighted to find that I was not alone in making Sims in my own image.  And that many MANY people who play The Sims 3 are not, in fact, white.  

There are a lot of people on that thread providing feedback on Sims and offering tips on what kind of jaw line and eye shape to use in order to give your Sim an authentic Vietnamese look (for example).  Which would be completely racist and inappropriate except that the person offering the advice is (for example) Vietnamese.  And the fact that the thread has remained even-tempered and honest, providing examples and offering critiques, without dissolving into the worst possible thing (like you would expect) is nothing short of amazing.  

In fact, I would be hard-pressed to find another discussion of race on the internet that contains - as far as I can tell - not a single flame or trollish message.  And although the Sims 3 forums are moderated, it doesn't seem that any nasty messages have been deleted (because you can always tell).  

Is this the best game in the world, with the best players in the world, or what?