Deaf & HoH Simmers, how do you feel about hearing aids in the Sims?

GrimlyFiendish · March 2023

I'm partially deaf due to a degenerative hearing condition that runs in my family. At first I thought the addition of hearing aids for those who wish to play as their Simself was a positive idea, but the more I'm seeing townie sims in my game with hearing aids the more it's bothering me. I grew up with both my mother and grandmother using hearing aids, I also grew up knowing that I still had to make sure I was facing them and enunciating my words clearly so they could lipread rather than miss out on whole chunks of conversation. I don't need hearing aids at my stage of deafness (that might change in the future), but I still regularly have to utilise things like closed captions, make sure people are facing me properly so I can hear them, or have to lip read on occasion.

And then I see sims wandering about with hearing aids, and they're not having to ask people to face them when they're trying to have a conversation, or dealing with people getting annoyed because they've had to ask another sim to repeat themselves, or having other sims shout at them because they think that yelling somehow makes it easier to lip read - and all of that's not even including the fact that I don't see any hearing aid wearing Sims actually signing, which is a language of its own and a huge part of deaf culture, plus they can all talk and be understood perfectly well which is not always the case with people born deaf. Like, I'm sorry but the hearing aid fairy isn't just going to wave a magic wand and give someone perfect hearing.

Am I just being overly sensitive? Am I the only one that's bothered by this? Honestly it's got to the stage now where if one of my born in game sims randomly has hearing aids added to them I immediately remove them in CAS, and townie Sims with hearing aids end up getting deleted.

naeshelle · March 2023

i don't think you're being overly sensitive at all! i think that hearing aids have a clear function, one that you're intimately aware of. when sims wear them without needing them (meaning, there is no corresponding gameplay), the hearing aids begin to feel like fashion accessories, which they're definitely not. like yours, my mother also wears hearing aids, so i think that might influence how i feel about their use in the game as well. i don't remove them from random townies but if one of my sims has them on when they age up i take them off.

i don't know if you're a pc simmer that can play with mods, but if you can, check this one out. it claims to stop the randomization of makeup and accessories on sims, including randomly generated townies. i say "claim" because i haven't tested it for myself + i don't know if it applies to medical wearables, but it might be something that helps you out.

all of that to say, your feelings a perfectly valid & i hear where you're coming from.

(edit: whoops, i may have overstepped here. i'm the child of a hoh woman, but i'm not hoh myself. sincere apologies if you were only looking to hear from deaf/hoh folks, i just now realized you might have been!)

Future · March 2023

Another reason why they should’ve made these CAS items for players to add only instead of enabling the ability for them to be assigned to townies randomly.

GrimlyFiendish · March 2023

naeshelle wrote: »

(edit: whoops, i may have overstepped here. i'm the child of a hoh woman, but i'm not hoh myself. sincere apologies if you were only looking to hear from deaf/hoh folks, i just now realized you might have been!)

Oh no, not at all. Interested in hearing from anyone who has any experience with this, including friends and family members.

GrimlyFiendish · March 2023

Future wrote: »

Another reason why they should’ve made these CAS items for players to add only instead of enabling the ability for them to be assigned to townies randomly.

That would have been much better.

Oldeseadogge · March 2023

As one who is supposed to wear his: I frequently forget about it, it often seems more trouble than it's worth, it needs to be recharged nightly. Why inflict such misery on our sims? They have enough troubles as it is.

Atreya33 · March 2023

It is very interesting to hear from someone who has hearing aids. As someone who has no experience in this topic, I saw it as a nice gesture towards inclusivity. But without gameplay or consequences attached, it is nothing more than gesture.

itsTheSimsGuy · March 2023

I personally do not care if they are in game or not. I am deaf in my left ear, I feel zero need to have sims deaf just because I am. I have no desire for “representation” myself. I don’t really put myself “into” games like that. I play to escape reality. And being deaf is not really something I think about anymore. My right ear hears well enough for both tbh.

haneul · March 2023

And then I see sims wandering about with hearing aids, and they're not having to ask people to face them when they're trying to have a conversation, or dealing with people getting annoyed because they've had to ask another sim to repeat themselves, or having other sims shout at them because they think that yelling somehow makes it easier to lip read - and all of that's not even including the fact that I don't see any hearing aid wearing Sims actually signing, which is a language of its own and a huge part of deaf culture, plus they can all talk and be understood perfectly well which is not always the case with people born deaf. Like, I'm sorry but the hearing aid fairy isn't just going to wave a magic wand and give someone perfect hearing.

I feel similarly even though I'm not deaf. If I were to have deaf Sims, I wouldn't want all of them to be in families that only speak, but there's no other option in the Sims. Sign language is important and it feels a little icky to me to include hearing aids while not including anything else because IRL deaf people are constantly ignored or forced to speak and it is such a huge problem. Parents of deaf children who refuse to learn sign language annoy me, but they're also not at all uncommon. Hearing aids aren't magic. They can be annoying and require a lot of concentration. Sometimes people just want to relax and speak a language that's less effort. Representation is great, but it can be hard to get right, and here the Sims may be perpetuating the idea that deafness can be completely eliminated with hearing aids/implants and that sign language is irrelevant because it is no problem for deaf people to speak -- when speaking and listening with a hearing aid can require a ton of effort and constant concentration. But I still think this is a step in the right direction.

KestrelDC · April 2023

Yeah, even if they're not gonna have gameplay effects and are mostly a detail to represent that aspect of the Sim and we're to just imagine that they're helping the Sim hear story-wise, including them in random does strike me as an odd choice. It would be one thing if the randomizer flagged those Sims as hearing aid wearers so they'd wear them somewhat consistently, but it's very weird having my infant age up into a toddler, going to change their outfits from the randomized ones, and seeing just one of their outfits randomly have a hearing aid. Like.... they don't wear any in their other outfits, but in their swimsuit they randomly put one on, for example. Hopefully a future update removes them from the random pool.

Gordy · April 2023

HoH here. I'm lucky that my issues haven't been debilitating, only really giving me problems at work and sometimes at home. (Pro-tip, kids: don't be HoH and have memory problems. You'll ask everyone to repeat things for you, and then you'll immediately forget what they said.) I think your concerns are pretty legitimate.

That said, I feel that the HoH don't need to come with the same elements. There's only so much CAS accessories can do. And as much as I'd like proper disability gameplay to play things out properly, I'm willing to accept that things right now are limited, and we should take what we can get for the time being. I'd rather have the hearing aids and deal with unrealistic deaf/HoH sims, than have nothing at all. It gives me more options to tell stories, and I'm willing to ignore or downplay the awkward elements as a limitation of gameplay. But at the same time, I can understand why others would find this shallow and unsuitable for something so critical.

Eleri · April 2023

I have auditory processing disorder and my mother has incident, comparatively mild, hearing impairment. The first time she phoned me after she got her new hearing aid (or maybe I phoned her, can't remember), we basically spent half of the conversation asking each other "What did you say?" On her end, she hadn't gotten the hang of her hearing aid. On my end, I was accustomed to being able to easily understand her because I'm very used to her speech patterns, but her speech patterns had altered because of her hearing impairment. Since then, she's figured out the proper settings for her hearing aid and I can understand her again and she can understand me. My point is, maybe the hearing aid townies have a relatively mild hearing impairment, such that getting the right settings on their hearing aids can alleviate their functional challenges.

LeGardePourpre · April 2023

Hearing aids and Glasses in The Sims are decorative tools for storytelling as "actor props".

The sims are just actors.

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Deaf & HoH Simmers, how do you feel about hearing aids in the Sims?

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