So starting from the premise that all social mechanics will be exclusively ran by players by means of implicit contracts dictating the laws of the land, there will inevitably be a point in which someone, out of curiosity to see how the devs handle the situation or even actually out of honest genuine intention, will want the option to marry someone of the same sex and someone in a position of power will grant it. Faced with this issue, how do the developers address it? 1. They can deny same sex marriage altogether, which results in two obvious problems, namely first being a bit hypocritical into taking the power away from their players which is contradictory to the idea of sandbox they're trying to create, and the second which would be the PR nightmare that would follow. 2. Allow it, which would be nice and all, but obviously desperately screams for the implementation of adoption (which again should be a thing based on the criteria that a true sandbox should give players this sort of freedom). Now I know that this subject's been tackled before, and I might be wrong, since I only fiddled around for a few minutes, but from what I gathered, it was shrugged off and denied due to the obvious design flaw of the ward option becoming imbalanced. Now to be very honest, I believe that that's simply a lazy response. I know the devs have grown quite attached to what looks like is going to be an amazing design. But a sandbox needs (more) flexibility. There are multiple answers to this. Such as the ward option only being available when there are also enough children in families (which I am aware is restrictive in itself, which still contradicts, at least to some degree the virtues of the sandbox, but I feel that what it takes away in terms of liberty when it comes to char creation, it compensates in terms of gameplay, namely the freedom of letting players marry chars of the same sex and adopt, not to mention the jobs of the policy makers regarding this. Since it is one thing as a developer to restrict gay marriage and adoption altogether which could obviously result in pointing fingers, and another if the players inside the game wrote their characters with some creative license to make for some really interesting debates between the policy makers of the land, including on the issues of gay marriage and adoption.) It wouldn't make any sense either if MOST people simply chose ward to being born in a family, it would simply not be realistic to have a huge percentage of child abandon rate. Sorry in advance if the post seems too rant-like in nature or criticizing the development team, that was far from my intention.

Cheers