@JessTheUnstill If you qualified that to "any game with a character/avatar creator", I'd wholeheartedly agree.
But do you really think it would be such a "low bar" for a major narrative game like, say, The Last of Us, to make Joel's gender an option?
@LouisIngenthron @JessTheUnstill
Why would it be hard to have a choice of character gender?
Seems like a fairly nominal inclusion unless the code was badly written
@mloxton @JessTheUnstill It depends on the type of game. For online games and the like, it's really not hard, and should be expected.
But think about narrative, or story-heavy games. In those games, you play the role of a character (hence Role-Playing Games, or RPGs). To allow the player to be of variable gender you'd have to:
(1) Have different art (easy)
(2) Record two versions of every line of dialogue that even vaguely refers to the gender of the character (harder than it sounds, but still doable)
(3) Remove all themes or plotlines that are gendered (i.e. motherhood, lesbian relationships, gender transitioning) or just water them down enough that they can become interchangeable.
That last one is what tips the scales for me. To write a deep, rich character, you need to know everything about who they were up until the player takes over for them. You can't do that if you don't know things like what gender, age, race they are, or where they're from. So leaving those options up to the player necessarily weakens the narrative.
I never connected with Commander Shepherd or my Fallout/Elder Scrolls characters quite like I did with Geralt or Joel/Ellie, and that's because the former aren't really characters at all... they're just empty vessels to do the player's will.
@LouisIngenthron @JessTheUnstill
I celebrate your statement that this "should be expected"
1. Agreed
2. Not every line, just the gendered bits, and parameterizing the text is a good idea anyway
3. So this gets to the core of the whole issue - most things we assume are gendered are not. Pink/Blue, trucks/dolls, guns/whatever etc are not actually gendered and yet game and plot writers often mistakenly confuse role and gender, and also attribute preferences to gender.
@mloxton @JessTheUnstill On 3: Right but does it matter whether it's gendered biologically or culturally when it informs the character's backstory the same either way? If, for example, you have a character who's in the military and was born in the 50s, the paths to get where they are today and the motivations that drive them would be very different based on their gender, and that would inform who their character is in the present day... even though those differences were entirely cultural. If you take that away, and let the player make the choice, you either need to write two totally different characters with different motivations, or you need to water down their backstory to where it could fit either one. So much of who we are and how we respond to the world is built upon experiences that pertain to how the world around us reacts to who and what we are. To rob the writers of such critical backstory elements necessarily prevents them from fully realizing the character, and thus weakens the overall story, especially when the character in question is the protagonist.
Now, if the game is set in a fantasy world where there is no gender inequality, then yes, there's no reason not to offer a gender option. But to make characters who feel real to us with our experiences in our world, you have to know where they came from and factor that in to who they are.
Like I said in another thread, I'd rather they make me play as a woman, if that's the story they want to tell, rather than give me the choice of gender.
