Video Games & the Sexy Gender Binary

[dreadlordmrson]

Watch on YouTube

This is a really thoughtful video that's absolutely worth watching for anyone who wants to put thought into gender in gaming, how the male gaze effects decisionmaking, and any game devs out there ready to start putting together their character creators.

I'd say "I'd take this to heart in my own game dev" but honestly... at least with the character creator-specific stuff... I keep coming up with ideas without any complex character creation at all? The delivery game I was starting to think up with ysabetwordsmith recently I was picturing as being first person with no character model (though since multiplayer has come up now I guess you'd need something...).

But it's still important to keep in mind for the worldbuilding. As this video points out, when all the important, "relatable" characters (and there's another whole rant about judging characters worth about how much they are or aren't relatable, but let's leave that for later) are highly-gendered and non-conformity is left for outcasts, weirdos, and the monstrous...
THAT'S NOT GOOD!

And I'd argue it's less important than to be perfect Tumblr-safe progressive in your representation than to try to make characters that feel real and fit into their setting. How do people treat gender in your world? What are the standards, what are the exceptions? What ways does it chafe some people? If you ignore all that and just glue in modern discussions about transness and gender into the narrative it feels random and jarring and out of place.

*looks over at the looming mountain of "dismantling the male gaze" discussion that's waiting*
Yeah I'll... tackle that another time, too. Safe to say that this video has some really good points about how even playing a female character or romancing a man is still presented in a way to encourage seeing yourself as the man and the woman as being for you.
It can be really uncomfortable!

My comment:
I'll always remember my first two games of Monster Hunter, World and Rise.
The character creators in them are VERY gendered, and yet in World I could make a cool butch woman with lovely sideburns who just. Felt good to look at in an aesthetic way, and felt like "I want to do more with this OC", and then... in Rise... the facial hair options were suddenly much more limited for women, and I just couldn't make the same woman again.
It the real like I'm a guy, and I want to be perceived as a guy. But in games I love blurring the lines much more and it's... really frustrating and sad how rigid gender options in character creators can be.
FFS how are modern AAA games who are intentionally including trans rep in their games worse at this than DARK SOULS?!
It's... upsetting...

ETA:
Ugh Youtube seems to have eaten my comment over there and it's not showing up. Maybe I'll try to remake it later, maybe not.

Comments

Re: Thoughts

[dreadlordmrson]

>> Then you'd need a way to distinguish them for different players, so some ability to customize would make sense.

At minimum I'd expect different shirts. If you go a selection of patterns and players' choice of colors, you have both personalization and colorblind assistance. And it would be a good way of having a filler system in place if you did want fully custom characters but needed something simpler in the meantime to test the multiplayer system.

...you'd want to decide very early if the game was going to be co-op or purely singleplayer though. It's basically always worse to try to tack multiplayer on top then to build it as part of the game's foundation.

>> Do we need 36 versions of facial hair? Probably not, but 3-6 would be nice.

As long as one of them is actually my bead for once. :p
Player creators rarely allow the full feral lumberjack. If I grab the tip of my beard and stretch it straight, it touches my belly button. But a "full beard" in a game is often barely down to the chest if you're lucky, and frequently only like two inches! Cowards!

>> In fact over in Terramagne, it's one of the superpowers most prone to injury or fatality at manifestation for that reason. There are combat teleporters, but not many, and even most of them are just snatching people out of a scrum and dumping them away from it. Very very few actually use it to hurt anyone, let alone remove body parts. And part of that is the culture, because The Teleport is one of the most cohesive subcultures and very serious about presenting themselves as safe so society doesn't pitch a pogrom and try to murder them all.

XD
Yeah I've seen other powers have that same thing happen in various settings... the "everyone is terrified of what we could do so we heavily self-police" thing...

Honestly it's not hard to turn pretty much any power into nightmare fuel if you take it to extremes. Wynn can control Plants at will (though it does take energy and focus). Not hard to imagine the terrors someone could get up to when every single plant in the area is a potential weapon, including the poppy seeds on that muffin you just ate. :p

>> Mostly what I was thinking about was the visual effect on reflexes, where a split second can make a huge difference.

Fair enough. Cars are certainly a matter of fast reflexes for emergencies. That's part of why I don't drive. My brain can randomly lag out. And indecision is a major problem for me and can cause me to freeze up. A terrible thing to have happen behind the wheel!

>> Yeah, if you're ever going to do that one, here's the place for it. You could do a lot with it, and still have a simpler build than a whole body. A few basic hand shapes (long and thin, beefy, squarish, pudgy, etc.) plus adornments (nail polish, hair, tattoos; you wouldn't want to wear jewelry while hauling). Have a simple 10-scale of skin tones, or more complex with a bunch of base colors and 5-6 shades of each. Freckles or not, maybe an in-game option like stripes or dapples.

>> Limb differences: simply include a toggle to "turn off" either hand or any of the fingers. If you added a bit more code, you could make the game harder with a macro command like "If missing 1+ fingers, adjust odds of dropping an item thusly; if missing a hand, use this amount." But you don't block a one-handed character from being a drover, because people can learn to work around stuff. Or buy a prosthetic body part to compensate.

Yeah for sure, all these options are great plus I agree on not blocking people out. Honestly I'd even be included to have this purely be a visual thing for personalization. Also because that makes it simpler. There's too many different games available in this space and it's hard to narrow down to just the one you want to make. :p
An extremely detailed peusdo-RPG with player stats? An experience where the character is irrelevant and it's purely about the game objects?

Also, on custom options:
You can add that furry or monster fan appeal with inhuman hand options. Paws, paw-hands, claws, etc.