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]

>> Looking at those first two pictures makes me think it would be fun to create a race whose sex-linked traits were more of a smooth spectrum than standard humans with their almost-a-binary model.

Of course humans are less binary than a lot of us think we are.

...meanwhile I find that I keep thinking that if she was real there'd be good odds my grandma would have dated her. Especially if it would have been a terrible idea. :p

>> A key reason people often judge by looks is that most people use their looks to communicate things about themselves.

True enough. And her gloriously-styled pompadour makes me think she really cares about her presentation, too.

>> I think it's great to have a large dangerous creature that doesn't attack every time it sees a character, but might just be doing about its own business. If a character wants to pick a fight with random wildlife, they can; but if they just mind their own business (or stand still, or make a noise, this should vary by creature) it will leave them alone.

If you want to invest the time and effort you can put some serious AI into creatures too. Rain World has a wholeass ecosystem. I'd love to do a game where I actually simulate a priority system for animals where they might ignore you if something more important is going on right now.
...partly because I'm sick of games where a predator makes a kill and immediately is ready to chase you down when there's fresh meat RIGHT THERE. Yes, sometimes predators make multikills. And sometimes they're just playing. But quite often they don't want to expend more energy than they need to.
Being able to wait until the dragon eats a cow and then walking by while it's napping would be clever.

>> Frex, when I built the sea monster ecosystem for Torn World, I gave each species a role in the ecosystem (predator, omnivore, prey) and a reason for conflicting with people. Those reasons included a huge variety of things like: boats look like food, boats look sexy, a boat can be wrecked to make a great nest, territorial as fuck, fishnets are full of food, and likes to lounge on the same kinds of beaches as humans. So the methods for dealing with one were different than another, and water travel was really fucking dangerous -- they had a whole class of characters called warsailors who whole job was watching for and dealing with sea monsters. It's a simplified version of a real ecosystem's complexity, but it makes sense because it is inspired by that.

A good was of modelling a simpler and quicker to understand version of complex animal behaviors yeah.

>> Oh, that reminds me: giant animals actually are the norm.

Eh... *hand wobble* that's going to be a debate where you have to define what "norm" is first. Animal sizes go up and down all through prehistory. And arguably the norm is being a beetle. :p

But a fair point on it not being unrealistic to have lots of large animals in a setting.
Though I do agree with people who caution against too many large predators, because there's only going to be so much meat to go around. And if the planet is settled by sapient races they would have cleared out a lot of large animals just like we did. But sometimes you just have to say "fuck it, this is Monster Hunter logic because I want people to be skittering among giants".

>> I stumbled across the number while trying to figure out why there was a gator the size of a fucking bus in Peculiar Obligations that I definitely did not put there on purpose. Took me a while to work out that slightly lowering human aggression meant fewer extinctions.

...okay, this makes it sound like Peculiar Obligations is some kind of game or simulator, but I did a search and I'm getting a lot of "peculiar obligations" and proverbs and stuff. So what's that?