I don’t have a problem with a game if it has a locked ‘gender’, but I laud those who are able to include both sexes.
Of course, there still has to be a reason for it. I know some people have mentioned Sabres of Infinity, and while I liked it well enough, I admit the ‘cultural reason why there weren’t women’ just was strong enough for me. I mostly chalk this up that I would have liked to see more interaction in the societal setting for this reason.
And by the same token, I definitely acknowledge some stories can only be told from one perspective. Take Somme Trench, by this point, professional militaries were running physicals, etc. for their soldiers, so it would be tough for a ‘secret woman’ to be in trench warfare, especially if you’re on the British side.
Yet, I would personally find it more compelling if someone focused on a female’s activity during war. I admit, this is WW II, but Russia fielded women pilots, and snipers, and that could be just as evocative.
For that matter, I’ve been tempted to play around with a Civil War era story (though admittedly with supernatural elements), and one could justify a woman as well as a man there (too many accounts of women who disguised themselves as men to go to war).
I’m almost positive there were women masquerading as men on the Western Front, as well, though probably only a handful. And for the Civil War you could have a woman fighting at, say, Gettysburg or one of the battles in Virginia and encountering some of the ghost and supernatural stuff that’s supposed to be there. Maybe she meets the ghost of the runaway slave or murdered field hand or something.
But Somme Trench deliberately starts with one character and I wanted it to be a common infantryman being sent to the trenches. He’s sort of a blank slate as the game starts and your choices about him and his world really influence what type of battle he experiences (and what you as the player learn and see). What might an infantryman see and do? That’s the whole point. So that rules out starting as an officer, or a pilot, or a spy, or an aristocrat, or a woman, or anything else that absolutely would be interesting but messes up the game’s basic approach by changing the MC from an everyman to an exceptional outlier.
What I tried to do instead was acknowledge those other people throughout the game with some substantive scenes for them, including women. Yes, that mostly involved a brothel, but in striving for historical accuracy it was the best route to take. But forcing a gender choice option at the outset simply wouldn’t have made sense within the context of the game.
To relieve the Great Game thread of the genderlocking discussion:
@CaesarCzech, I think you’re mistaken in calling it hypocrisy. A different standard isn’t always a double standard.
I’m suggesting that we Westerners consume way too many stories starring straight white males. It’s an unbalanced and unhealthy diet for our collective imaginations. So my goal is to have more stories with protagonists and characters who don’t fit that description (and gameworlds that don’t privilege SWMs).
That’s a very different goal from “everyone should be able to customize their character to be as much like themselves as possible.” If I held to the latter principle, then yes, preferring female genderlocking to male genderlocking would be hypocritical.
But I don’t. You’re of course free to disagree that increased representation of people who aren’t straight white males is an important goal; but unless I’m missing something, that just means that you disagree with me, not that I’m being hypocritical.
Having a predetermined gender isn’t a bad thing. Yes, sometimes it’s easier to write a story of a character of a preferred gender. That’s okay as long as the writer takes the time to only explain why a particular gender wouldn’t work with story but that writer has to then have the skill and grace needed to make the case for said predetermined gender believable to not only him/her but to the reader.
To me, that’s the real problem. Being forced to play in particular gender only to find out there’s no actual cause for it. It what really sucks about it. Which why I would choose to vent over why I couldn’t play as my gender (which is female).
That being said though, games where you can play as your preferred gender over predetermined one are too few and usually on the lines of overplayed stereotypes that are could very well be downright insulting.
I’m a little worried now. I keep seeing posts from people who are so vehement in their preference for gender choice that they outright ignore most genderlocked games.
The game I’m writing features a male main character. Apparently that choice alone will cost me about half my potential audience.
I love genderlocked games. I don’t care which particular set of genitalia my main character sports. What matters to me is that I’m able to identify with them, immerse myself in their decision-making process, and so on. Unfortunately gender choice sometimes gets in the way IMO - it can dilute characters, for example, or make some passages awkward to read. It can also make NPCs - romantic interests especially - feel like automatons rather than real people with real preferences.
To my mind, gender choice is often merely cosmetic - which is fine, especially in imaginary worlds with perfect equality of the sexes… but I prefer to be given a fully-realised character. Let me know who they are, where they are, what they want, and I, the reader, will take over from there and guide them as I see fit. The more predetermined the main character, the better. The more options you give me at the start - male or female, ethnicity, hair colour, muscular or skinny, etc. - the more detached I feel from the MC, who instead of feeling like a real person, comes across as a cobbled-together set of attributes.
I’d rather be in control of the more substantial aspects of their personality, their choices, their relationships, etc.
Writing genders well is hard. It takes a lot of effort that I believe in many cases would be better spent elsewhere.
That being said, I’d love to play a choice game where gender has a real impact on the player’s experience.
There are pro’s and con’s to both methods of story-telling.
If you want to gender-lock your story, go right ahead. If it’s female, I won’t object too strongly. If it’s male, I likely won’t give it a look unless reviews suggest the game is a strong one.
I can get much more invested in a female character whom I can choose appearance and personality aspects of, less so with fixed specifications and least so if the character is male.
As I said in my previous posts however, gender-locking will affect my purchasing decision making, especially if locked to male.
Ultimately I believe you should make a game you enjoy making and would enjoy playing, there is little point otherwise.
There are people out there that share your views. I think this thread was pre-disposed to people that do not however. Perhaps a private discussion with the CoG staff in to sales figures of their published gender-locked and unlocked games might help with your own decision making process?
“I can get much more invested in a female character whom I can choose appearance and personality aspects of, less so with fixed specifications and least so if the character is male.”
“Personality aspects” is an interesting one, because there are different approaches to that too. You seem to prefer the “blank slate” approach (pick everything from the start). What about games where the character has some established personality traits - e.g. sarcastic and cynical - but you get to ‘override’ these to some extent by being in control of that character’s responses, actions, etc. pretty much at all times?
As for gender choice, I have some serious thinking to do. I always thought it would be too much work to not genderlock. Now I’m not so sure. I also believed that gender should only come into play if it adds something valuable to the payer’s experience of the world. Now I’m reconsidering that point of view as well.
Good idea regarding CoG sales figures, btw. Might do that.
I do, but I also realise that this isn’t nearly as realistically possible as I’d like it to be
That would be fine, I lean towards playing mischievous characters where possible. It would take either a sizeable writing team, or a significant investment of a solo author’s time to make truly different personality types. Most of the games here, hosted and official offer no choice at all in this matter and are no worse off in my opinion.
I do have an “ideal” in my mind for my main character (which I can describe if desired). Sometimes the writing will allow me to “head-canon” that, sometimes not. If a character has a well defined fixed personality though, that can be just as entertaining as choosing my own.
If you need me to expand on points or clarify let me know. Reading this back I come across to myself as somewhat disjointed
I am in favor of genderlocking games when it would serve the kind of story this is and/or the kind of setting it is - for example, Sabres of Infinity - to do so.
But when there’s no reason a protagonist of the either gender couldn’t be in the PC’s role - for example, the plot of Psy High doesn’t involve anything where male characters can go where females can’t or vice-versa - then I have to say I’m not very thrilled with the idea, especially for stories starring male, presumably straight, characters (for the reasons Havenstone talked about).
I don’t know why you (@WUBWUBWUB) want a male main character in your particular story. I would want to know why the story can’t be played as someone else if I was looking at it, though. Simply “I didn’t want to write that as an option.” is more of an turnoff than it not being an option is.
Speaking in general and on genderlocking:
The more you define who and what the character is, the more likely whether or not I want to play that specifically is going to influence whether I play the game in the first place as opposed to the story of what the character does. As in, you could have the most amazing plot, the most superbly described scenes, etc, etc. - but I’m going to think long and hard before giving a game where the PC must support the Bonapartes a try as opposed to a game simply set in France of the era that was discussed with the option to support that or not.
Picking that as a fairly innocuous thing, just not my thing.
Maybe I’ve said this before, maybe not: Make the game you want to make, even if you don’t have a good justification for your choices beyond “that’s what I wanted to do”. That’s half of what writing is about.
BUT, bear in mind, the other half is the people who read it, and making a choice without a good reason is going to alienate a lot of people. Gender especially, as it is so integral to many people’s identities, is one of those things that people feel strongly about. It’s also one thing that you need a strong reason for doing less. Even justifications like “It takes place in a time where women/men wouldn’t have been doing such a thing,” are flimsy compared to players’ desires to see themselves in a story. The only situations I could see having a good justification for a single gender are stories based on an established character (like Guenevere), or stories that specifically are about gender and how it alters our lives. There are no examples I can think of right now, but I was working on a game that was set in the 1950s where the player was to play a housewife. In that situation, you really can’t justify a male player.
This will sound harsh, but I also feel like many people who complain that they wouldn’t be able to write distinct characters if they were gender flipped are either amateur writers (who find it hard write distinct characters, period), not dedicated to their work (such that including even small divergence is seen as a hassle rather than an opportunity for more fun), or outright sexist (who can’t possibly imagine people operating outside of their own ideas about gender), and don’t want to admit that they are half the problem. Think long and hard before restricting your game like that, especially here in the CoG community, where diverse character options are what drew many people here in the first place.
If your game is about a dragon hunter, or a young noble, or a person living feral in the jungle, there is no reason not to include a simple flip for the protagonist, at LEAST. Even if your game world has some kind of heavily enforced gender roles, it is of greater value to your game and your players to make an exception to the rule than to adhere to it.
For a lot of readers, it changes how they perceive the MC, even if it changes nothing else in the text they read thereafter. And as you can see, a lot of people value that, and don’t ask for anything more. Whereas others join you in feeling that if you’re going to offer a choice of genders, your story should diverge significantly based on that choice.
Nor will you get a consensus on whether MCs should have a distinctive personality or be completely determined by the reader (with the goal of never snapping the reader out of second-person immersion with the thought “my MC wouldn’t have done/ thought that”).
But it’s worth considering whether you’re sure that a character (main or NPC) really requires a fixed gender to be properly realised. Isn’t it possible to develop a character with strong personality and preferences that aren’t contingent on their sex?
For me it’s perfectly acceptable to play a genderlocked MC, but I think that the genderlock should be justified by in-game reasons, and not by the author’s lazyness.
Some of the best games and WIPs here are genderlocked (best examples are the Infinity series for male and Guenevere for female). Their authors explained well why these games needed to be genderlocked, and I agree with them.
I partially agree with @Havenstone. Currently there many hosted games with pre-dermined male MCs but none with females, and I whish there were more of them. But that doesn’t mean that there should be less games with full customizeable MCs, I think unless there are good reasons for a genderlock the MC’s gender, race, sexuality should be selectable.
BTW, @WUBWUBWUB’s idea of an MC with preset personality that the player has to change sonds very interesting, but it is off topic and should be discussed in an own thread.
Good discussion everyone. You’ve given me a lot to think about.
I chose a male MC because
the world I’m building is decidedly patriarchal. Women, on the whole, have little status and no opportunities.
being female in this world would therefore be a competely different experience - pretty much every action and interaction would have to be re-written to accommodate this.
So a simple gender “flip” is out of the question.
That being said, the more I think about it, the less I like my genderlock. Playing a female adventurer in a chauvinistic, male-dominated society is an inherently interesting premise. Certainly more exciting than what I previously had in mind.
@SpaceLesbian - guilty as charged: amateur writer, no idea what I’m doing, and reluctant to bite off more than I can chew.
It is certainly like most fantasy stories which often have either a patriarchal world with a male hero or a genderblind setting. I want to know more about your game, will you create an own thread soon?
Games in which you are forced to play a woman are so rare that I wouldn’t even think twice of making one. Go ahead. Its a breath of fresh air.
The thing is, there are a lot of historical/ semi-historical games that force the player into a pre-defined gender usually a male (I mean all gaming and all media, really, not just Choice of Games LLC, which is usually quite inclusive in what it lets people play).
Now… sometimes you just want to tell a particular story that wouldn’t work, and other times its really difficult to consider all the implications of gender assumption and privilege into an already complicated narrative.
The danger, of course, is that it effectively excludes women from a lot of genres and games if this happens too much. It also perpetuates straight white men as “normal, the default” and that idea needs to go die in a fire.
I’m not saying you can’t make your game around a male character, or that I wouldn’t buy the game (Blades of Infinity is great). Just try and give serious consideration to whether or not you CAN make your game more gender inclusive with a bit of effort.
@WulfyK - I suppose you’re right; it’s not much different to any other generic fantasy setting in terms of gender roles. In that sense, I don’t have a proper justification for genderlocking.
I’ll make a thread once I have a demo ready, by mid-March.
I think this is important. When that’s the only sort of stories we’re consuming people tend to repeat it over and over again, those same stories, taking them as truths. That’s the only way things can be.
That this straight white man is somehow the default setting for the world and everything is other. That writing anything else you need to have reasons for it, but he can exist as the centre of everything without being questioned. I like that we question him here, that we don’t take his existence for granted.
I like that we’re encouraged to think outside the boxes.
